Janis Zech: Hey, Darren. How is it going?

Darren Fay: Good. Thanks for having me.

Janis Zech: Well, great to have you. Quick introduction about yourselves. You're currently the director of revenue operations at Teligence at Instructure, but you actually started off at Sprint, you know, in the non SaaS world, in sales ops, and then had a career back at Domo, which I think many people know. Then you joined Clarivine as the manager of revenue operations and strategic business development to now basically end up where you are today. You also are a founder. You're founder of Peak RevOps, helping, you know, fellow RevOps professionals to succeed, and you founded RevOps Roundtable, which I know is a passion project for you to bring RevOps professionals together. And in your free time, you actually wakesurf, which is pretty awesome, and I'd love to talk a lot more about. But today, you know, we'll talk all about your revenue operations methodology called intent based revenue operations. Super excited. Maybe you can give a quick intro what this is all about.

Darren Fay: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for giving me that summary. I will say the revenue operations roundtable is, yeah, it's a huge passion of mine and not to, you know, pay gate knowledge sharing for revenue operations community. The intent based revenue operations methodology that I've created is about maintaining the priorities of your revenue operations department based on their impact towards the revenue operations mission statements and objectives. You know, given that the mission or objective should align to your organizational mission, objectives, and, you know, it starts with, you know, a well defined mission statement, which will be grounded in the impacts the organization is looking to make from, you know, the top down.

Janis Zech: So can you give us a specific example, you know, how does such a mission statement look like?

Darren Fay: Yeah. You know, an easy mission statement for any revenue operations organization would be delivering on revenue growth. Right? That could be a number of things, but when you really think about the business as a whole and what revenue operations is in that business to facilitate, it's around operationalizing the business and making sure that the business is set up in a way to maximize their ability to grow revenue. Right? That could be through a number of ways such as revenue retention, or it could be on multiplying your revenue growth via new bookings. And a lot of that could be down to standardizing processes, well defined information and training and enablement for an organization so that they can effectively go after their targets. Could be something as simple as making sure that the system is set up in a way with proper data management so that the data is easily accessible so they can go through and do their job and, you know, make new sales or retain a customer and have the proper insights at the rate that they need to to make the most impact on the business. And it's really up to the individual business and department to come up with what that mission statement looks like, but I usually recommend you talk to your senior executive team and say, you know, if you're a revenue operations leader, you report into a CRO, maybe start there. And then from there, if you can stretch and go a little bit higher to the CEO level to really understand what is important to them. And then once you understand what's important to them and where their ideas are in terms of where the business should be focusing, that should help to deliver you some insight to determine what your mission statement should be from the revenue operations department level. The reason I say starting as high as you can is in operations, we don't necessarily tie a bookings performance or a direct revenue generation to the work we do. So making sure that you deliver on your c-level executives' needs and they can clearly see and articulate the value that you're bringing to the organization, it helps invest more funds into what you're doing and helps build the department in a way that, you know, can continue to support the business in scaling.

Janis Zech: I really think this last part is so important, right, because it's like, the one part of this mission statement is to create focus for yourself, but then at the same time, you also create alignment as early as possible with different levels in the organizations and different stakeholders. And I'm wondering, like, is this something you think is a one-time exercise and then essentially you as a RevOps team are done with it, or how often would you iterate on that?

Darren Fay: Yeah. I definitely think having that clear communication that you brought up is an ongoing experience. Right? You set up that mission statement, and you should be communicating that mission statement broadly and making sure everyone's very clear that that's what that mission statement is of the department. When you write your OKRs, I typically like to do a quarterly OKR. You do the OKRs, and once you write those, they should be well crafted OKRs that directly align to your mission statement and the impact that they have on your mission statement. So one of the principles I like to put into place in this methodology is when you're writing an OKR, you should use somewhat of a change management framework in determining those OKRs. You're gonna say, you know, first, identify the problem that you're looking to solve. And then from there, you're gonna craft the potential plans. And I say plans because you shouldn't come up with just one. You should come up with a variety of approaches to solving the problem. And you evaluate the impact of each one of those plans as well as evaluate the impact of not doing anything because you should never make changes to make change. Right? And in some cases, you'll find that doing nothing may actually be the best option to help you in your way to achieving your mission, which is, you know, additional revenue growth, because it could cause more, I would say, distractions for the sales team or disruption in what they're doing or even the marketing or the CX team. And that could actually yield a lesser result and not actually impact your mission statement. But sometimes when you're in revenue operations, you get so caught up in delivering on something because you wanna show value for your work that you sometimes lose the focus that you shouldn't really just do anything to do something. It should be you are doing stuff with purpose, which is the whole point of impact based revenue operations. It's okay to not do something in a particular area because sometimes that's the best thing for the business. Once you've done that, you align on the plan and you socialize that across the organization. So overly communicate and make sure that everyone's aware that this is what you're trying to do, this is what you're trying to accomplish by doing that, and this is what the desired result would be. And then you implement that plan once you've socialized it, and then you give ongoing support after it's been implemented. And then you evaluate the effectiveness to determine what you should do again. And once you've done those OKR craftings, that's something that you're gonna continue to share across the organization. Like you mentioned, it's socializing, continuing to communicate it. But once that's done, you know, you're always gonna have something else that comes up, and there's this prioritization loop that I discuss, which is around making sure that you can clearly articulate what those priorities are at any given point. And part of the reason people don't feel comfortable pushing back on other people's work requests is because they don't fully understand why their work is a priority right now as it is. So by going through the intent based revenue operations methodology approach, you are already understanding and doing the work to understand the value and the impact that your existing projects have. So when your leadership team comes to you, you can go through the prioritization loop and say, hey, this is why this is important, and you have the discussions and state which one should be a priority. And if something does change, you know, that's okay. We're okay with changing priorities, but we wanna make sure that the impact is aligned with that core mission statement. And that core mission statement should be the same day in and day out. And my recommendation is you choose one mission statement. You don't have three. You don't have four. Because if everything's important, nothing's important, and everything should be boiled down to a single mission statement.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. The way I understand you is basically your mission statement is your north star, and then you break it down into your OKRs. Right? And there, you have flexibility around, let's say, a quarterly cadence. How does your road map feed into the OKRs, and how do you know what to work on?

Darren Fay: Yeah. I would say focusing on that intent or the impact. Right? So it doesn't necessarily have to deliver immediate impact, and that's why I like the mission statement of basically delivering revenue growth for me because that's not a time based objective. It's something that is at its core. You are looking to accomplish this as a department. Right? And so when you go to your OKRs and you start crafting those, some of those will be time based. They should be time based. Right? You should be able to accomplish stuff in a specified period of time. And in doing so, you should be able to go in and determine which ones would have the most impact on the business, whether it be from a short term or a long term gain. Your data management processes, you should always have something that is looking at a long term vision, a midterm, and a short term in terms of OKRs in my opinion. So when you're looking to develop your OKRs, you should have something forward thinking that should be scaling. You should have something that you should get the results by the end of the year, and you should have something that you should be able to see some immediate results in the next quarter or two.

Janis Zech: So it's a bit like, you know, the flywheel strategy, right, so that you keep track of those, you know, feeding into your mission statement. But then at the same time, what can you do in this quarter to deliver on revenue growth in this specific example? I'm curious, you know, what are some areas that are very typical in your experience to deliver revenue growth?

Darren Fay: Yeah. Process improvement's a huge one. Right? So making sure that the experience that the teams are going through, they are not spending a ton of their time doing non value added activities. And everything that you put in the system should make sure that it has purpose, which is another, you know, pillar of the impact based revenue operations. If I were to have a request to put a field in place, I'm gonna scrutinize that field to begin with, and I'm gonna make sure that every aspect of the creation of that is tethered towards an impact or an action. If they want additional values associated within that field, each one of those values should have a purpose. And if there's no purpose, we're not putting it in the system. Because what that does is it makes tech debt, and then it requires a larger team to manage. And then you aren't focused as much on the impact that you're bringing to the organization. You're more focused on maintaining what you've created. And in all cases, it's not necessarily all delivering value. So making sure that, you know, when you develop those processes, like a data management process is really huge. You can go in and say, let's document well each one of our fields, what we're using them for, how they go through, the way they get populated, and make sure you have a predefined time period to reevaluate those things so that you make sure you're maintaining things as they go so that the work doesn't get out of hand. Because if you just create things and you get moving and you're delivering just on immediate objectives, you're losing sight of the long term benefit of revenue operations and the value it can bring to the organization, and you could be creating more work for yourself in five years down the road. And you need to always keep somewhat of a foot in both camps, immediate value and iterative successes versus, you know, scalable value.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we've all been there that, you know, you create a process, you document that well, and then nobody follows it. So, you know, how do you make sure that you actually drive process adoption? You know, how do you integrate into the system so that people actually know, you know, the process and live it day to day?

Darren Fay: Yeah. That's a great question. You know, when you think about the reason things like this happen, it's because generally, they haven't done the proper scoping and impact assessment of why these processes are in place. Somebody's not gonna go — if you were to ask a sales rep to go update these things in the sales process, they're being asked to do something, and they're not gonna do it if they don't see the value in it. If they can understand the value that it's bringing to them in the business, then they're more likely to go through and follow those processes. Right? So by going through an early stage evaluation of the work that you're looking to do and the problem you're looking to solve, having it clearly tied to a problem and having those impacts clearly tied to how they can generate more revenue for them and the business, it becomes a lot easier to ask somebody to do something that's helping them. Right? And it's also a bit of a gymnastics exercise for you to say, hey, maybe I won't do something. Because that's the hard part is sometimes you get down the road and you start scoping something and you've done the work to do it and you're afraid of walking away from it because you've done this work. Right? But the true, best in class way of approaching a project, if it's not gonna deliver the value you need, you abort it. Right? And you move on to rescoping it. And, hey, it's okay to make mistakes and say, hey, let's pull the ripcord. This is not getting the desired result that I think it's going to. Let's reevaluate and see what we can do.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Sunk cost. Right? It's one of the biggest pitfalls. And, like, just curious, like, on the process improvement parts. Again, like, how would you measure, for example, whether a process has really improved for, you know, a larger sales organization? Would you run, like, a survey afterwards? And, like, how do you rate, like, the sales process, like, this quarter versus last quarter, and then do that every three months? Or do you have, like, a different system in place for that?

Darren Fay: I think it's really dependent on the business, but there's a couple of ways that you could go about it. Right? You could do a survey approach like you mentioned. You could also do, you know, a shadowing exercise where you sit down and watch the process and you take some time stamps and say, it's taking them this amount of time from point a to b, the number of errors associated with it or the number of fields that are populated that aren't actually used in a process, number of clicks. You could do a whole slew of things that are around a productivity measurement. But then what you should do at the end of that is always equate it back to your mission, which is — so by exercising this amount of productivity gain, you're expecting this amount of revenue growth. Right? And it's gonna be really difficult to assess what that revenue growth would be, but I would say start moderate in your assumptions, but also make it a bit of a stretch. Because when you go through some of these exercises, you do wanna be able to mentally tie back the work you're doing to the revenue growth. Because if you can't, your executive team can't. And if your executive team can't, then, you know, why is there a revenue operations organization in place? At the end of the day, we're tying to our core mission statement, which is delivering on the revenue growth.

Philipp Stelzer: Just wanna, like, tell me, like, one quick opinion because I think, like, one thing that's really critical about this is to not be afraid of making these estimates because only if you start making these estimates, you write them down, then you compare it to basically the results. Only then you're actually able to become better over time. So if you're always, like, afraid of, hey, like, no, we cannot commit to anything because we don't really know, then, yeah, you're never gonna be able to do it. So I think, like, at some point, you will be. Right? Like, when I first started in product management, you know, you always have to sort of, like, estimate, like, what's the impact of this feature on retention or, like, dollar conversion or whatever. And in the beginning, of course, you don't know, but then at some point, like, you build up that knowledge and you are able to say, okay, you know, probably this feature will, like, have an impact of something between five to ten percent on early day retention or something like this. So, yeah, just do it. Right? Otherwise, you'll never become good at it.

Darren Fay: I love that you brought that up. And I think when you think about the way that people are afraid to commit to estimates around their OKRs, a lot of it hinges towards feeling like they make a mistake in their estimates when I think the best way to untangle that web is to say, this is why I assume this estimate and have your methodology spelled out very clearly. Because if that's wrong, if your estimate's wrong, it's not you that's wrong. And it's not you that did this poor estimate, it's that you used the wrong methodology. And then it goes back to how do you articulate the change and improve on it. You know, you may say that you're gonna generate this much because you based it off of the amount of time it takes for a rep to go through these things. You shave off about this much time, and then you're expecting this amount of revenue. Right? And it could be something as simple as that calculation. And then if somebody were to say, why are you assuming this revenue growth? You should have some intent behind everything you're doing rather than just, you know, licking your finger, putting it into the wind, and trying to guess what these numbers are. A lot of it's around making sure you clearly think through the intent of why you chose those numbers. And it's okay if you chose bad numbers as long as you have the intent on it because you can help someone zero in on improving that when they understand what not to do. You know, it's the best way of learning, right, is making mistakes. And if you go through this process and you understand what you did wrong because you were clear about the intent of why you made those assumptions in the first place, you have a launching pad to correct. But if you're just guessing, right, and then — that's where a lot of people get fouled up — they say a number because they don't know. Rather than focusing on the number, they should be focusing on how they can get to the number. And I think that's kind of a mental exercise because if you can articulate that, your c-suite's gonna be able to articulate that. They're gonna understand why you're thinking that, and it's gonna articulate the value more. And as, you know, we have more jobs that are automated in the future and things like that, we wanna make sure we're very clearly articulating the value that we bring to the business. And that's how you justify headcount. That's how you justify the department's growth, is by being able to clearly articulate the value. Because if you do bring value but you don't articulate it well, it's just as bad as not delivering the value.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So I think what I really like is, you start high level, you break it down into quarterly goals, you obviously have a road map. Right? I know you love Asana and also t-shirt size estimates. You put a dollar metric against it, right, towards your mission statement. And then I think it's also not just about these major things, but sometimes these small things that are iterative and incremental improvements towards the value. Right? So you start with a goal, and then you break it down. And there could be five to ten different projects, and some of those are super small and fast to achieve, but it's not about the project itself. It's actually about the value they deliver against the quarterly or annual objectives. And that's, I think, a framework that is really, really helpful. So, yeah, love it.

Darren Fay: Yeah. It's definitely a change in focus on how you communicate about what you're doing. Right? Rather than saying, yeah, I completed these things and check out this new process I created, it's shifting your focus on look at the value I'm bringing to the business. Look at how I'm impacting your team, and this is how I did it, and diving into it in that way.

Philipp Stelzer: I mean, it also just helps your internal exposure. Right? If you just think about career development as well. Like, if you are able to write an email to the entire organization or, like, whoever you should send that to, and you're able to explicitly explain, like, what was improved and why it was improved and how it was improved and so on, people are just gonna treat you differently. So I think a lot of career development that is not happening — like, basically, like, people being unhappy, being stuck in their role — it often comes from, like, they may be successful, but they're really bad at communicating their success. So having that framework, right, is so important. Yeah. Also for yourself, not only for your company.

Darren Fay: Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. Yeah. I think when you look at the typical revenue operations professional, we're technically talented people, not always the greatest communicators, yeah, in a lot of senses. But when you put yourself in somebody else's shoes, like a c-level or your own boss, for example, whoever that may be, if their skill set's not at the same level that your skill set is, the way you communicate is incredibly important in terms of them understanding why you're doing what you're doing and how and the impact it's bringing to the business. Practicing the focus on intent and impact through scoping and understanding that stuff gives you the tools to have the proper communication and to socialize appropriately and to prioritize appropriately. With the prioritization loop that I mentioned earlier, a big part of that is around — before you even attempt the prioritization conversation, you have to fully understand the value and the impact that your project is bringing to the organization before you do that. Because it starts with somebody like, let's say you, Philipp, you were to bring me another project or something that you want done. I'm gonna listen to what you have to say, and then I'm gonna ask for clarity. So I'm gonna clarify what it is that you're trying to tell me, and then we're gonna debate based off of the information that I have for why my thing is a priority and why your thing is a priority. And we're gonna come to a mutual decision of, hey, this is what the priority should be, whether it's yours or mine, not having to tie it into it, focusing on the impact, which is the mission, and making sure that we're not being tied up in our own ego of our own project, but we're tied up in how we can impact, you know, the revenue operations mission objective. And then from there, once we've decided on that, we persuade the rest of the group and you make sure you socialize that and you make sure everyone is aware of why this shift happened — and that's that persuasion piece. And then you go and execute on that project. As you execute on that project, you pay attention to the learnings you have from that exchange. And then it's repeated because you're always gonna have a conflicting objective that comes in. And that's where that whole prioritization loop kinda comes around. And I would say understanding that every choice you make should be grounded in our ability to impact our mission statement.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's great. So when you think about the tips and tricks to communicate and demonstrate value. Right? Like, I mean, you mentioned a few of those, but what else has worked for you? I mean, I know you're a big proponent of transparency. Right? Like, the debate culture and discussion culture, there's no bad idea. Super curious to dive a bit deeper on there.

Darren Fay: Yeah. I think, you know, again, you start with understanding your own because you can't go anywhere without fully understanding your own, because then it becomes a heated discussion based off of preference. Right? And you wanna make sure it's founded in logic. If you've ever read the book Crucial Conversations, it's around finding mutual ground. Right? And, you know, making sure that you're focused on the same objective. And that's a lot of where a lot of these principles kind of have their grounding for me, which is making sure that everyone's focused on the same thing and you find alignment in purpose. But once, you know, somebody does come to you, asking them plenty of questions. And, you know, before you do any of this, you do need to get comfortable with pushing back or making sure that you ask difficult questions, but making sure you feel comfortable with it because you're doing it for the right reason. It's not because you don't wanna do something, it's because you wanna make sure you're always doing the right thing by the organization. And one of the questions you'd ask them is, you know, what problem are you trying to solve with this? Because oftentimes, you're gonna have somebody who comes and brings you a solution of something they want you to do. But if you were to just take that and go and run with it, you have no further information on the value of that, how it's gonna impact the overall department or the organization. So asking them what problem it's going to solve is also very helpful. What is it gonna be used for is another one that I like. Who is it for? Like, what is the audience? Is it a multitude of people using this? Is it one person? And is it something that's gonna be repeatable, or is it something that's gonna be done now and never done again? And, you know, those things together help you really prioritize things. Why is this seen as a priority is also a really pointed question to ask somebody because it forces them to articulate why this is a priority, and it gives another field of vision as to why they think it may be.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think RevOps discovery is really important. Right? And you have one stakeholder coming to you, but then also taking that back, thinking deeper about the problem, and doing your own discovery, talking to more stakeholders, trying to understand the problem, and evaluating, and then having, you know, the transparency and, hopefully, the culture to debate and make the right call against your mission statement, that's really awesome. Right? And I think the unfortunate truth is that often hierarchy pushes down things, you know, people's throats, and there's not enough pushback. Right? So it's probably also something that you have to learn over time. And as soon as you clarify what your mission statement is and you put dollar values to it, right, and you also have a cost estimate and you make that transparent, people start understanding the reality and the trade offs. And I think that is so important because there's always trade offs.

Darren Fay: Yeah. I think the hard part is with revenue operations, what I've seen is typically people are assessing the value of that department based on their relationships with leaders because they ask them to go execute on a task and they go and execute on that task and they make their life easier. Right? Rather than — you know, it's an uncomfortable approach to tell somebody who's your stakeholder, hey, let me ask you some questions and set the stage that this is gonna be a safe environment to do so. But oftentimes, giving clarity in this situation is the best thing that you can do. Because if you just push back right at the get go and this is your first time doing it, it's gonna be super uncomfortable. You're not gonna feel like you're being a good partner because you're asking them to really clarify why they have a value because it's almost like you're telling them that you don't believe it's a value. But if you take it from an approach of saying, hey, I want to help you drive our mission statement, which is delivering on revenue growth. And in order to do that, I need to make sure all the work that we are doing on a given time period is focused around the biggest impact that we can make at that current time and for our scaled approach to deliver on that commitment. These are the projects I have right now. In order to take another one on, I need to understand a few other things to make sure I can articulate if something needs to fall between the cracks or we need to reprioritize. Can I ask these questions? And oftentimes, people are gonna be more open to that conversation because now they understand that, hey, we are sharing the same focus, which is gonna be we both care about delivering on revenue growth, and you're hearing me and supporting me rather than pushing back on me. And it's gonna be incredibly uncomfortable for anybody who tries this for the first time because it is not something everybody does and not every leader is used to doing. But if you do the right thing for the right reason, people will eventually, you know, thank you for it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. It's a way of framing. Right? You basically take an inbound request, you frame it, and then you go back and have an honest conversation, and people understand you're in the same camp. Right? You want the same thing. And so I really like also kind of making the mission statement in that sense a bit high level because it is easier to tie back to, and you probably, you know, across the CFO, CEO, CRO, COO, and CPO, and maybe also CTO, you win your stakeholders. That's quite important in RevOps. Right? I'm curious, like, maybe a closing topic here. Like, I mean, we have the mission statement. We have the OKRs. We have the road map. Right? But then you execute on all these projects. How do you then implement those? Right? I mean, it's one thing to have the framework, but then, you know, what are your tips and tricks in terms of actually getting them live? And maybe that's one for another episode. I don't know. But, you know, give us a sneak peek.

Darren Fay: Yeah. Definitely. You know, I think the key is gonna be making sure you maintain the top priorities. Right? So you're working on the same project that is aligned to, you know, what you need to deliver for the business. That's why when I mentioned earlier with OKRs having one for — I'm gonna call it a scaled project, which is for long term vision — making sure things like data management, things like tech debt consolidation, things that are focused on making sure that you are delivering value and you have the right tools in your tool belt to deliver the right outcomes that you're trying to accomplish for the right objectives that you have in place. Those are the long term ones that you should be focused on on an ongoing basis, and those should be iterative, and those should be delivered on — you shouldn't have, like, a global project that says, hey, this is, like, our yearly project. You should break those up into quarterly chunks and say, hey, we're gonna do these five field deprecations this quarter. We're gonna do this data management framework, and we're gonna run this and execute it for this quarter. And then you have your midterm projects which deliver on — oftentimes, like, they're gonna be a go to market strategy in my mind. So you're gonna see something that's around preparing the organization for the way we're handing off our sales deals to our CS team or the way we're handing our SDR team opportunities over to our sales team. And our short term values will be something likely possibly a campaign driven — we see a need in the market, we're gonna drive some immediate value, and we're gonna focus on how we can deliver some value to the organization and help, you know, optimize the work that we're doing and get to revenue quicker. And by doing that approach, you always have something that you're delivering value on in a given time period, but you're also focusing on the long term vision that you're doing. Because what you'll see is there's a flavor of the week issue where someone will say, hey, I have these projects, and these are what's important to me right now. And you'll go do all those projects, but then you lose sight of the long term vision of how things are being built. And so, you know, clarity of going through these projects — I would recommend a change management approach. Again, making sure you overly communicate, you deploy it well, you make sure you have enablement in place, and you document well the process that you've developed or the impacts it should deliver. And then I recommend measuring against those things. So after you've deployed a process, don't forget what the intent was and go back and evaluate it. And make sure, is it delivering the right intent or is it not? Okay. If it's not, the project wasn't the plan. The intent was the plan. So now it's about, okay, maybe you need to make some adjustments in your project or maybe reevaluate it because just completing a project is not the project itself. It's about delivering the value that you set out to deliver with the project.

Janis Zech: Love it. I think that's a great way to get to our closing question. So I'm super curious. I mean, you have a wealth of experience. You know, what would you tell your younger self if you were to start all over again in revenue operations?

Darren Fay: You know, there's a quote that I — I have a slew of quotes I read every morning to kind of spread myself mentally. But one of them is do something today your future self will thank you for. And making sure that you slot out a little bit of time every day for you to grow, to expand your knowledge, keep up on practices, like listen to a podcast, go read an ebook. If you don't know something, figure it out. Like, learn and search it. Don't let curiosity sit in the back of your mind. Like, if there's something that you're thinking about, do a little bit of effort every day to expand your thinking and level yourself up a little bit because what you do today will compound just like interest, you know, on some type of investment. Little bits every day grow exponentially rather than waiting and doing large sums in one given period. There's a reason some of the most famous artists that are out there are people who hone their craft little bits every single day, and it's repetition that is the key, and then also focusing on your behaviors. You know, skill has very little to do with where you go in life. A lot of it has to do with grit, excitement for what you're doing, focus, and willingness to grow. And then on top of that, making sure that you're, you know, constantly