Janis Zech: Welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. I'm here with Philip, and our guest today is Alex Freeman. Great to have you.

Alex Freeman: Thanks.

Janis Zech: Okay. So we spoke before, and I'm really excited about this conversation. I think it's gonna be awesome. Just for context, you're currently the head of RevOps at YouGov. I think head of RevOps and enablement, if I read it correctly. And YouGov just to share some stats. I think you have three and a half thousand people. You know, last year was above three hundred million USD. It's a public listed company. I looked through the board decks and investor reports, and I would say RevOps complexity, pretty high. So I'm sure you have a lot to do. So thank you so much for being here. Maybe let's kick off who are you, what you do outside of what I just said.

Alex Freeman: Yeah. Thanks, Janis. Yeah. So, yeah, Alex Freeman, we call it sales operations still, though my remit does include kinda customer success. So that's nice. We're getting there. Yeah. So outside of work, I live in London. Got a wife and two young boys, so that keeps me pretty busy. Yeah. So I don't have huge hobbies apart from home renovation for something out of the garden because we bought a house and had a lot of work needing doing, and so I keep having to do that. Yeah. And just spending time with the family. You know? Love eating. So barbecuing, cooking, anything for good food and good company is great. And then I just really love what I do. So I love kind of talking and a lot of networking with my peers, trying to learn from other people, you know, really conscious of it's a phrase, you know, try and never be the smartest person in the room. And so I really always wanna spend more time with people to really understand where, you know, where is go to market going. What are some of the latest trends? And then trying to really work out, okay, is this just a fad? How would this apply? What can I take away? Yeah. How can I keep to open myself as a professional as well as my team and obviously the business and drive growth?

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, we've been huge fans of the general RevOps community. We're part of a few Slack groups, also run our own meetups. I saw you were actually, you know, speaking at a meetup lately in London, right, about the tech stack. I think it's a fantastic community. People are being very open and help each other out, which I think is always great. Today, we wanna talk about, you know, some lessons to learn, especially around, you know, kind of being seller friendly and seller first. And so maybe let's kick off with that. Like, what do you mean with, you know, seller first? What does it mean to you?

Alex Freeman: Yeah. So I guess there's a number of things. I think at the highest level, you know, we've got two customers for RevOps or SalesOps, you know, the internal customers, our sort of primary customer, that's the sales team, but obviously keeping in mind the external kind of customer of the business. And our job really is to get the most out of them. There's some interesting, you know, narrative we can explore later about, you know, the value of RevOps, and people don't like saying we're a support function, which I get because I do believe we're driving revenue value. But, ultimately, we're doing that by helping us be as efficient as possible on the go to market side. And I saw a stat from Boston Consulting Group saying, for mature RevOps organization, you can save thirty percent of kinda go to market costs or, you know, help drive kinda growth to that extent. And I think, you know, that resonates with me, and that's what we're trying to do. And so ultimately, trying to unlock the value of the people we have on the commercial side so that they can drive more impact. And so that's the core of what I mean. And, you know, if we think of the typical place where maybe sort of sales and revenue operations was maybe ten years ago, more of a sort of CRM admin, you know, box ticking, that kind of tension between kind of leadership and management on how we need to know this that and so make this mandatory, add this step in. Let's be, you know, really prescriptive on every step of the process versus, you know, sellers that just wanna go and make money. And so I kind of try and have my kind of guiding principle, which is, you know, I'm in the business to grow more, to make more revenue. The way we do that is our sellers make more money, basically. They wanna sell more, and therefore earn more. And so, actually, we've got a really good alignment on priorities. But it's not always felt that way because, again, I think, typically, we've not been amazing always, and this is more historically, I think most of the people I talked to have a similar approach now, at really thinking, well, what do the sellers and, you know, our revenue teams actually need? What do they want? How can we really kind of serve them as opposed to just, you know, adding more fields and building some more reports? And so the focus really is to help shape everything we design and build for them under that light, and then really sell those benefits through saying, you know, we think this is gonna help you earn more money and here's why. And occasionally, there needs to be kind of compromises, you know, CPQ for me is the most obvious one. No seller really wants to do that, but you have business requirements, and then ultimately, people are paid a salary and not just commission. But then even with those things, like, do I make this as easy as possible for you? And, you know, I have a theory, which is that, you know, we've taught sellers to hate admin, maybe more than they actually hate admin, and it's because we ask them for low quality, you know, rubbish. When I joined, we had a checkbox on an opportunity that was mandatory to move from one stage to the other. I mean, it tells you absolutely nothing because it's a typical deal. So it's like, it is pointless. It is a way of just giving someone, you know, the middle finger and saying, I don't care about your time. And I wanna flip that round and really, you know, figure out, actually, you know, how can we help? How can we make sure we're aligned and we're pulling together?

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, this resonates a lot with Philip and me. You know, we founded this company, actually, Weflow on a mission to enable sellers to do less admin work. This was the initial product by either automating or simplifying, you know, data entry tasks. And so, I mean, it's something that I think resonates really deeply with us both. What are some of the common pitfalls you observed in your career with doing that. Right? You already mentioned, you know, some, you know, maybe, stage exit criteria that were too harsh and actually never used in terms of, right, like, collecting the data but never ever doing anything with it. I mean, I'm curious, like, you know, if you would list these pitfalls or things you've observed, like, should people start to stop doing certain things?

Alex Freeman: Absolutely. I think so much of what we want to capture ends up being qualitative data. Like, I don't know many people who are worried that the, you know, the prices in their opportunities aren't about right. Now, sure, the forecasting, are they right early enough? There's a whole piece there for sure, but once the deal's closed you kinda know those details get captured. You might get worried about important things like billing address, particularly for repeat customers. It's probably not really getting looked at and updated, so there's a challenge there. But I would say the majority of the data that we want to try and gather and run really cool insights off is just qualitative data. You know, things like reasons for loss, you know, variety of things in that, even what stage is it? You know? You wanna define it nicely with criteria with, I mean, the entry and exit criteria, but it is still so-called qualitative. You're not sort of measuring it. You're just trying to get a sense of progress. And the trouble is, historically, when it's qualitative data and you're asking people to fill it in, you know, manually, then it doesn't matter if you get the data if the data's no good. They can just pick the top option on the pick list or the option that seems like they're less at fault. They can write the bare minimum. It's just not a very satisfying, you know, way. And typically, when I talk about the data issues that I've, you know, faced internally and previously with consulting other customers, that's normally where the issues come. It's that we've got some stuff or, you know, if it's mandatory, we've got it. If it's not mandatory, it's probably not filled in, but we don't really know the value of it anyway. And so using, you know, we've got tools similar to what you were talking about, you know, trying to solve that that are capturing that data and putting it in for us from our, you know, our emails and our calls because, again, we now in this kind of AI era, we've got access to all this material. We don't need to get people to manually put it in. They can start, you know, polishing it and shaping it, and we can use that as a way to guide conversations. I think the other area that I've been particularly struck by in the last kind of six months or so is how so much of what we can do with data and kind of insights and particularly kind of the sort of the predictive AI more than the generative AI is kind of disempowering to end users. You know? Again, so much of our analytics in the revenue space is done on the whole. And we essentially just make these guiding assumptions, and they kinda work over time to help us get, you know, a good forecast. But the data isn't strong enough to be able to predict individual outcomes. We've just sort of aggregated it. But it can look quite disempowering to the end user when, you know, Salesforce provides scoring that I could use, you know. We use Gong, but I know there's lots of alternatives, and everyone gives a score to a deal, but the seller can't change it. They can't query it really. They can't say, you've marked this down because we haven't had any contact in the last two weeks, but my champion's been on leave for the last two weeks, and they've already, you know, set up our next step, and actually things are going well. And so it's sort of things that gets told at them that ultimately they don't even use. It's their manager and their leaders that use it because it helps give them insight when they're not on the front lines, but it can feel a bit disempowering. And I think that creates easily a sort of a skepticism of the value of these tools because if they're helping people that aren't yourself, you need to try and understand that. And again, if it's actually not helping you and in many ways, you're having to — sometimes it's making more work for you and you say, actually, no, that one looks bad, but it's not because of this. That makes life tougher. So one of the things, you know, we looked at doing, and I did with a small startup, is we created a machine learning model to look at predicting close dates. And what it gave us was two really nice kind of parallel options. We essentially could swap out close date on our kind of, you know, x axis for our forecast. So instead of using the closed date, we could use the predicted closed date, and we had a data driven time bound forecast, which we could use either a data model on the amounts or we could just use our kind of commit most likely best case categories. But that's kind of so normal in a way. The really cool thing was we already used Slack and we could push that through to individual sellers themselves and say, hey. You've got this deal that you've predicted is gonna close at the end of the month. And the computer saying it's actually gonna close in four months time. Now do you wanna accept the change? Do you want to maybe update the stages? There's some pieces of information that are misleading, or do you wanna reject it? And if so, you know, just give a quick reason why. Why is that not the case? And the great thing there as well is all of a sudden, we can start to get some stats around this that are the specifics of, if I've served you a hundred recommendations over the, let's say, the last year or whatever period, and, you know, you've accepted forty of them and sixty of them you've rejected, then of those sixty, ten of the times you were right, that means that the computer — I always call it the computer, the machine, the model — was right five times more often than you. You've gotta start paying more attention. And I just, you know, took those numbers because they're easy to remember and we can understand them, but you could do that a lot quicker and at a smaller volume and start saying, look, we can really see who on the team is learning from it or not. We can sort of point over to some of your peers that have been on a journey, and they've started to incorporate that. And all of a sudden, all the amazing things we can do with data and models and kind of AI in this sort of revenue space can really empower kind of all levels of the organization more than just, hey. Don't worry. The AI can help draft your emails for you, which, you know, is pretty table stakes in this sort of ChatGPT era.

Philipp Stelzer: I hear you talking about, basically, about two different aspects. So one, I think, is, if I may recap it in my own words, is sort of like you have this technology aspect where technology is improving. And because it's improving, if you utilize it in the right way, of course, then it can save a lot of time. So automations, LLMs, but probably also, like, very, like, stupid things. Like, for example, you know, if you wanna just an example from Salesforce because that's the ecosystem we are mostly in is, like, when you wanna log an email with the Salesforce extension, you need to click at least three times before you can log that email. Right? So you could just, like, develop a solution where you don't have to click at all. It just does it in the background, and only if you wanna manipulate it, you can click into it. Just like super stupid example or like your machine learning system with the closed date push. Right? So, like, utilizing technology in the right way and really, like, you know, getting the most out of it, I would say. And then on the other side, you have this whole mindset aspect or, like, this underlying philosophy, this way of thinking, like, having a framework of how to approach even aligning with the sellers. And in my mind, actually, like, technology is amazing, obviously. Right? Like, we are product people. We love it. But I think, before you can solve a problem with technology, you actually need to understand how do I incentivize, like, my sellers to actually interact with it and to accept it. And I think this is so much harder to do than building, like, a machine learning model, which is crazy if you think about it. But I think that's basically the reality. Or would you agree?

Alex Freeman: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, before I joined YouGov, I was working in sort of startups, and I was doing some consulting when I was in my previous company with a number of, you know, some bigger companies as well. But this time, we're working with about three hundred sellers, fifty SDRs, and maybe a hundred people in we call it client services, but customer success effectively. And, you know, across the globe, I think about thirty different countries we've got offices in. And, yeah, it's kind of the change management piece is always harder than you think. And getting that buy in and the big, you know, the big learning that I've tried to take away is actually, you know, RevOps will influence really from the side. And so I need — and it's tricky. I think it depends who you report into, but I do think the person that oversees the revenue function and then the sales function is the key one even if you don't report there because, ultimately, people only care about what their boss cares about in a company. Again, in a larger company, the CEO and the CFO, they're basically mythical figures for most people. They'll never speak with them, see them. They could say something once or twice, and it doesn't impact people's day to day. Now I kinda need them on board to hold the CRO. In case my boss is chief commercial officer, you want them to be on board so they hold them accountable. It's not just you saying, hey. We've gotta do this. It's like, you know, you've got full buy in. But then they need to hold, you know, her direct reports or his direct reports to the standard, and the goal is always you hold them, and you hold them on behalf of their team to that standard. And then that sort of top down kinda trickle down, you know, I think is what's required for change management. I've had a number of people. They effectively want me to be the compliance police and go and make it happen, and it just doesn't work. It's not what I wanna do. I wanna cash in my organizational credibility on it. And again, it shows that the change management's done wrong. It's like, look, we need to solve the problem. It's solving the wrong problem. And again, we could probably get a lot of this stuff filled in, but is it accurate? Is it usable? Are we just taking away people from frontline activities? And because I think those are the values to your solutions that save time. It's not as much the time saved because typically, if you're saving time, it's not being done properly in the first place. So the time saving is only a small component, and probably your estimation of the time saved is inflated because most people aren't actually doing it. They do something else. But if it's a valuable job to be done, what really needs to happen, then getting it done accurate and properly is super helpful. So, you know, I like to say that we've taught sellers to hate admin rather than they necessarily intuitively hate it because we ask them typically to do stupid things. I think of it a bit like children. We tend to ask them to do something. They need to do it in the way we ask them, and they need to kinda tell us they've done it, you know, prove that you've done it. The whole if it's not in Salesforce, it didn't happen, you know, idea — and there's some really good, you know, memes and videos on this stuff. If everyone was treated like sales, you know, like, your product guys, I'm sure you always ship your features on time. But, you know, if you look at the sales forecast and the discrepancy they get, whereas, let's be honest, engineering normally always ends up a few months late, no one's getting fired on that side for missing the road map. And there's a real truth to that. I just think it is probably the hardest job there is, and they're treated a different way. But, actually, smart people, you know, who can really earn a lot of money if they do a good job. They're motivated to do that. I wanna tie everything again that they're doing back into their ability to earn because that's our ability to grow and serve the business. So, yeah, I think creating this environment is paramount. And then the other side, which I didn't touch upon — and they're kind of like two sides of the same coin — is being kind of customer focused as well, customer first. And, again, the job of RevOps to make that smooth kind of customer journey, and that's the other side. And I do think those two things kind of line up nicely. If our internal journey is smooth and makes sense and is well designed, then the external journey will be smooth. And again, we also know if the customer journey is nice, then it's gonna be easier to convert and sell. So they both seem to fall very close together and really try and make most of my decisions around trying to, you know, optimize for making it easy for, yeah, the internal and external customer.

Janis Zech: So how do you do it? Do you basically incentivize sellers? So if you fill this out, you get, like, a fifty dollar bonus at the end of the month, or, like, how do you find that alignment?

Alex Freeman: Yeah. No. Because I think that's the wrong way of incentivizing because the point is they should be able to make thousands of dollars by selling more. So I incentivize them by trying to convince them that if they do what I say, they'll be able to sell more. And that's the tricky thing, and I think again, this is my point about why often with data and analytics and insight, we've not empowered our end users. The reason that they're not giving us kind of clean data is they've never seen the advantage of it for them. I think typically, so it's like, how can we feed back insight to help them do their job? And one of the things I think about on this is kind of process design, which we sort of touched on, like, tangentially on what we've been talking about, but, you know, I've pitched this internally. I'd rather we all run at ninety five percent efficiency, but the same ninety five that we all run at, rather than a different hundred percent because you just can't learn at scale. And particularly in a business like ours, it's large, you know, global. There are lots of people wanting to do things differently. And some of those differences are gonna matter. Right? You're gonna need some branches in your process, but at the same time, every time you add one, you're watering down your ability to learn quickly because now you've gotta factor in, you know, a different sort of branching journey. The corollary to that is I also don't wanna create super rigid processes. I want to have essentially — think of it in terms of, I suppose, gates is a good point — or points on a map where I wanna go very specifically from here to here to here and figure out the right things to measure. And the way between them can be different. So to pick an obvious example, let's think of prospecting. A lot of companies, you know, will hold their SDRs to, you know, call targets for outbound dialing and email targets for, again, for outbound. And I kinda understand why, but I just think it's flawed, like, we just — and I know they try and do this as well, but — it's the meeting booked target that you really want and ultimately the sort of pipeline conversion target. And we should recognize that different people will work differently best. You know, some people are gonna like being on the phone, some aren't. And, again, our buyers — some, you know, we don't have a culture of cold calling. I'd like to encourage it at some point, but we don't. But I pick up a cold call, you know, if I'm not in a meeting. Trouble is I'm in a meeting most of the time, so normally I can't. And if I'm super busy heads down, I'm obviously not also gonna pick it up. But, you know, there are times you're like, okay. I'm just sending some emails now. The five minute disruption ain't gonna kill my day, and I'll pick it up and take it. But, you know, that's the advantage of the multichannel as well is you meet your buyers where they're at, but you also allow different people to shine. And sure, if you're underperforming as an SDR, you're not hitting your meeting booked targets and your peers are, well, sure, I get then we can focus on the activity. Are you doing enough? But ultimately, and I think we all know this, quality dominates in these kind of things, and we want to encourage quality. The best way to do that is to measure the things that matter and, again, have that sort of flexibility. And so I've tried to design in, as we've built processes, you know, what are the kind of the gates, the sort of the rock points where we wanna get, you know, be very clear we've got here, but then how much flexibility can we give in how we get there? So, again, people are encouraged to get there their way. I kind of say that on an individual level, sales is, you know, half art, half science. And on an organizational level, it's all science, but we don't wanna scrub out that art level at the bottom piece. And the sort of the incentive there to get on board and to do these things and if need be to try and increase, you know, activity levels if they're underperforming — with enablement, we can better support you if you're doing things the same way. You know, we can provide, you know, learning materials, supporting materials, all sorts of things if you're working the same way we are. But it's much harder to provide for you if you're off, you know, blazing your own trail in a completely different environment.

Janis Zech: Yeah. It's so interesting. When I listen to you, my thought is the whole time, okay. There's a big discussion where RevOps should report into, but then, you know, when you actually talk, it sounds almost like RevOps has often been too focused on serving the leadership audience and maybe neglecting the end user angle. And I don't think it's unimportant to serve the leadership audience. I think that's not my point. But maybe that has actually gotten a lot more say because if there's a next board meeting, you basically stop everything and you help the CRO prepare the next board meeting. Is that necessarily the best use of RevOps time, question mark? Right? I don't know the answer, but I think this is what actually is happening in my head right now, which I find super interesting. I'm curious what you think about that.

Alex Freeman: Yeah. I think so. Great. And so I like the sort of the top down planning versus bottom up. And obviously, we want to be more strategic. We want to affect leadership. But I would say, well, how do we do that? And the how is often actually where we need to make the whole thing work and the details work. There's a quote from a friend of mine who does RevOps at a company called Sweep — it's from his CEO — but he says, like, ninety five percent of strategy is tactics. I think there's something there, and it's similar. Absolutely. I wanna be serving the c suite. I wanna be invaluable to them because that's where my promotion, pay rise, all sorts of gonna come from, my career development. But you don't do that by only listening to what they think. You've got to work out how we're gonna actually make this happen. And again, it's so easy to make something that looks good on paper, but if you can't do the change management as you were saying earlier, you know, Philipp, it's not gonna survive first contact with the enemy. And so it's a balance to pick, but I yeah. It feels like it's increasingly kind of well accepted now that, you know, if you're starting a new role, where you start with this going, speaking to all the people around the business, really understanding the company. Where are people winning right now? Where do they need more help? And that's the sort of thing you pitch back into the c suite to say, here you go. Here's how we're designing the road map, and obviously, we're taking in the business trajectory and the certain initiatives that we're leading from this level. We're gonna shape them based on what we're hearing on the ground. And I think there's often just so much — that's where you can find the quick wins. I think that's where you can find the, you know, the substantial roadblocks. When I hired for my enablement team and I bought a lot of software, we were coming into a new financial year and a new strategic plan, so I kinda queued it all up. But I essentially pitched to the CFO and my boss at the time, who was our chief operating officer, that what we needed was revolution, not evolution, because we had, you know, we refer to it as kind of culture or compliance problems across the organization, and it's the commercial organization. And, you know, it's always best practice in any kind of, you know, design function like product or operations — one thing at a time, do it properly, kind of, you know, move on. But it would be just like playing whack a mole. Right? Let's go fix it. Let's whack that one down. Here's another one that pops up. I'm like, we need to rechange the whole landscape, the whole way we set sales internally, the tooling we provide them, how we set everything up for success. And that's gonna mean doing a load of things, you know, fifty to sixty percent as well as they should be. And so, you know, after one year of doing that, this was the year of really doubling down and getting further value. But we've, you know, we've started steering that titanic and moving the ship and getting things ready, and inevitably, there are some things I missed, some things that I didn't get the plan correct in the rollout, so I need to go back and reevaluate. But the general principle of — and again, it's gonna depend on business situation beforehand — but looking out and saying, look, this is pretty sales unfriendly. Let's shift that entirely, and then let's focus on this, and then we can start holding this to higher standards. The other way I've referred to it is this kind of a bar. We had this really low bar compliance threshold. When it was so low, we had a Salesforce hygiene dashboard, and it had opportunities that are due to close in the next two months with no activity in the last one month, thirty days. I mean, it's just, like, pointless. If you tick that versus you don't, you're still not gonna win the deal. Way more than one every month, you know? So, like, again, it's just this pointless admin bar, whereas I said, we're gonna set a best in class aspirational threshold and we don't have to hit it, but we're just trying to get close. And again, the sales job internally to the team is clear. It's like, we rolled out MEDDPICC, for example, you know, and we wanna do our best at filling this in, and I believe in, like, you know, communicators, and we got some buying in. You never get a hundred percent. Like, if you do this well, you're gonna close more deals. But it's not just that. It's if you do this really well, your manager's gonna have much better understanding of where you are. So your one to ones gonna be much more focused, and you're gonna get much more insight. You're gonna learn from, you know, him or her a lot quicker, and therefore, you're gonna get promoted a lot quicker. And your when leadership are in on one of your deals, they're gonna see everything squared away. You're gonna, you know, plant that seed that, you know, you're someone whose house is in order that can be trusted. So not only is your, you know, short to medium term earnings gonna go up, your medium to long term career growth — that time is gonna come way down, and you're gonna be able to drive forward much much quicker. So yeah. It was all about kinda creating that environment to try and sell it in. You're not — I'm not trying to convince anyone that I'm gonna help you close one more deal this month or this quarter. That's a tough sell, and that's gonna fail in most cases. But it's like, generally, all these things are gonna help. And the other thing is a lot of what I've done, I've tried — you know, we've done a number of things around, obviously, our tools and the people we speak to. But so much of sales is not about your product and things. It's about understanding your buyer and industries and just sales skills. And so much of it is like, but most of what we're providing for you will last you for your whole career. Not in a static way. You need to keep doubling down on it, but if I only invest in you to help me and help me now, that's a pretty rubbish, very transactional relationship. It's like, if we have that trust that as a business, we'll invest in you and give you, you know, skills that will evolve over the whole of your career wherever you are. And, you know, that's great. I think the phrase in startups is no one likes the idea of investing in your people only for them to leave. But the worst thing would be having people that never left because no one else wants to.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That sounds pretty shitty. Truthfully.

Alex Freeman: Yeah. So I have a good way of flipping it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. No. For sure. So I have so many thoughts because I think it like, you know, obviously, building Weflow, we think very deeply about what you just alluded to. And, you know, the way I dream of, you know, the future world is as following. You know, you ideally automate all sales methodology entry tasks, email, meeting, contact data. You enrich them automatically. Right? Like, even stages, closed date, as you alluded to, they can, right, they can almost go away to essentially do two things, right, provide the managers with a lot better visibility into what's actually happening because the reality is often that's not the case. Right? It's these one on ones and pipeline reviews, they are very much based on gut feeling hearsay conversation instead of actually looking at the hard data. These are simple things. We're not even talking AI. Right? This is like, is there a next meeting in the books? Right? Is there multithreading? Right? What does it actually mean? How is it defined? Is there a path to power? Right? So, like, some fundamentals, I'd say, in usual sales processes. And then the other piece, and I think that's super exciting, actually, is provide actionability to the reps. Right? Like, basically, you go and take the data and then enable them to be on top of their game. Right? Because I think that's also reality. If you work in a cadence or in sequence, you know, the sequence tells you what to do. Whether that's the right thing or not, I mean, that's to be debated. But if you work deals and pipeline management, the system should help you know what to do. Right? And I think this is where everything is going. Right? And I personally think it's a bright future. Just have to apply it. Right? But I think it really goes down to what you said initially — I love this so much. It's essentially, if reps make more money, the company makes more money, and that's actually kind of part of the fundamental mission, you know, of the whole setup. Like, quota attainment is such an important metric. Right? Sales