Philipp Stelzer: Hello and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. Hey, Janis. Hey, Philipp. So why should we listen to today's episode?

Janis Zech: In this episode, we talk with Charlie, also known as RevOps Charlie, about RevOps as a strategic function getting an end to end view on the buyer journey. And we'll dive deep into how RevOps organizations change in context of the size of the company. As a bonus, Charlie shares how to write a book. Please enjoy.

Philipp Stelzer: Really impressive, and we're excited to have you here. So welcome, Charlie.

Charlie: Thanks very much, Philipp and Janis. It's a real pleasure to be here, and it's lovely to hear that that history there. It's been quite a journey.

Philipp Stelzer: How are you able to create so much content in such a short amount of time? That's just insane to me. How did you do that?

Charlie: It goes back a bit to lockdown and the year of the pandemic, and I read a book called Atomic Habits back then. Sort of bestseller, I'm sure it sat on many coffee tables. Maybe some people have opened it as well. But one of the things that he talks about in that is about creating a good habit by focusing on the outcome. Sorry, by focusing on the input, not on the outcome. And so if you take the example of someone that says, I want to get fit, or I want to lose weight, then that's what they focus on. When the reality is if he's focused on at twelve o'clock every day, I'll shut my laptop and I'll do a five k run, that is much easier to focus on. And at the end of it, you will end up losing weight or becoming fit. And for me, it was at the time when I had a lot of extra time on my hands because of lockdown, I wasn't commuting. I had this idea that I wanted to write a book for first time sellers that were just getting into their sales career. And one of the examples he uses in his book is about writing a book. A lot of people say they wanna write a book, but very few people do because they're focused on the output, not on the input. And so for me, I said, at eight o'clock in the morning, I will open up my laptop, and I will write for one hour. And so I just wrote a chapter, chapter, and then that started in September. By December, I was like, ah, I think I've written a book. And so I was able to self publish that. And I've just kept that habit every day, weekdays, weekends. My kids call it my power hour. You know, get up, walk the dog, and then I will write from eight to nine. And many of those days, I won't know what I'm gonna write when I sit down or it'll come to me during the dog walk, but it's just become that muscle. And I use that to be able to write the blogs that I write, the newsletter that I write, and a new book that I'm working on at the moment focused on revenue operations.

Janis Zech: Okay. That's really, really impressive. Is there anything specific that you learned from creating so much content? I mean, there must be. Right? And also, I also read the book, like half of it. I read half the book, then I watched a YouTube video that summarized it. So that worked for me.

Charlie: For me, the little secret is the best way that I learn is by writing. So to write something, you have to really think about it and think about how you wanna structure your point of view or your perspective. And so actually, when I start writing something, I don't really know what my point of view is or what my perspective is. So my writing process is, you know, I wake up in the morning and I take the dog for a walk first thing. And at that point, I'm like, oh my god. What am I gonna write about today? Like, I haven't really got a thought. But something will come to me about an article that I read the day before or a conversation I had with a client or maybe it's some chapter that I need to write for the book. Then I'll get back. Then it's time for a shower. And then in the shower, which is where most people have some of their great thoughts, is when I'll start thinking through, right, okay. If I'm gonna write about this morning, I was writing about org structures in a series a business. So if I'm gonna write about an org structure in a series a business, what do I think are the two or three things that I might want to talk about? Well, today, I might wanna talk about the leadership structure, what kind of roles should you have, and then about how do you plan. So it's like these would be the headings or the h twos of your article. And then at eight o'clock, I'm sat down, and then it's just about how it comes. Because I've spent an hour or so thinking about what I wanna write, and then it just comes out. And so for me, the actual writing bit is not necessarily the difficult bit. It's the hour that's happened before that about thinking about what's the topic, what would be the three main bullet points, and then just getting it out without worrying about any grammar or editing.

Janis Zech: And, like, when you write, and also just in general, like, how you act like RevOps Charlie, do you look at revenue operations through a specific lens, also to have more focus? Or how do you deal with that topic overall?

Charlie: Yeah. Some days I feel like a bit of an imposter in revenue operations because I come to it from a twenty year background in sales and enterprise SaaS sales. And so I went through this process of writing this book to help first time sellers, and one of the lovely byproducts of that was I got invited in to do some sales training, coaching, a bit of consultancy around that. But it was clear to me that sales is not the answer to everything that's going on in the way that customers are buying right now. Certainly post COVID, buyers want to educate themselves much more before they get in touch with a vendor. When they do put their hand up and want to speak to a vendor, they want that person to be super educated about their business, about their industry, and actually be more of a consultant to them than a junior seller. And so from the buyer's perspective, they're looking in at our companies and saying, I want to interact with a combined revenue organization that has experience about what other customers are doing and about how people are integrating and about how they've phased their projects and about how they've structured their team. I don't wanna speak to some junior rep who says, look, can't help you with any of those questions, but what I can do is ask you some MEDDIC or BANT questions, and then I can book you in to speak to someone else that's a little bit further along on the conveyor belt, and they won't know the questions that you want, and they'll book you into another meeting. And it's very much this, as a buyer, I want everything all at once. And so that's my view into revenue operations. That revenue operations is about aligning marketing, sales, and customer success. But for the benefit of the buyer looking in at your organization, not just for the benefit of our operations team to be able to report and get commission data and product usage data in one system. And so that's definitely been my kind of journey in of looking outside in rather than a systems led inside out perspective.

Janis Zech: Right. So I think in one of your YouTube videos, you also shared that quite remarkable statistic, I think, is that for all successful deals that go through, prospects actually only spend, I think, what was it, seventeen percent of their time talking to sales or customer success, but eighty three percent of their time researching?

Charlie: Exactly. Yeah. It's a good Gartner stat. And in fact, Gartner have a great set of pages which are free to access around buyer enablement, if you search Gartner buyer enablement. And yes, some research they put out that in a typical buying process, a buyer will only spend seventeen percent of that time speaking to suppliers, and that's all suppliers. So if you imagine they're looking at three different suppliers, then you can, you know, cut that down to maybe only five or six percent of the time they're spending with you. So the rest of it is internal discussion with their team. It's doing offline research, going to events, and so on. It's online research, downloading reports, talking to analysts, and so on. And so this, again, leads to my transition from being just purely a salesperson to revenue operations. If your customer is spending eighty three percent of their time not in touch with your organization, your sellers, then just being better at selling, here's the ultimate opening line or the ultimate email, that can only affect five or six percent of the buyer's experience. And we need to think much more broadly about the interaction they have before they speak to our company and as they're speaking with people later on in the process.

Janis Zech: So, I mean, like, just to recap then, just to make sure I understood it correctly. So basically, you're saying revenue operations is very much about basically understanding the buyer process from the buyer's perspective, obviously, and then making sure that all the go to market functions, like particularly marketing, customer success, etcetera, solution engineering, and so on, are aligned in order to make sure that those eighty three percent of time they spend actually researching your company, understanding your product, etcetera, all resonate well. So during that eighty three percent of time, you actually try to make it as easy as possible for sales to just, you know, go through like the typical steps, but the impact that sales actually has in the end is — I mean, there is an impact, right? For sure, but it's probably less big than, you know, everything else that has happened outside of the sales conversation. Is that fair, or am I going too far here?

Charlie: No. No. No. That's — I think about how we buy things as individuals, whether that is deciding what movie to watch on a streaming site, whether it is choosing a car to buy. We speak to our friends. You know, I'm thinking about getting an Audi. I'm thinking about getting a Volkswagen. You know, what do you think? You might watch an episode of Top Gear or some other auto show. You might go on to Auto Trader. Certainly in the UK, that's a site you'd go to and you'd read independent reviews about that. You then work out exactly what model you wanna buy, what color you want, what engine you want, and you'll work out what you should be paying for it. And only then will you walk into the dealer because you're gonna meet this young guy or girl with a thick tie that's gonna go, oh, have I got a deal for you? And you're like, don't worry. I already know exactly what's gonna happen here because I've educated myself and you take control. Because if you don't, you're gonna get absolutely destroyed by someone that has more information and more knowledge than you. And we think that it's not like that in business. That's exactly what happens in business. So whether you're a CHRO or a CIO or you're a supply chain manager or an HR administrator, you are part of your private social networks, whether that's Slack communities or Discord channels or Reddit. You're going to networking dinners or breakfast where you're speaking to your peers. You're speaking to colleagues that you used to work with who now work in another company, and everyone's asking like, what are you doing? What do you recommend? Can you give me a short list of products? And you're figuring out what you should pay, what type of contract you should have, and only at the point when you're pretty sure what you're gonna do, do you respond to that SDR email that came in, and you go, actually now is a good time to speak. And on the other end of that email, there's some SDR that goes, oh, I knew this new phrasing that I've come up with was going to work. Now they were just in the right place at the right time and now the buyer is ready to have that conversation. And that will come through as an SDR outbound logged lead, but actually, a load was happening before that in this kind of dark funnel before they got there. And so a lot of the conversations I have with clients is, firstly, you gotta get your head in the game that this is what's happening. It's not in your attribution model and it's not coming through Marketo or Pardot. You can't see it because it's happening in the dark funnel. But you've got to embrace that and then figure out, right, if my customers or my potential customers are speaking to other people in these networks, how do I help guide that conversation and make sure that they've got the right tools and benchmarks and diagnostics and reports and calculators that help them with that part of that process that then leads them back to responding to my SDR call or email or filling in a contact me form.

Janis Zech: I think you're touching a really interesting point there. I mean, if you think about how we've historically done go to market, we try to measure everything and then attribute and then allocate budget accordingly. But what you're suggesting is essentially a complete strategic mindset shift in how we approach go to market. Right? I mean, I'm curious, like, if you break that down, you know, how do you operationalize that? Right? I mean, I think you mentioned one thing which really resonates with me. This needs to be understood probably by the entire revenue organization, marketing, sales, right, RevOps, but then also the executives. But really curious, like, you know, are there specific things you're recommending to actually embrace that buyer enablement centricity?

Charlie: Yeah. One of the things that I describe with clients is what I call a revenue acceleration flywheel, which as we're on a podcast, I'll sort of describe audio style. But if you imagine a flywheel split into two halves, the top half of it is really looking at the external experience that your prospects, your customers, and indeed your partners go through as they go through their buying experience. And so we start looking at, like I talked about, the dark funnel there. Where are they hanging out? And then when they do end up on your website, what's the type of content that you're providing to help educate them through the problem? And then we travel through their buying process as they deal with your SDRs, your AEs, going on to your solution engineers, and your onboarding team, and contracting, and all the way through to their upsell and expansion and hopefully renewal. And so it's very much an external perspective of what they're looking through rather than being inside out. And by bringing your team together, whether they are marketing, sales, customer success, whether they're from product, whether they're from finance, talking about pricing and bundling. Let's really look at the experience that that buyer is gonna go through. Now this isn't rocket science because any PLG type company does this the whole time because they haven't got any salespeople. It's all about how do we design our product so that the buying experience is conducive to helping you to encourage new people to join, to make it really easy to click the buy now button, to make it really easy to add in new users. So in PLG, it's all about growth and experimentation to improve this experience. But for some reason, when we get into enterprise, we go, woah, woah, woah, you know, we don't care about the buyer's experience anymore. Let's not listen to what they want. When they say I want pricing, let's not give them that. When they ask, can I have a look at the product? Well, you can't have a look at the product. We make it really difficult for them to buy and to become customers of ours. So it's really just helping from a founder to your revenue leaders to have this different change of mindset to think about it from the perspective of your buyers rather than going, ah, I've read a book on how we do enterprise sales, and it involves silos, and it involves passing off between teams, and it involves not giving the customer what they want when they want it.

Janis Zech: I think, like, one thing that I think we also experience here at Weflow every now and then is that sometimes you have to go into that challenger mode where, actually, the buyer, they actually don't know exactly what they're looking for, or they have this vague idea of what they want. But we actually do know better because you've heard that story before, and you know that it's not going to work out, and you have a better suggestion. So you kind of like, you don't want them to go all in on your product without supervision, because otherwise, they basically will go into the product, they will try to do their thing, they will fail, because that's just not the intention here of the product. And then so you need to be more in control there. I think that's also like a valid take that you can have, though I generally agree with what you're saying. But I think there are these moments like for specific types of products where it's just really important that you actually educate the buyer. And then in order to do that, you need to have that wall somewhere in order to put them like, hey, pause, you know, like, let us explain a few things to you.

Charlie: Yes. But I think there's ways around that. So I think about my teenage daughter when we're having a discussion about something, and she'll often say, that sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. When we think about enterprise companies, oh, well, you know, we can't share pricing because it's quite complicated. And we can't give you a look into the product because you probably wouldn't understand it. And if I was a customer, I'd be going, that sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. If your pricing is too complicated and your product is too complicated to guide me through, then that sounds like you need to figure that out rather than saying I need to click a contact us button. So I think there's definitely ways around that. One example that I like is Snowflake. And Snowflake, you think that's super complicated because you're dealing with data coming from private clouds and public clouds, and the pricing model is consumption based. So I mean, like, you know, how do you give a price for something? But they have a standing webinar in loads of different languages every week, which is from zero to Snowflake. So in half an hour, they'll take anyone from not knowing anything about Snowflake to having running their first reports using a sort of standard set of data, a data file that they give that everyone uploads. So it takes you on that journey, and they'll help you understand a little bit about how that pricing model works. Other ones are sort of clickable demos where people can go around or guided videos. So I think the onus is on us as technology companies to figure out, like, if we can't answer the question of how much does it cost and what does it look like, we've gotta figure out how do we let someone do that. Because in their problem identification phase, which is when they're in these other networking groups or they're just browsing around, they're in the moment. They're trying to figure it out right then. And to take the wind out of their sails and say, right, I can give you that, but it's gonna be next Wednesday, just slows down the process they're in.

Janis Zech: Okay. Yeah. No. I think that's a really good example, actually. And, yeah, I fully agree. I mean, for sure, there are ways around it. And I think, like, yeah, I mean, there's all the opportunities in the world, right, to create content, to put it out there, to make it available to everybody. And I think really companies shouldn't be, like, scared of, like, people stealing their ideas or designs. I think, you know, maybe, like, if somebody wants to do that, they'll find a way anyway. So that's not a good argument against it.

Charlie: And this again comes back to my journey to revenue operations in that it's not even about just marketing and sales. Because as sales, we don't know enough. It's customer success that have the goodness, because they know what customers are actually doing with the product. This is the phase that they typically roll out module by module. This is typically the integrations that they build in your sector. This is typically how they determine the value that they're getting from the product. This is typically how they negotiate contractual terms or whatever it might be. And that's the kind of important insight that someone wants right at the start of the process when they're in a Discord or a Slack community. So for me, I'm always trying to think about how do we almost interview the CSMs, the onboarding teams, the renewal teams, and figure out — and, of course, the customers, because they're the ones that are really using it — and figure out what can we learn from them that we can take all the way to the start of the process and help someone that's in that problem identification phase to educate themselves.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think this really resonates very well with me because if you think about that general notion of buyers just having so much information, once they enter the process, they wanna go specific. Right? They wanna know the nitty gritty. They wanna know how that software is essentially helping them to succeed and drive that, you know, like, solve that problem they are trying to solve. So I'm really curious, like, what does this mean for the journey, right, whether you're a product led or you have a clickable demo or, you know, you're a sales led. But, like, once you basically come inbound and you have a high consideration stage, right, like, who should the buyers talk to in your opinion?

Charlie: In my opinion, and of course it depends on inbound versus outbound, but someone that is coming inbound wants to speak to someone that can answer their question. And if you're going to put them in touch with someone that just cannot answer that question, that's going to be coordinating, you're causing some frustration. So there's a lot of talk at the moment about do you have SDRs? Or when I started in sales, I was a full cycle AE. You know, I turned up first day, given a set of leads out of Goldmine, which was the CRM system back then, and you start calling. And one of the advantages of that was that my goal was not to book a meeting. I wasn't gonna pay for my food and my rent through booking meetings. I was paid on getting customers that would sign a contract. And so through those first few months, you're taking people the whole way through the process and getting through the contracting and then onto the onboarding. Now the beauty of that for me was that I learned stuff from the end of the process that I could then bring back to the next outbound call or inbound call that I received. Was much more valuable to the customer at the start because of what I was doing at the end. One of the challenges with the SDR model today is that the SDRs, whilst they're fantastic and they're working hard and they're really trying to accelerate their career, they just haven't got the knowledge of what happens later on because they haven't experienced it. And so when someone calls in and they're asking, right, I'm now educated. If you think about, you know, me with the car, I've spoken to my friends. I've been on Auto Trader. I know the model I want. I now wanna have an educated conversation with you. And I'm now speaking to someone that knows less than I do. Well, I don't really know about the product. I'm not certified on that. I don't really know how the pricing works, and I don't really know about the contract terms. But I can organize a call with someone that can. And I'm like, that's why I called in. That's why I booked this call. So I definitely think for companies, there is a conversation to be had about, do you funnel those in depending on the account, maybe the size of the account, and make sure they get quickly to someone that can answer that question.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I hundred percent agree. I think it's so important and such an annoyance. And I think especially in markets where you have product led and just different sales motions competing with you, you really have to be very conscious about that approach and change it. And I think you can route. Right? Like, you can route to different, you know, AE types, you know, SMB, mid market, enterprise with different capabilities, but being able to quickly understand the value. And it's similar to the pricing discussion. Right? You don't have to go into the scoping discussion immediately, but at least give a range, you know, give an understanding, and I think this goes further than through the sales process and also the discovery process. Right? But maybe let's switch gears a bit. I know we want to talk a bit about, you know, how are the organizations changing, you know, in seed, series a, series b? How is RevOps, you know, how should it be set up? I mean, you spend a lot of time on that. I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Charlie: When I moved into the world of revenue operations and I was thinking about where I can add the most value to clients, I built out a spreadsheet and the columns were the different funding rounds, seed, a, b, c, d, e. And in the rows, I did a lot of research across different VC firms reports, across SaaStr articles and sessions, Carta, who provide a lot of equity management data, and just helped myself to really understand what each of these businesses look like at each stage. The number of employees they've got, the amount of revenue they're doing, the number of products they've got, the number of countries they're selling into, and how their GTM teams are structured, and also specifically what their revenue operations organisation might look like. And it was really insightful because coming into this, I think where someone like me adds most value is actually a later stage organisation, series d, e, because they've got a lot of stuff that's broken and there's lots of opportunity to optimize that. But actually, as I came back to series b, to series a, and indeed seed series, you can see that at series a, and of course it depends on the industry, where we are in the economic cycle and the geography, but typically, you'd say that it's at series a, a team has just come out of finding product market fit. They've got about thirty people in the company, and maybe about fifteen of those are in a go to market function. And there's probably one person that has got an ops type role, and they might be called a marketing ops or a sales ops person. They're probably updating HubSpot and creating some spreadsheets. So that's thirty people in total, fifteen in go to market, maybe one in operations. If you then fast forward to series b, maybe a couple of years later, if they're following the right venture track, now you've got about a hundred people in the organisation from thirty to a hundred. In go to market roles, you've got about seventy, so gone from fifteen up to seventy. And then in a revenue operations type role, you've gone from one person now probably to about five people led by a VP of RevOps. And so for me, that was that transition. Like at the start, you haven't really got RevOps at all. And at the end, you have got it, and you've gone from, you know, quite a simplified go to market structure to something that's a bit more complex with multiple teams. And as a founder, especially if you're a technical founder that's come from a product background, you've never built this structure before. You're gonna hire in a lot of new leaders, a sales leader, a marketing leader, a customer success leader, and these people are likely to have come from a company where there were lots of silos and it was this handing off from one team to another. Each of these leaders is gonna come with a list of tools that they need to use. Oh, we use this as our marketing automation platform, and this is what we use for intent data. And then this is what we use for call recording and revenue intelligence. So this whole proliferation of tech stack that comes through, and everyone is focused on their own process rather than the overall one. So you might think, well, let's just get a VP of RevOps in day one that can oversee this. But a really strategic revenue operations leader is probably not going to join your scrappy startup, which is still at that point only got thirty people. So for me, that's really where I can really help by partnering with a founder to be their guide as they go on this journey building from a to b. And then hopefully, at that stage, they've then got the right revenue operation structure. And the culture through the organization that we have a revenue engine, a revenue team that has some functions within it, but we are not looking at these three silos that so often creep in.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think to your earlier point, being buyer centric, starting this rather earlier than later is super important, right, because you're building the structure between series a, series b, and then into series c. I'm curious, you know, like, how does a typical revenue operation organization look like at series b? I mean, if you have five people, what have you found?

Charlie: Typically, it's built around the activity that they're doing. And this is one of the reasons why it's so important to build this out from scratch, rather than trying to retrofit it into an organization that has already built around marketing ops, sales ops and customer operations. So I typically see five teams — I have to say five, and then I'll remember to — if I stop at four, you tell me. But so one of them is around strategy. So the strategy team. So this is really looking at it from the perspective of the buyer. So how are we going to architect our buyer experience? How are we going to structure our revenue engine in terms of our org structure and our strategy, pricing, bundling, the channels that we're going to use as we sell out to market. So very, very strategic. And then you're going to have teams focused on insights. When we think about the data that we're generating across all these systems, how do we generate that, turn that data into insights that we can use to create new business models or to support our teams and our customers better. We've got a team around systems, of course, the tech stack that we're using. We've got a team around enablement. So how do we enable our sellers in order to do a great job? And then the fifth one, of course, I knew I was gonna forget. So I have to actually look at — oh, sorry. Deal desk. Deal desk. That's always the one that I sort of leave at the back, which, of course, deal desk comes in later on in an organization. But by the time you get up towards a series b, then making sure that you've got a team that can win good business and that you don't suddenly discount everything on the last day of the quarter just to get it in is absolutely critical.

Janis Zech: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for all these insights. I have one more question before we come to the end, or, like, the last closing question, so to say. Like, there's one popular opinion, I think, right now that you can also read on LinkedIn quite often, that is that from the beginning, founders should essentially sort of, like, be in that RevOps position, particularly doing, you know, pre seed, seed before they go to series a. Would you agree with that? And what are maybe some typical issues or errors that you've seen that these founders make when taking over that RevOps role?

Charlie: This series a stage, when you've still got maybe thirty people in the company, the temptation is to bring in people into senior leadership roles and as a founder, you can delegate it, and maybe get back to your product heritage, which maybe you came from and you're very, very keen on. But at this series a stage, the sales leader that you bring in really needs to be a player manager that's focused on delivering your monthly or quarterly revenue number, that they're in the trenches with the sales team. They should not be a VP of sales, and definitely not a chief revenue officer that is owning all of this structure. They are managers that are doing work and delivering. And so it's the same thing with revenue operations. You, as the founder, have got this overriding revenue responsibility that these managers are reporting into. And if you delegate that responsibility too early, you're gonna miss the nuances of your business and how you're gonna build this revenue engine as one single aligned business. And that's one of the reasons why I'd mentioned at the start, I'm just writing this second book, which is called the revenue operations playbook for founders. And it very, very much is focused on helping a founder, a technical founder, an engineering background founder, to understand what revenue operations means in the context of running your business. It is not systems and spreadsheets and internally focused. This is as strategic as product development is to your business. How do you do revenue development? How do you build repeatable, scalable and consistent revenue? Because if you can do that as a founder, you will raise your series b and go on. If you can't demonstrate repeatable, scalable and consistent revenue growth to investors, then you'll miss and you won't be able to make that second raise. So it's absolutely critical that you as the founder are in the hot seat and own that function, understand that function, and can have educated conversations with your senior leaders as they come in to pick up those roles as you scale.

Janis Zech: Okay. Great. Thank you so much for all these insights that you've shared. For our listeners, we obviously add the link to your website and to the show notes, revopscharliedot com. You can find all the books and all the valuable charts and, yeah, just great content there. Before we end, just one closing question that we ask all of our guests on this show, and that is, yeah, what's the advice you'd give yourself when starting your career all over again?

Charlie: If I was to go back to the start, the little side story quickly, I was at agricultural college, so I learned all about farming for my degree. I got into enterprise sales just because there was a business in that town that had some nice cars out the front. And so I knocked on the door and asked them what they did there. And they said they were an internet service provider. And so I said, that sounds great. Can I have a job? And so that's how I got into digital. It's a conversation that I have both with my own children and also with others that are starting their career is that you just don't know what is around the corner. The world that we work in, technology, is advancing at such a rapid rate that the job you're gonna be doing in two or three years probably hasn't even been invented yet. So enjoy what you're doing, stay curious, read lots