Janis Zech: So hey. And welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. We're here with Tom Van Langen. And, actually, it's not the first time. It's the second time because we loved the first time so much. Tom, welcome back.

Tom Van Langen: It's great to be back on the pod. Thanks for having me.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I mean, you know, pod twenty twenty five. So expectations are very, very high. Yeah, how was your Christmas time? Did you have some time off?

Tom Van Langen: Got some time off, which is always a little bit challenging with a year end in there, but managed to squeak a couple days here and there. But yeah, great holidays, close the year off strong. So yeah, excited for twenty twenty five.

Janis Zech: Nice. Yeah, awesome. Same here. And we got Philipp as well. So yeah, let's dive in. So today we talk about the fun and easy topic of operationalizing the plan. And I think we've all probably spent quite some time planning for this year. So maybe let's kick off with why do you think this is important?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah, I think it's a great time to be having this conversation. It's January. I think a lot of the team is exhausted at this point. You just got through Q4, or at least for a lot of companies, and you've spent the past couple of months deep in planning. You have built every model upwards, downwards, capacity plans, bottoms up, you've tailored it by region, by segment, done different territories, setups. At this point, you're just really ready to get it out the door, right? To finish it. But how do you make that plan a reality? And I think it's a perfect time to make sure that months of hard work doesn't go to waste.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think everybody can feel you. Not just that Q4 is always just super, super high energy, pressured to close the year strong, but then all those conversations, right, and the coordination with all the different stakeholders to get to a budget and a plan and all the fun things, and then you end up in January. And, okay, where do you go from here? So, I mean, usually, right, these plans, they're like quite strategic, I'd say. All the executives are involved. There's like a very clear idea about how you plan out the next year. But then, in your experience, how do you turn this strategy or this plan into action?

Tom Van Langen: I think that what I've seen across a bunch of different companies, the planning process can actually be disorganized sometimes, but typically leads to great outcome. So to your point, you know, you get the management team around what some of those critical priorities are. You're planning with several different models and with the data to drive the business forward. I think one of the biggest challenges is how do you turn that strategy into action? How do you make it executable, in a way? And one of the, I think, biggest, let's say misnomers or misconceptions about it is that you hear people saying, I'm ready to get back to my day job. At this point, you know, like you're done with planning. You put in all of this work, I'm ready to get back to my day job. Which is supporting go to market, customer success, sales, marketing, whatever way that the team has. But the reality that I see for RevOps is the strategy needs to be your day job. Like at its core, the strategy needs to be your day job, and really what you continue to make that plan a reality.

Janis Zech: I think one of the tough parts here is it's really hard to, I think it's one thing to you in your RevOps role, say okay hey I need like three out of my five days I need to focus fully on strategy and execution of the strategy and two days on other admin stuff that I need to take care of. But then the other part that I think is super tricky here is that RevOps alone rarely can execute the plan, right, alone at least, so they need to have support, they need to bring in more people that support them, that run with them, and that also make time to operationalize it. So I think the key part here is not only to free up yourself, but also in advance to the whole operationalization — oh my god, what a word — you need to also actually make sure, hey, head of product or head of sales, in January, in February, you need to have like twenty percent, thirty percent, whatever that ratio of time is, you need to have that available in order to help me or make it a success.

Tom Van Langen: I think it's absolutely true. It's not just RevOps that's going to make the plan successful. But it's not that product manager either, or the sales leader. It's the company that makes it successful. And that's why I think the strategy needs to be your day job. Don't get me wrong, everybody's dealing with the day to day things. And of course, more automation, more process improvements, freeing up more time is definitely important. But, you know, I'll give you an experience at least from myself. Landed at a company a couple years ago mid year and I showed up and one of the first things I did is I had time. I just joined. So I looked at their annual plan and I was asked how do we feel like we're trying to turn the strategy into action. How are we doing? Help us do this. So looking at the annual plan, looked awesome. Like, so good. Like the slides, what they were doing, all the material. But then I went and, you know, one of the items was we're launching a new service and we were trying to achieve x bookings for this new service. The product manager is the owner of this new service. We're going to achieve it. And that product manager was absolutely responsible for that goal. But they're not the only one. So is marketing, because they have to build pipeline, and sales actually needs to book the deal, and pricing and packaging needed to get it on the list, and RevOps should be inspecting it. So every team is really doing it. The challenge in this situation is I found that that service or that item was the sixth priority for about everybody around the company. Just never made the cut. It was there. But it was always the sixth item on everybody's to do list. So it's really how do you get it from the paper to making it a reality for all the teams? That they're all — that it's really integrated into your operating plan, that the people on the shop floor are saying the same thing as the C suite. Because frequently I think the C suite is really good with their priorities for the coming year, but turning into action is how do you get it immersed in the company for twelve months.

Philipp Stelzer: Fully agree, and I think often you have the sales kickoff, for example, but then this is very focused on the sales side of things. So this often feels like a kickoff, but I also, like speaking from product experience, you often feel a bit detached from that. Marketing is still a bit involved in a sales kickoff, depending on the company, product, engineering, other functions, often not. So do you have a framework or some methodology that you're saying has worked well in your past, or that you've seen at other companies that ensure that people become aligned?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah, absolutely. For me, it's kind of my mental checklist when we're just getting through. We're actually just at this point. So you're about to — it's pre sales kickoff or pre like a company kickoff. You're just working through compensation plans, finalizing items, rolling out territories and segments. So how do we start to put this into the practice for the company this coming year? I'm just going to run through there are five items. I'm somebody that believes in goals of three or five, so naturally I come here to RevOps Lab with five items that I tend to think about. One is to step back and reassess your strategic priorities and communicate them in the organization. That's the first one. Two is provide concrete guidance. Be really clear about what you're trying to achieve. Three is RevOps needs to role model the strategy. Number four is connect the strategy to the go to market operating cadence. And number five, measure the delivery of the strategy. And I think that those five items have been helpful for me to think through. Every year you're trying to make the plan more actionable, but coming back to them has been helpful for me to make plans truly actionable during the year. And I'm glad to take you through some of those.

Janis Zech: Yeah, let's maybe start with the first one. Obviously, right? I think your example was great because you mentioned it was like the sixth item on the list. Right? So it didn't really make the cut. How do you communicate your strategic priorities, you know, to the entire company so that everybody knows what you're actually talking about? How do you focus the entire company ideally, including Philipp's example of also product engineering? Do you have any best practices there?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah, first of all, planning is a long process. You have to remember, your leadership team started their long range planning in Q1. A lot of companies start planning the detailed planning process in Q3, budgets build up, you got to step back. Those priorities have probably been muddled and wordsmithed so many times, you have to really make sure that they mean what you want them to mean. And you've got to limit to a handful. I said three to five. I really mean three to five. It's the hardest things to do. But if you're coming up with six, cut one of them — three to five. It's the way to go. You should be focused on some of the midterm objectives. And I really like to try to make them a rally cry and to make them memorable. Whether using strategic priorities or OKRs, the way that they have to be communicated needs to be a rally cry for the company. To me, I always remember when I was at Autodesk and I was at Autodesk during their subscription transformation. So they were going from the old world — this was like over ten years ago — but they were going from the old world of perpetual licensing to subscription. And they came out one year and their current CEO was brilliant with strategy. He came out with twelvetwentyfifty. Twelvetwentyfifty was the numbers that everybody remembered. And he even presented it as an equation. And it was a twelve percent billings increase, plus a twenty percent increase in more value per subscriber, equals fifty percent increase in the number of subscribers. It was so fascinating, like that goal and how it weighed out because the numbers still echo like a decade later in my head. But different parts of the company were really actually focused on different things. More value per subscriber clearly focused on customer success. The more subscribers component clearly focused at your marketing and your new logo sales team. The billings was like how does every other function make sure you're optimizing for the billings and ultimately the financial outcome for the company. So it really did a great job. You see startups do this really well, too. Like, we're going to land one hundred new logos next year. That's an awesome rally cry. Or we're going to create one hundred million of new pipeline. Those are the types — by the way, hundreds are just random numbers I'm pulling out. But it's a rally cry that really brings your team together that I love about that first one.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, we are unfortunately not yet at a hundred million in pipeline generation, but I like that goal as well for sure. Do you think they always have to be quantifiable?

Tom Van Langen: I don't think that they need to be quantifiable. I think that you can typically have, you know, a goal that's like you want to be the best at something. I would make them concrete, which actually kind of gets me to the second one. So that was a really nice segue. So thank you, Janis.

Janis Zech: It wasn't planned, but you're welcome.

Tom Van Langen: Yeah. Don't think it always needs to be quantifiable. I know that breaks the whole OKR type of framework. But I do think some parts of the organization — like a big thing is launching a product. And it's hard sometimes for you to realize the full value during that fiscal year of launching that. But a part of your organization is enormously invested in getting that live. So the next year you're going to measure it, but this year might be just on hitting that milestone at its core. But make the second one — make it concrete. So you can go out with a nice rally cry that's, you know, one hundred new logos. But how are you going to do that is important for making it concrete. You don't want it to be one hundred new logos, see you guys in three months, we're going to talk about it in the QBR. What are we going to do to do that? A recent company I was at was really crystal clear where they said, we're going to deploy a new sales methodology focused on force management. We're going to use these as an ICP demand strategy targeting these types of accounts. They were very clear about the items that they were changing, and the guidance to different teams that helps achieve that combined outcome. Make it concrete — as detailed as you can possibly go about what you're expecting teams to do.

Janis Zech: So you mean the guidance should be on how to achieve those goals?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example of that, which is you can say that example for Autodesk of more value per subscriber that I gave. Well, how are we going to achieve that? Well, focus on customer outcomes. What does that mean? Like, that's what you should do. But like, I'm on that team, focus on customer outcomes. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. So what are you actually gonna do? And what's the change that's involved in that that's concrete that the team is taking?

Philipp Stelzer: I mean personally I do have to say I do like the equation approach a lot more, because I think from there it's pretty concrete in my opinion. It explains the underlying motion, so it gives you like sort of like guidance — okay, this is the mechanics of it, this is like the lever that we have to push things in a certain direction, and now go and figure out how you can impact that. And I think there's also bad examples and so I just want to mention one that I had experienced in my past. So basically it was on Net Promoter Score. We want to have the best Net Promoter Score in the industry, and first of all, it's one of those where you don't know how others are calculating the Net Promoter Score, then you have some random Net Promoter Scores flying around, then it's very easy to cheat it, so you only send the survey to people or customers where you know they didn't have a bug in the last six months, or something like this. So I just wanna say, I think even concrete goals sometimes actually can be like a misalignment of actually where the company wants to go. Just wanted to share that.

Janis Zech: No, I was just like thinking of that. Right? Like, I think when you give out a goal, it's always in context of the size of the organization. Right? If you have ten thousand people, it's very different to a hundred people or a thousand people. Right? And then I think what you do with an Autodesk approach is that you give some freedom to the intelligence of the team to come up with the idea of how to get there, but then you also suggest some programs. Right? And I think this is actually nice. Right? So it's basically kind of what are the current assumptions of programs or projects or road maps that lead to those outcomes. But those are maybe specific in terms of guidance, but it's a guidance. Right? It can change. And I think that's a very realistic approach because often, you know, in plans, you have changes. Right? So I think, you know, at least in my experience, for example, planning for a new product launch and putting a revenue number to it — very bad practice. Right? Like, because you just don't know. So always assuming, okay, this is what's working right now, how can we do it better? And then this might be kind of a bonus. Right? But otherwise, what you do is you redirect attention away from what really moves the needle in terms of the core business outcomes. So yeah, I really like this combination of like, what kind of hard quantifiable on top line that is memorable and then, you know, a specific guidance that is treated as something that, look, this is our current belief, but maybe in three or six months it will look different, and it's okay to change that.

Tom Van Langen: You know what's interesting about the Autodesk one is that they communicated at that high level, and they actually did change the metrics. About two years later, they realized, okay, this worked pretty well. And they adjusted it and it became a different set of numbers that they were communicating out. I always reflect back on that one because it was really memorable and it had stuck with me. The executive team did an awesome job with rolling out that strategy. After all these years, it's really stuck with me. And every team, to your point, Janis, really knew like, hey, we're going to try to move the needle on this number. And that's what they were trying to do. And they all had their own related programs and items with it. So I even think your type of rally cry that worked really well because it was so multifaceted for a large company. But for a smaller company, just making it a clear rally cry and making it the concrete actions can really go a long way to making that strategy successful. And inevitably, RevOps is at the core of helping define some of that with the leadership team in the annual planning process, so now make sure it continues to be strong.

Janis Zech: So maybe good segue to role model the strategy. Right? Like, kind of what do you mean with that?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah. RevOps has always been on with strategy. And that's one of the big items that I think I meant with the strategy needs to be your day job. By the very definition, RevOps is working across and triaging the whole go to market organization. So you have to role model it. And this isn't just the leader needs to role model it. I think it's the team who needs to role model it. And every conversation you go to, you need to be talking about the strategy. The actions need to be consistent with the strategy. So if you're going in and you're not talking about one of the strategic priorities, you're always stuck in the minutiae of something, the strategic item will always take second seat. So you have to make sure that — it's very cliche to say this, but your roadmap — everybody knows the classic for RevOps, which is it's better when everyone's rowing in the same direction. And it's really true, right? You're trying to get the whole organization going in the same way. But I've seen great things that other go to market ops leaders share out in their roadmaps. And you want to make sure that your team's roadmap is consistent with the strategy and you're really evangelizing it everywhere you go around that strategy, around the company. I think that's how you make it not be the sixth item on the list. It will continue to be top of mind for everybody that you're working with.

Janis Zech: Yeah, what immediately pops to my head is like, okay, well, that's kind of the theory, but then the reality — I saw a video from Matt Walms yesterday, you know, waking up, getting pinged on Slack all the time with so many different operational topics. Right? And yeah, I totally love that as well. And I think like, how do you then use kind of the North Star metrics to say no? How do you make sure that you don't get derailed? Right? Like, what are some tips there?

Tom Van Langen: Yeah, I mean, wow, that's a really good question of like productivity. I love that too because you're constantly — I mean, we're constantly getting bombarded and can be so reactive to all of these items because the list is never, never ending of what's going on. I think that some of the items I've done — I'll just throw them out. I think people have different strategies that work for them. But I loved the Eisenhower principle or Eisenhower matrix, which is a two by two of impact and importance. And when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'll frequently lay out everything I'm working on on those two dimensions to see what's falling in. Because, yeah, a part of everybody's day needs to be on the operational items. But if you're never getting to the strategic items, you will not drive that business growth that everybody's looking for. So how do you balance the two and what's the time sucks for you? And then I do that every once in a while. You can't do that every day. That's not reasonable. So my very simple hack is like, what are the top three things? It's so simple. I'm very old fashioned. I keep a notebook. But what are the three things I'm going to do today? And if those three things don't align with something that really moves the business — it's like, approve this quote in Salesforce, that's not really doing a lot — it's got to be moving the business forward. Those are my two, let's say, prioritization hacks that I've used, Janis, but it's a constant battle for any team. And that's why I think that you need to be modeling it. And how do you avoid burnout of RevOps in the process? You have to turn away some of the reactive items. So what are the reactive items that are really important that you do versus which are just nice to have items.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Maybe sharing a lesson learned from my days at Fiverr, when we were around two fifty, I think three hundred people, product priorities became a huge challenge for go to market and how do we communicate those out. So we basically installed kind of a prioritization meeting where everybody could voice, but then still everybody saw the road map, everybody agreed on the road map. And then we also introduced a newsletter where we regularly shared out the news. Because often, I think the challenge is not so much the operational day to day that comes from the AEs or SDRs. That's also challenging. But the challenging piece is what if the CRO and the CMO, you know, what have you, comes and says, look, we need to completely change course. Right? And so you need kind of a forum where that needs to get discussed and be linked back to the strategic priorities. So that's something that worked really well for us back in the days because it informed everyone around the table, especially those who have the power to change course, and you need to hold those folks also accountable, right, to the wider common goal. And as I always was part of the executive team, right, so I was kind of seeing those conflicts from the other side. And they're very true and happening all the time because folks are also under pressure. Right? They typically get fired. Right? The average tenure of a CRO is eighteen, nineteen, twenty months, right, which to me is like super value destroying, to be very honest. It's horrible if that's the reality. But yeah, I think it's something that worked really well for us back in the day.

Tom Van Langen: I love that. I think it's a great, great combination. I've seen Jeff Ignacio, who I think you've had on the podcast before, he has a great go to market roadmap that he's put together and even templates around it. I think it's really good for creating that shared alignment. And you said something that I was thinking back from my experiences in past companies where it's constantly communicating back like, this is what we're working on, here are the things we're prioritizing because it matches with this, and documenting this — we cannot get to this because it does not match with one of the priorities and we have to focus on these other things. And sometimes I think reminding a CMO that you can't get to changing, I don't know, something in a newsletter or a flow — I'm sorry, making up a scenario as I go here — by saying, remember we agreed to this as a part of this and you had seen that before. And that requires pre work for you to get there, but once you can get that shared alignment, it helps move away some of the noise. And taking your team with you — it shouldn't just be a VP of RevOps that's doing that. It should be the whole team that's doing that, so they know the stuff that they can do. I think one big part is you yourself and your mental state and how you keep sane with everything that's happening around you. And then I think the other part is just also keeping the rest of the company sane and on track.

Janis Zech: And I think actually you had a fifth point that fits quite well into that. And I think also it has the conversation with the CMO, for example, and that is keeping the score of how you're doing with executing the strategy. Because I would argue that nearly every executive, you confront them with like hey, we could do this and this would, you know, have an impact of like x percent, but look where we are in terms of the score — just gonna call it the score now — like, we are still twenty percentage points away, and we wanna move there in the next two quarters. And to do that, we need to achieve this and this and this. Right? So yeah, curious like how you think about that, like how RevOps can really be the scorekeeper of that year long game of operational plans.

Tom Van Langen: I think that being the scorekeeper is being pointed and direct across the teams. You need to understand if your strategy is actually succeeding or it's not. Or was the strategy flawed to begin with in achieving that outcome? So you're constantly asking that. RevOps independence is you're trying to honestly answer that question for the team. But in this process, I choose to be more agile and pivot with it. So you can be very, very firm and try to measure the business, be the scorekeeper. And if you're rigid with it, that's all you're ever focused on. But if you need to make — and the way that you measure something, if it needs to be adapted, do that. Right? It's your insight with the business performing. You're not achieving the outcome. Why? Explain that. So being agile with how you're interacting with it is important because you're reflecting it back to the business. But ultimately, along with honestly your finance peers are typically the ones that are saying like, is this exceeding or not? And you're looking at it frequently from the leading indicator perspective, and your finance peers are looking at it from the outcome perspective, which is it having the financial impact on the company? So you want to be ahead on some of those metrics to understand, is it really performing? And why is it performing? How do we extend that to the leadership team, or even the board?

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think that's a superpower for RevOps. Right? You basically can see the future. Nobody else can. This is really like, if you do your job well, you see what is going to happen in the next two quarters after. And this is, I think, a good idea of like, you know, the level of professionalism that you can get to. It's hard to get to. Right? Totally get that. But maybe I wanna throw in a third one. Right? So you have the finance team, the RevOps team, and then you have the executive team. Right? So, for example, what we always did is like, look, we know this is a plan. Right? We know it can fail. Right? But this is what we are signing up for. That's communicated to the board. The board approves it. Right? That's a formal process. And then, you know, if we don't hit plan by Q1, Q2, right, we have another plan. And that often comes with, okay, we adjust the cost base. Right? And I don't mean like restructuring or so. I mean, often in growth companies, like, we just don't hire as quickly as we do. Right? And I think this is also really good to think about. Right? Like, if you're in RevOps, always think about from like, what's the financial metrics, what's kind of the investor metrics, and then what's the go to market metrics? And what are the leading indicators that feed into that? That essentially are different layers that, you know, if you understand the end to end, it will help you have the different communications. I think we talked about this actually last time. Right? Like, how do you have a conversation with the executives versus maybe with the finance team versus with the C suite VPs and then also the individual contributors, because they all hear and see different things. And they're all — ideally they're all aligned, but usually that's not the case. Right? So not everybody thinks in these different layers. And so getting those layers right, I think, sometimes helps to understand what is the core priority for the different layers of hierarchy in the organization.

Tom Van Langen: That's a great call. Totally.

Janis Zech: So maybe as a recap, like, can you walk us again through what are the five points just for the audience to remember? Just so that everybody remembers again how to turn strategy into action.

Tom Van Langen: Yeah, let's tie this up. Let's put this to action. Operationalize the plans. Really fun word. But the core is strategy should be your day job. And the way that I make it a part of my day job on a regular basis is really through five main pillars. The first is reassess and communicate your strategic priorities. The second is provide concrete guidance to the teams. The third is, as RevOps, role model the strategy. Number four, connect the strategy to your go to market operating cadence. That's the golden thread. And number five, be the scorekeeper, as Philipp very well described.

Janis Zech: Perfect. Awesome. Awesome. Now you know, everybody knows now what to do, you worked hard on your plans, so now go and execute on it. And if it doesn't work out this year, you know, at least work towards it, and then maybe next year it'll be a little bit better.

Tom Van Langen: Oh, yeah. You're doing a pep talk. No, I'm like a big cyclist. I love the concept of marginal gains, you know, like Team Sky and bike racing, they're always improving. That's it. Like, hey, you might improve the plan a little bit this year, improve it a little bit more next year. You're always gonna get better. That's RevOps. Marginal gains.

Janis Zech: Marginal gains. But now it's maximum — I'm also a big cycling fan. Always create a new PB, right? That's essentially it, personal records. You compete against yourselves. Tom, that was really really good. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's good to know that guests are willing to come back and that we don't completely scare them off. We also have a new question in place that we like to ask our guests and I think it's especially good for the beginning of the year, and that is: what's a book that you would recommend to our listeners?

Tom Van Langen: A book for listeners. Okay, so we're RevOps and we're all here right now. Want to make sure — I'm going to butcher his last name — but Revenue Architecture, which just came out in the past year, looks more like a textbook. Jacco van Everdingen — you help me pronounce his name because I'm going to completely butcher it.

Janis Zech: Jacco van Everdingen. There we go.

Tom Van Langen: Yes. It's great getting back to fundamentals, but I also find I'm a very visual learner, so it looks really, really cool for getting up to speed for RevOps these days and different frameworks around it for different maturity levels. So I highly recommend that. And then you asked the question, it was pretty open ended. I'm also reading James right now, which is a really good book, so I highly, highly recommend that. So that's just a fun personal reading for everybody.

Janis Zech: Perfect. Thank you so much, highly appreciated, and we'll add it to our list and fully agree. Jacco's book basically has become a standard textbook that every RevOps person needs to read in order to graduate in the RevOps Academy of our world. Thank you so much, Tom. Happy New Year.

Tom Van Langen: Thank you so much. Happy New Year.