Philipp Stelzer: Hello and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab Podcast. I'm here with Janis, and our guest today is Haris Odobasic. Haris, welcome to the podcast yet again.

Haris Odobasic: Thank you. Thank you for having me a second time.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Exactly. You were one of our first guests. I don't know the actual episode number, but it must be in the — I don't know, one of the first ten episodes.

Haris Odobasic: I'm sure. Yeah. I think it was, like, one and a half years ago. And it's really impressive to see how far you guys get and the consistency. I think it's paying off.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. All the credit goes to Janis. So the last couple of months, like, he organized most of our guests. So, yeah, big kudos to him here on this part for sure. We have you as a guest on our show today because you did something really, really interesting. You created a survey with more than one hundred and eighty professionals across twenty eight different countries, and the topic of the survey was, of course, RevOps. How else could it be? And so, yeah, two questions to get started. First of all, I think it would be good if you could give a quick introduction about yourself, what you're doing, why you're interested in the topic of revenue operations, and then what inspired you to undertake such a huge comprehensive research study.

Haris Odobasic: Okay. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I can start with a quick introduction. So I'm Haris, one of the co-founders of Revenue Wizards, one of our RevOps agencies based in Amsterdam, working primarily here in Europe. And I am quite passionate about revenue operations, and the other passion I have is writing. So at the moment, I'm writing also a book about revenue operations, and when you're writing a book, you feel sometimes alone. It's you and your own thoughts and putting it in the writing, so I thought, okay, I need to add more color to this book. There will be interviews and expert opinions, but also wanted to capture the view of the RevOps community as a whole. So that was the inspiration to set up a survey. So with the survey I can capture many voices from all over the world and from different company sizes and really complement the book with this insight as well. So this survey turned out quite successful, like you mentioned, one hundred and eighty participants, and so what we're doing now, we are going to launch the survey result as a separate report, that people can read the insights — if you have show notes or something like that, can put a link to that later on as well. So yeah, that was the motivation really to write the book. So that's not only me saying what or how RevOps is, but also really getting the community view on it.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I love that. I'm a big fan of doing qualitative research, but then just to kick things off, but then to undermine it with quantitative research as well, just to confirm that like the original ideas and thoughts that you were able to collect during interviews actually can be confirmed with a broader audience. I think that's —

Haris Odobasic: Or challenge them, even.

Janis Zech: Or challenge them. Exactly. I mean, that's also the idea, right? You want to reject a hypothesis in most cases, really.

Haris Odobasic: Science, yes.

Janis Zech: Were there any findings in that study — before we go into the details, but we have a couple of questions to go more into the details — but was there anything in the research that completely challenged your current assumptions about revenue operations? Or was it really more all as expected?

Haris Odobasic: Yeah, so the one surprise is we all know in RevOps, we can get very technical, and when it comes to tooling, data and insights, but we also have to work with many stakeholders. So one surprise was there that I asked like, how much time do you spend on improving your soft skills per year? And over sixty seven percent answered less than ten hours per year. That's really low, right? When you compare it to somebody who's striving to be in a management position, they spend at least like a hundred hours per year, they might work with a leadership coach. And also many people in the survey said they want to have a management path, so a management career. So it's a bit contradictory that so little time is invested in getting better at soft skills, which also means most people spend their time on technical skills, or we assume they're really good at soft skills, but from personal experience you really need to be a natural to be good at soft skills and communication and persuasion, or you need to invest a lot of time and effort, and pretty much everyone needs to invest time and effort into it. So I think this is also a limiting piece why sometimes RevOps is not strategic enough or perceived as a system admin because if you spend so much time on the admin side or technical side, yeah, well, then you get this perception as well.

Janis Zech: Great. Yeah. And one more question about the methodology. So I'm just curious if you could just briefly describe the methodology just so we have a bit of context around how the data was actually then conducted.

Haris Odobasic: Yeah. No. Good question. So there were different types of questions. Most of the questions were in the form that they have to give a choice. The choice could be like a multiple choice, not actually like a point scale selection, rating something from I'm not interested at all, I'm very interested at it — so a five point Likert scale is like I think the technical term. Then there were multiple choice questions, so selecting certain answers, sometimes some open questions, and later on it was used through AI to aggregate similar answers to get an insight there. And what type of question else? I think this is the main question format, and mostly we asked them — you could not skip a question. So hence we have for every question we have one hundred and eighty replies. So it's a nice and comparable plan.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. Thank you so much. Then I would say let's dive into some specifics. As mentioned, we're gonna link to the research, of course, so people can download it and can read along while listening to the podcast, if you like, or just take this as an inspiration while reading. So what I would like to kick off with is just a connection to what you said in terms of what surprised you when reading through the results of the survey — is RevOps — the survey shows that RevOps is often perceived as operational rather than strategic. I think it's probably not a big surprise to most of our listeners, right? This is something that they are also struggling with. But did you find any insights in the research where you say, okay, this is probably what was driving this perception and maybe also some guidance on how to change that, aside from the soft skills that you mentioned before?

Haris Odobasic: Yeah, no, exactly. So I think the soft skills, I think it's the main one. If you don't invest time on it, it's difficult to be perceived as strategic. I think it has also to do a bit with goal settings, like how our objectives are set, how our KPIs are set, and I think also to give an answer, what helps to be more strategic is, okay, can you link your initiatives that you're working on to OKRs, for example, objective key results. I think that usually is helping in becoming more strategic as well. One surprise, I think often many mentioned they spent a lot of time firefighting, which also relates to the point of being perceived as operational — as you are the guy and we have a problem, and you're okay, let's call Tom, because Tom is like in RevOps and he's gonna fix our bugs, or he's going to create this report, or he's going to do this and this. And so this often can be quite operational and perceived as that, so you're not linked to the strategic initiative. So if always people think of you as a firefighter. And then the question is, how can that be resolved? I think first, in the beginning, proper planning. I think one surprise also was how many of you use a project management software — less than half used it, which I find also surprising because in RevOps we have a lot of projects happening. Related to that, to project management, you can also build a ticketing or a backlog system. Also that didn't happen that often. So how you manage requests, how are you managing disasters — if that's not properly managed, well, yeah, obviously you're going to end up firefighting and being more operational per se. So just being strategic, I think the preparation aspect is very important, and maybe also like a little challenge there. I think planning is amazing, but plans are useless. In the end, stuff goes wrong, right? But that is something that's definitely going to help. And also, I think what can help is giving visibility for strategic projects. And I think not necessarily as in there, but really linking to your RevOps roadmap, your initiatives, what you're working on. I think that also helps. And being in these conversations and providing these important insights.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a topic that comes up again and again. We had a whole session with Tony about RevOps being more strategic, right? Like, and a few ideas there. I think we could probably spend the whole episode on this topic alone. Right. And I think it is like in our mind or like in our view, right? Like it's very much centered around what do you actually do and how does it drive the core initiative of the company? How can you measure that? So if you don't have a roadmap and somebody comes to you and you cannot say, okay, well, you know, these are the initiatives, that's how they are driving, you know, some of the KPIs we're working towards — you know, it's really hard to communicate. I think I mentioned this, you know, example of having a newsletter where you communicate out to the core stakeholders regularly, having a roadmap meeting where people understand the trade-offs. Right? You know, maybe also separating out the big strategic blocks and the operational day to day. Right. Is something that comes up quite often, similar to a product roadmap. Right. Like you have your strategic product initiatives and then you have your bugs and they are both very important to be worked on. But probably the bugs — I mean, even those you should put into your newsletter, but in different framing. Right. So and I think then it comes back to like this — what you and I think this really resonates with me — like how you message what you do to the different stakeholders is just so different. Right. If you basically communicate out to the executive team or even to the board, what are the strategic initiatives? It's just a completely different conversation and a different message you need to bring than potentially just, you know, introducing a new training session to the AEs or CSMs or a new process. Right? So I think that's also something that I think is so interesting in your research because obviously that has a lot to do with understanding who you're messaging to and then what kind of message actually resonates. And I think for the strategic messages, like backing up with specific data and really tying it back to the company objectives is just so, so important. And then maybe last thing, and then I stop my rant here — I think it's also like, you know, the discussion I'm a bit annoyed about the discussion personally because I don't think that everything always needs to be strategic. I think that's like, you know, in my mind, it's also the wrong perception. And if you create more value by making reps more efficient or automating manual data entry that they hate or, you know, providing better visibility — right, those are things that might be really hard to, you know, like frame as strategic, but they actually make a huge difference for the company. Right. And so I think it's then like, how do you communicate? Right. Always remember this time when we hired people from top universities back at Fiverr. They always wanted to say, oh, I want to work in strategy. I was like, okay, you know, I stop here because you have no clue what you're talking about. Right? Like, if you talk about, like, working in strategy, that job actually doesn't really exist in most companies unless you're a huge company. And then it's like strategic projects you're working on, like M&A or so. So in my mind, all of this builds the revenue engine and that is the strategic objective on the revenue operation side with a lot of like, you know, more abstract goals and like monetary goals. Okay, sorry, I totally got carried away.

Haris Odobasic: No, it's good. So sorry. Like, what that made me thinking was also important just to highlight — like, RevOps is a job title, but also a function, right? So the people who have RevOps in the title, but there's also the whole function of revenue operations. The whole function can be strategic and operational. Also, the day to day job is strategic and it can be operational, and they're also most probably gonna have a team. So I think in the survey, two percent were solo. Let's exclude them for a moment. But let's say seventy eight percent was a team of RevOps. And in these teams, you're gonna have different RevOps professionals. So somebody might be — not might be just, but they might be focusing more on marketing automation, somebody in system administration, somebody working more cross-functional products, and most probably going to have a VP of RevOps, or a head of RevOps in that team. And that head of RevOps, he will be talking definitely with more stakeholders. He will be working more, trying to align all the initiatives on the more strategic objects. So there's also a degree of who's doing more the strategic and more the operational role. It's not like that everybody has one hat — in RevOps, everything actually a little bit, because some people, like the solo RevOps — let's pray for them, they have a tough time — but most are working in a team and there's roles and responsibilities as well, and I think that helps with the perception of being perceived as the system admin or not. Many of the ops leaders I'm talking to, they are not perceived as firefighters per se because they are working on many different projects, initiatives.

Janis Zech: One finding in your study was also that forty five percent of teams prioritize sales over any other function. I thought this was a really good insight, because certainly something I've been wondering myself: what's a good balance? What's a good distribution to think about here? Right? So sales is not the only team. There's obviously marketing, customer care, success, whatever. Like, you know, it obviously varies by company, but curious what your thoughts were when you saw that stat.

Haris Odobasic: I think when I saw it, I had mixed feelings. At first my reaction was, oh my god, not against sales — they're getting so much attention all the time. But then I was thinking, oh my god, it actually depends. Like if you're an early stage company, you probably have below ten million of revenue. Yes, you want to focus on sales, you want to focus on marketing, you're going to put all of your resources in there, you need to prove yourself, and especially if you're relying on investor money, if you can't close, it's a bigger problem than keeping them. So yes, you want to focus on sales, but eventually let's say you have fifty million revenue, most probably eighty percent of your revenue this year is going to be made from existing clients. But if you still have to focus forty five percent or more on sales, it might be backfiring for you if you don't give enough attention to keeping and retaining that client. And I think especially now, customers are very critical in what software they're using and what they are paying for. They have review cycles — are they going to keep it, are they happy with that? They even mock — in every space of RevTech, there's a new competitor popping up probably every week. So there's a new attractive solution you can be switching to. So if you don't invest in customer success especially from a certain mark, yes, they're gonna be challenged. So probably you might have at least an equal split and probably even more. Let's say you are like Adobe, a huge company — how much growth do they have per year, ten, twenty, thirty? Max percent, but the most is from existing clients. What do they do to keep them, for example? So yeah, it depends on which stage of company growth you are.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I have an interesting — so obviously this goes into the debate like, you know, is RevOps and also the CRO geared towards sales? Right. And should we call it go-to-market ops? Right. There's some folks in that camp. Still have RevOps is the right thing. But then often, you know, like, it's applied to maybe just the sales function, and then it's actually sales ops. Right? And so I think the whole idea of RevOps is to go across the entire bowtie. The counter argument for what you're just saying, right, is like, okay, it's early stage, forty five percent, but why is marketing ops then not playing a bigger role here? Because you could also argue if you're below ten million, marketing and sales drive basically pipeline and conversion. And so I find that quite interesting. I think the reality in the market, or at least when I look at some of those titles, is that obviously it's a newer thing. And I think everybody buys into the idea, but the reality often looks different, similar to the CRO reality. Right? Like, and I just released a cheat sheet on the CRO side. And I had a lot of CMOs actually saying CMOs should never report to CROs, right? Which is interesting because then if you have a CMO, you have a CSO or you have a CRO that has sales and CS, but not the end-to-end bowtie concept. Right. And look, I get it — I think marketing ops and sales ops is very, very different. Right. And so I would think like in the end, RevOps can come from any background. Right? It can come from marketing ops, can come from sales ops and CS ops. Ideally, you have experience in all of those. And then, you know, I think a RevOps is often also probably a more like — it is already the management part. Right? Like, if you have a team of four people, like we see this all the time, then you have somebody who manages RevOps end to end, but they still have marketing ops, sales ops, CS ops. They might have, you know, systems teams. Then if you look at some much larger company, yes, I talked to somebody who built up RevOps at Facebook. Right? Three hundred fifty people. Like, I think they started with forty, went to six hundred. Right? I mean, we could probably spend, like, two hours just going through the org structure because it's so, so complicated. So I think there's a lot of nuance to this, but I found this very interesting and quite like confirming of the debate that is happening. So I think it's a healthy debate, actually.

Haris Odobasic: I think in the beginning, you lost me, then you got me back in the house. I believe marketing ops is part of RevOps. If you really have a good RevOps structure, then, yeah, you are uniting sales, marketing, and customer success in one function. So, yes, if you focus early on with RevOps, great. The other point is I actually also think that CMO should not report to the chief revenue officer. Maybe marketing ops per se, like the technical part, but marketing is a lot of strategy. Marketing is, for me, the real go-to-market, right? So this is like, where is the market going in two years? That's the question I expect from a chief marketing officer. I don't expect from him, what's the website conversion? RevOps can answer that question. But what are the new trends? Where do we need to go? How are we positioning ourselves? What words are we using, even, like the content base? I think that is more the beauty of marketing and power of using psychology, etcetera, to sell products. And some people are amazing at marketing. But I don't believe that the chief revenue officer would get all of these parts. So that's my hot take.

Janis Zech: You know, we need to go back to Philipp. He'll bring the structure into the conversation. So Philipp, what's next?

Philipp Stelzer: No, I just wanted to — no, no, not going to add anything to it. I have so many thoughts. You have to stop me here.

Janis Zech: No, no. I think it's good. Let's switch some gears. I think we talked about leadership skills, organizational structure now a bit. Maybe let's focus a bit on the technology aspects of it because you also asked some questions there and also found them interesting. Also in our own interest because one of the questions was hovering around the topic of custom build versus, you know, specialized, like bought solutions. So point solutions, bundled solutions, custom build solutions. And in your research, you found that there seems to be a preference for custom build tools. And given that Weflow, of course, is also — you know, building a lot in activity capture, pipeline management, forecasting — obviously, I'm curious, what do you think are the implications of this trend? Where is this coming from? And where is it going?

Haris Odobasic: Yeah, I think it probably comes out of frustrations. I will explain that in a second. But I think nowadays, building software is easier than ever. I think we all can agree on that. Second, there's a lot of flexibility that these no-code automation workflow tools can allow you, and you can build a lot. Even just with Zapier and a few API calls, wow, you can build crazy stuff or empower existing infrastructure. And we know all in SaaS and tech, it's a very fast moving environment, so you need to be fast. And with specialized solutions, like if I have maybe now a product request for you guys with Weflow, you're gonna take it serious. You're small, agile, you can build it quite quickly, and you're gonna deliver it. If I have the same request now to Miro, it's gonna take like a few years maybe. Maybe not years, maybe half a year, but they could put it on the roadmap. And if I go next level, if I go to HubSpot or Salesforce, they have the idea board. They have some ideas that are seven years old with twenty thousand upvotes and no sign that they're going to be put on the roadmap. And it's just like, that's why the whole ecosystem that empowers such softwares like Salesforce — you guys also empower Salesforce in a way. So I think this frustration is the reason why custom builds, because you can just move quicker. It's maybe sometimes quick and dirty, but it gets you to the use case. You maybe need to use multiple tools to get the result, but you're getting there. Sometimes we cannot wait for big giants to put in the feature we need in the software. I think many have this sentiment.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I think it's so interesting because obviously we're in the revenue intelligence space, building activity capture, conversation intelligence, pipeline management, forecasting, as Philipp just mentioned. And so we made a decision very early on that you can buy each product standalone. Because what we saw is that, for example, people are very frustrated with EAC, right? Einstein Activity Capture in Salesforce to capture emails and meetings — cannot report on them and so on and so on. Right? Like most people know the challenges. And so they don't necessarily want to buy everything. Right? They just want to buy that solution, or they might just want to buy, you know, a better way to capture their meeting data and actually also make sure that they have all the specific data fields in Salesforce, or level up their pipeline management, the review process or forecasting. So I think it's interesting because obviously it's a bundled suite — you can buy everything together and also makes sense altogether. But I feel like some of the vendors out there, they kind of — you know, they started out with like super high pricing and then to justify the pricing, they just bundled more stuff into it, but often it's underutilized. And I think a lot of people have been burned by buying shelf software that then suddenly over-promises but under-delivers. And so I think it's very interesting that it's kind of like this whole cycle of bundling and unbundling is happening again and again. We see it on the top of funnel side right now. Right? Like it's being unbundled again. Right? You suddenly have multiple different combinations you can stitch together of your Make or, you know, Zapier. Right. And I find that very, very interesting. Obviously, it's the journey we are on, so we're deeply interested in that. But, yeah, I think it's a very interesting finding. You had another finding, you know, on the tech side, which was like data quality emerges kind of as a major concern. You know, what are kind of the — maybe give us some context there and what are the patterns you see in organizations that have better data practices?

Haris Odobasic: Yeah, I think first we can say every company has data problems independent of company size, from small to big enterprises. So it's a common theme. Yes. And I think often it's something not everyone takes as seriously. And I also believe — coming now to the solutions, how can we improve data? — it's a top-down thing as well. I think it's a leadership aspect. Leadership, if they say, okay, data is the number one priority for us, and then walking the talk. Often I talk with clients in the near hour data aspect, how do we set everything up, then, okay, we need you now — in the deal reviews, you need to focus on data quality as well. Actually, what I noticed recently, many of our clients are putting commission based on data quality. I've seen that now a few times happening. And you get twenty five percent less bonus if your Salesforce is under a certain state. We built in some scoring and then the scoring, they can monitor it. If they fall underneath, then there's a commission impact, etcetera. That's a practical thing. I think many years ago that would probably not have worked, but I think nowadays it works. But then also being a bit stricter with data as well, having clear rules who can enter data, what data is entered at what time, what is being mandatory and what not, which for the end user might seem a little bit more bureaucratic. But in the end, this leads to good data, because I noticed at some point no training in the world will bring people to fill out data quality. And I understand it. I was selling myself quite for many years. If you're busy chasing deals, then you need to maybe think of your pipeline, etcetera. You have so many things, and then by the end of today, you maybe want to enter something into a CRM, or if you're really good, you manage this in between, but then something else urgent comes in, and obviously it has a lower priority.

Janis Zech: So we lived through this actually ourselves, right? We built a really easy way to update data on Salesforce. That was our initial product. And, you know, like, reps actually loved it. But then we went to RevOps or, you know, sales leadership, and they actually didn't really care about it. And then we went the route of, like, automating all data entry. Right. Which — and then I think in addition to it, you cannot automate all data entry. I don't think that's realistic. Right. But, like, you can then introduce stage exit criteria. Right. Guardrails, clear enablement, and you reduce, you know, maybe the, you know, let's say, you know, twenty five important fields and the stuff like MEDDIC that, you know, takes you a lot of time — and you automate that: emails, meetings, you know, MEDDIC fields, and so on and so on, meeting notes, blah blah. Right? Like, you can automate that, but then you still focus the people on the right data that actually make a difference. It might be close to products with amounts, stages. And you basically add the guardrails that inform the financial model or the forecast model. Right. And so I think that's like a big trend we're seeing throughout our customer base. You know, I think that's good because, yeah, I don't think — I mean, there's so much repetitive tasks on the AEs and CSMs. And so the more you can take away, the better, because it gives you know, we have this big belief of, like, 10x AEs, but still human in the loop. Right? AI won't replace everybody, but actually enable them to be a lot more productive. And I think that has already started for quite a while. And I think it's just going to get better. So, yeah, certainly a topic that is top of mind. Philipp, segue — mentioned AI. I think this is a topic we should also discuss because, Haris, you also touched on it in your survey. Naturally, I think, it wouldn't be a survey if you didn't ask about AI. So, curious, could you summarize the general state of AI and revenue operations for us briefly? What trends you kind of like saw? What trends you expect to see moving forward?

Haris Odobasic: Yeah, I think it's a tough question. There are different angles to it. I think everyone knows AI is here. AI is getting deployed faster and faster. But actually people are experimenting with it. I see people having an experimentation budget. Let's get this tool, let's get this tool, let's see how the results are. And often there's some disappointment there. Especially the whole SDR space — that one we can underline as a disappointment for the time being. There's great stuff on the marketing, on the content creation side. There's a lot of stuff, campaign planning, etcetera, better intent, just writing blogs and LinkedIn posts. I think AI is very good in that space, so that's great. But in supporting sales as AI SDRs, I think that didn't work so well. I think, to reinforce what you're saying, I think the activity and data capture, it's still a big pain point for so many organizations, and I think there AI has a great potential of doing it and getting us insights through the summaries, conversations, recording them, updating a CRM automatically, etcetera, gaining some insights as well, what could be done better in terms of conversation. So the enablement piece. So that's great. I talked recently to a company about what they built — some custom development, some Synthesia, etcetera. And then they built in the CRM in Salesforce. When they have an account, they could practice a mock call. So it will take all the historical data. Then an AI avatar would appear, they could practice a conversation they will be having with them. And I thought, that's really cool because I can think of a few objections, but the AI can think of an unlimited amount of objections and can use the historical data. I thought this was a really cool use case, and it lives directly in the CRM, not in a third party tool. Again, coming back to the specialized tools versus building your own, etcetera. So yeah, you can build your own in the CRM with a few API calls and a few tools, and bam, you have it in there.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I fully agree, and like, I would even say you don't even need it in the CRM to get started with it. Like so the way I use AI most of the time — I mean, first of all, if you wanna do it and ask questions about a deal, obviously, you need it in the CRM. It needs to be connected. That's clear. But I think just like for a lot of the stuff that RevOps also has to work on, like, you know, I just ask it like, how do I do this in Salesforce? It typically knows the answer, right? Very few people are actually reading the documentation of Salesforce, which can be quite painful.

Haris Odobasic: It's extremely painful. Very hard to understand. What flows and etcetera.

Janis Zech: Exactly. Yeah. Like, or create me like a CRO report that I can send in weekly with all the most important data. I just did that yesterday and just as a test and, like, it was a great report. Right? I could just immediately copy it into a spreadsheet and it would work pretty well, I'm sure. Right? So great time saver. Even if you don't have it in the CRM, I think it definitely generates value already inside this, what I would call now less experimental — like non-experimental, right — this whole chat flow, essentially. Did you see anything in the research where you thought, okay, those are like clear trends of things that are currently emerging, but will be like a, you know, a clear part of RevOps in the next five years?

Haris Odobasic: That's a good question. What trends? The survey, to be honest, was more backwards looking. And so I can just assume what could be. So let me think about that one actually a little bit longer. I think what the survey shows is that this perception of being an admin while at the same time being more on the operational side — I think that is going to shift more to the strategic side. Why I'm saying that, I think with RevOps, what people sometimes forget is it has to do a lot with change management. So all of these projects, trying to align the whole company on different initiatives, working with different business units together — this is super difficult, and especially the bigger your company gets, let's say we are talking of a company of thousands of employees, it's very difficult aligning on anything, and now you've always tried to do something like RevOps, super difficult. So all of this takes time, and I think people need to appreciate it more that it takes time because I think RevOps is a long term strategy. It's not something you implement today and you will get results in half a year. Sometimes there's some quick wins, but the bigger piece is more on the long term horizon. Taking it more time, and I think this coming five years will give it this time that it needs to flourish. So that's my view.

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