Philipp Stelzer: I'm here with Janis, who's actually sitting in a hotel room in New Orleans at RevOps AF 2025. Hello, Janis. How are you doing?

Janis Zech: Doing super well. Already had a nice dinner yesterday evening with sixteen RevOps folks and met a bunch of old friends from last year already this morning, so it's gonna be a good event for sure.

Philipp Stelzer: Great. Yeah. Awesome. So at different time zones right now. I'm still in Germany, and our guest today is Joe. Joe Ort. Joe, welcome.

Joe Ort: Thanks for having me, guys.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Which time zone are you in right now?

Joe Ort: I'm East Coast. In the States. So not — I'm probably a good six hour drive from you, Janis, if you wanna come on over for dinner.

Janis Zech: Let's do it. Let's do it.

Philipp Stelzer: Alright. Okay. Nothing beats a six hour drive after a conference day. But yeah, Joe, for our audience who has not met you yet, who are you and what do you do?

Joe Ort: Yep. So I'm a fifteen year veteran in the RevOps space. I've got the gray hairs to prove it. I was lucky enough to start my career at SiriusDecisions, which did research into what the best marketing, sales, and product organizations were doing. After selling for a couple of years, I got interested in operations and have been doing it ever since, working on various VC and PE backed companies ranging from transactional through enterprise sales. I recently started my own fractional RevOps leadership company, RevOps Inflection, to help companies through the growth inflection points they see as they grow beyond ten million and try to get to one hundred million in revenue. So I support the strategy and planning side, building out models for capacity and bookings. I look at ICP definition and the way it translates into territory design, look at ways to improve forecast accuracy, and really enjoyed digging into the data to understand what's happening in the business and the ways that they can improve.

Philipp Stelzer: Great. Okay. That sounds really, really good. Congratulations on also starting your own consultancy and business here. Today, our topic is the five A approach, which you basically came up with for revenue operations specifically. Maybe let's just start with very high level. What is the five A approach and why did you feel a need for developing it?

Joe Ort: Yeah. You know, at SiriusDecisions, we always had a model for everything that could break down key processes. So to make it easy for my clients to understand the process that they would go through when starting with me, I created the five A approach as a way to just lay out what needs to happen for us to drive success. So it's five steps. They all begin with an A. So we start with auditing the current state, and then once we understand the current state, then we can analyze the processes, data, and look for areas to improve and what will have the biggest impact. And then we'll align with all the stakeholders to understand prioritization because you can't get everything done right away and different teams have different ideas of when things need to get done. And then once you've aligned on everything, you start to architect the solutions that will drive the required impacts. This could be process redesign. This could be operating rhythm enhancements, any of the tech changes that may come with that. And then as you go into practice with all those, we start rolling out to the team. We can start to see the last A — acceleration. So reps are able to work with better quality leads. Our win rates increase. Our ARR goes up. We start seeing better converting leads, or we're able to see just conversion rates period. And then, you know, as we get a handle on what's working and what's not, we continue to improve those areas to optimize our outputs. So five As: audit, analyze, align, architect, and accelerate.

Janis Zech: Got it. Okay. Perfect. And this is more like — you know, how should our listeners envision this framework? Is it more like a cycle that you continuously go through, or is it something like, okay, once you've done it and completed it, then it's done and over, and you begin like the five B approach or something similar? Like, you know, how are you thinking about it?

Joe Ort: I should come up with the five B approach. I like that one.

Janis Zech: You should.

Joe Ort: I mean, from my use case, you know, I'm using it to start with new clients, but there's definitely additional ways that you can use this. So if you're stepping into a new role or a new company, this is a totally appropriate time to do that. The audit piece, you're going to have to do that as you're stepping in to understand what's the current state of the business. Outside of just that, there's also, alright, we're coming into a new fiscal year. Let's look at everything that we've got. How do we start to organize ourselves around what are the key projects and priorities that we want to focus on for the year? It could be after an acquisition, whether you acquired or you were acquired by another business. Let's go back to step one of that and figure out again across both of the businesses now, outside of integration work that you're gonna do, what are the key activities that we should be driving towards? Or it could just be on an individual project even. And you think about, hey, we're gonna be doing a CPQ project. Okay. Let's understand what the current state is. Let's align on what the goals are. So it really could be used across multiple areas. It's not just for a new role, but it's just a framework and a process to think through how do you get across all these things. Your question around does it start back over — I mean, RevOps has a lot of responsibilities, so you're never done in RevOps as you guys know and your listeners will know. So it's a good way to understand the backlog of the actions that have been requested of you and the team and try to figure out where can you drive the biggest impact, because that's the goal — is just to work on the things that matter.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I really like it. I think it can be used for various different purposes as you just outlined. Questions for you — why do you think such a framework matters? And I assume you've created that framework because you've seen other ways of doing things. So curious why it matters in your mind.

Joe Ort: Yeah. Put structure so that people know what to expect so that — especially you've got you're working with a lot of executives across sales, marketing, and then even your executive leadership team, your CFOs — they're all gonna be asking, what's the impact? What are we getting from revenue operations? So it's just to make sure that we're fully aligned and that we don't skip steps. One of the steps that I always skipped early on in my career that I wish I could go back and fix was not baselining things. So we would go do all this work. We would do this big project. We'd roll things out, but we didn't have what that initial baseline was. You can do things easy for some of the lagging indicators like bookings. Okay. Did our bookings increase? But other activities — so like, how long did it take to do x, y, and z activity? How long did it take to get quotes out? Those types of things. Not having those baselines was always something that — hey, we wanna show this improvement. We're getting into our final annual review. Hey, look at all the work that we did. Very often, it takes a step to capture the impact that you have. We're not the rah rah team typically, so it's always just one of those things that gets left off. So it's to make sure that people understand what they're gonna see throughout the process of this and make sure that us internally, that we're not skipping any steps so that you don't have that issue at the end to say, hey, look at all the work that we did. This was the expected improvement we were able to deliver. That's — we would typically skip that step.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. And that's so important. I mean, I think it's a recurring theme in our podcast. It's a recurring theme here at RevOps AF and any conference I've been to — you know, value capture and especially communication. So curious, you know, maybe let's dissect each step a bit and go deeper into each of that just to provide more context for the audience. So in the audit step, what would you say is a good way to audit the status quo?

Joe Ort: Yeah. And, you know, it'll depend on the scenario you're using it in — is this a specific project, or is this a new role type of thing? But a lot of it is just to try to get an understanding of the current state. So what data do you have? What's the accuracy of it? Can you report on different metrics that the business cares about? Can we track the entire lead from top of the funnel all the way through bookings? Just get an understanding of the current state. So that's the data side of it looking specifically within your CRM, but it's also looking at broadly what is the current tech stack, how are things used? And then how are they integrated within other systems? Are they being used? So do we have a bunch of tools and technology that sellers aren't using? Never seen that happen before. But just to get a full sense of what's the tech environment that sellers are walking into. And then just trying to map out — and a lot of times, companies of this size don't have it. You know, the ten to hundred million dollar range — what are the processes? So outside of just your sales process, which hopefully you've got, you know, your observable outcomes, you have the activities that we're looking for, we've aligned our sales stages to the buyer's journey. Outside of just the sales side, what do we have from a marketing standpoint? Do we have that handoff process? Do we have the handoff process from sales to implementation and our customer success team? So it's making sure that we understand fully what are all the processes that are happening, and then you start looking at some of the gap analysis. Hey, we can't look at this thing. Alright. Now we've captured that data point. And then another part of the audit side is just looking at the team. And when you're talking team from a RevOps standpoint, there's two sides of it. There's your internal RevOps team — do you have the skill sets required to accomplish the things that you think you're gonna need to do? Do you need to add additional resources, whether it's headcount or tools or whatever? But it's also your stakeholders. So your sales organization — you start doing some of this and hey, we really are struggling in our discovery, making sure that we have some sales skills training that we can do. So I was trying to get a sense of, from a capability standpoint, both your internal RevOps team, but outside of that too, your constituents. So that's all just trying to get an understanding of the current state.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And I assume that depending on the context, right — if you're basically onboarding as a new RevOps leader or you just acquired a business or you just wanna improve a specific project and you audit the current state — I would assume that obviously has a different scope of the auditing process. But in your experience, right, let's assume you come into a new role. Like, what is the typical length of that process? Like, how much time should I spend on the auditing process?

Joe Ort: Yeah. It's one of those things that it's a necessary evil — you have to do it because you can't make recommendations without really knowing what's going on. Between the audit and analyze stage, I think you're looking at, you know, thirty to sixty days, depending on how long it takes to get some of the information and to have those conversations with key stakeholders. But you're typically looking at your first thirty to sixty days to get a sense of what does the roadmap look like and get a full understanding. It's tough depending on the complexity of the business to try to get all of that as you can. And a lot of times, it might just be, hey, we don't have x, y, and z things. That's fine. We know that we need to do that. As we get later on into the stages, we'll figure out where does this land on our prioritization? But you should have a pretty good understanding within the first thirty or sixty days.

Janis Zech: Yeah. On Monday, we released an episode with Christina from Forrester, and she basically said the auditing process is so crucial and should actually start with the customer journey and then really do a deep dive throughout the organization, talking to all the different stakeholders. Any tips and tricks in auditing to basically get to the insights you need? Because obviously, you could just sit there and look at all the data and then think you're done, but obviously that's not how great auditing looks like. So is there anything you'd recommend, you know, that you wish you had known fifteen years ago when you started your career?

Joe Ort: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I remember from my time in selling is how hard sales is. And, you know, I remember the reason I wanted to get out of sales was because I kept having this eye twitch from carrying a quota. It's a lot of stress and responsibility. So what you see in systems or what you see in PowerPoint presentations versus what's happening in the real world is always very different. So getting out and talking to people, talking to customers is the best way to get a lot of information quickly. And I think fifteen years ago, we didn't have the tools that we have available to us now. So even now, if you go into your conversational intelligence, pull information out of that that you wouldn't be able to get to normally. So there's a lot of information that's getting unlocked, especially in the AI age where you can just say, hey, tell me or show me calls that look like this or that are talking about this, and you can get a lot of insights very quickly. So hopefully, if they've got something like that, that definitely accelerates your ability to consume all of those conversations and data points to be able to flesh this stuff out. There's no better way to understand what's happening in the market than to hear the market themselves. There's no better way to understand the pain point of sellers besides just sitting there and shadowing them, going on joint sales calls, those types of things. That's, to me, you just get so much information in a quick amount of time. It's one of those things that you don't always get that luxury to join a lot of those calls. That's why I think the conversational intelligence side of it is so helpful today versus what we had ten, fifteen years ago.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think it has helped so much in streamlined processes. This is also why it was one of the most recent additions to our product offering — short plug here. But just to move forward with the second A in your approach, which is analyze. Could you briefly — like, for our listeners — help them understand what's the difference here between audit and analyze? Because at least in my head, you know, there's like a lot of overlap there. So, you know, how do you approach these two steps differently?

Joe Ort: Yeah, the analyze side is — if we've got all that data, now let's understand what that should look like or where do we see things falling out. So the first step is just to get the information. Do we have all of this? Then when we get into the analyze step, we're going to be doing things like performance benchmarking. We should see our conversion rate from this stage to this stage for this size company and this industry be X, and we're seeing below that. So it's more on that side of it and then digging deeper. So if you're in some of the auditing stages, you see dashboards that show win rates starting to decline. Okay? Audit stage says, okay, we have that captured. Analyze stage is, why is it declining? So start to slice that information by segment, by sales rep, by region, by some firmographic information. Let's try to really understand the reason why we're seeing that drop. So it's basically peeling a layer off of a lot of the stuff that you did on the audit side of this, trying to figure out the root cause of all those pieces, look for leakage across the entire customer journey from initial hand raise all the way through expansion. Like, are we going back and expanding our existing customers? So it's really getting into a lot of the layer deeper stuff than just do we have it? And then another step on this is also the modeling side of it. So if we were to improve that conversion rate — so if our top of funnel conversion rate was, you know, X and we could get it up to where it should be, what's that eventual impact on bookings? And wherever that may be, it could be, hey, we're struggling with deals once we get to stage three being able to convert those to close won. If we're able to do this better, we should see X percent improvement, and this is what that could result in from a bookings standpoint. Getting control of our sales motion so that we're not just sitting here waiting for people — that we're getting better at finish a meeting, book a meeting kind of stuff. Okay, our sales cycle should decrease. If we do that, we could see X amount more bookings this year. So this is definitely more on the what's the impact of the changes that we might make on the eventual key performance indicators that we were looking at.

Janis Zech: Got it. Got it. And that makes total sense to me. What if the outcome of the auditing stage or step is basically that the data to really properly do an analysis is actually not available? Would you then actually spend time in the analysis stage to kind of find ways to capture that data? What would that mean for you? Actually like, look, guys, in the alignment, architecture, and acceleration, our first step before we can do anything, we need to now actually come up with a motion or a project where we can actually start capturing the data.

Joe Ort: Yeah. And that's why one of the accelerate types of things is, can we actually see our conversion rates for the first time? That very well may be the end result of one of those things that you end up doing because you can't make improvements unless you're measuring it in the first place. So if we can just get the data models set up the right way, if we can get our processes set up the right way, get our systems set up so that we can track it, that might be a win on its own. And then because it's never done, you're doing a continuous improvement view of this. Now that we've captured it, we're gonna start to be able to monitor that and find ways to improve it. So that might just be the end goal. So if you can figure out some way to backfill it, it's kind of one of those things of how much juice is worth the squeeze. So if it's gonna take a lot of effort digging through a bunch of old CRM data or ERP stuff to try to figure out some numbers, is that really gonna change anything? Or do we wanna just go through, figure out the process, and start to move forward, take it from today on, start to look at some leading indicators that will show whether we're improving or not. But if we don't have it, that's fine. We don't have it. Do we want it? Yes. Okay. When we go to the align step, figure out where does this stack in terms of prioritization.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Makes total sense. I mean, maybe it's still hidden in some data silo and some point solution somewhere and you can still get it out of it. But yeah, you know, I mean, if you don't track conversion rates then — yeah, pretty bleak. So I'm assuming the third step, alignment — you already mentioned that. Is this a stage where you basically, hey, here's my — based off my auditing and analysis, here's the big plan I have. And now I'm pitching this internally to all the stakeholders and trying to convince them. Is that what alignment essentially means, or how are you thinking about it? How do you approach this step?

Joe Ort: Yeah. A lot of times on the fractional side, the first two steps are part of the initial assessment phase that I'll typically go through just on a project basis. When we get to the align step, it's okay, we're delivering the results. If we were to go forward, this is what we're thinking in terms of prioritization and projects that should get done. But if you're thinking about it from an internal standpoint — hey, I just started at a new company, I've done these two steps — my alignment piece is going to be aligning with your key stakeholders now that you've done all of this work. You understand the work that needs to be done. You understand the potential impacts of this. You're going to propose — you're doing stakeholder workshops basically. Hey, CRO. Hey, head of marketing. Hey, CFO. This is what we're going to focus on as a RevOps organization. This is the timeline of some of these initial pieces that we're looking at. Does everybody agree with this? So if there are gonna be battles in terms of, hey, marketing thinks this needs to be put above this, you have those conversations. You get alignment on that. You understand that, hey, if you're gonna do this, what's gonna come off the board? So it's just making sure that we have that prioritization side of it and also aligning on what are the goals and what are the KPIs for us to measure success. So again, go back to — if you don't have the benchmarks and you set a goal to do X, do we have that information? So making sure that you have realistic goals. So if our reps are producing a hundred K a quarter, what's realistic for the changes that we're gonna be putting in place? Can we get them to a hundred fifty, two hundred by getting them another deal per quarter? Is that realistic? Okay. That's gonna be our goal. Okay. What are the KPIs that we're gonna be looking at in advance to be able to make sure that we're making progress against the projects that we're gonna take on? So those are the things that you're looking for in this alignment step — that you've got all the key stakeholders in a room, that they've agreed on the roadmap that you have. And this is one of the biggest ones that I think is a struggle because right off the bat people can't say no. And that's, you know, it's a superpower to be able to say no. It's okay — if you want that done, that's great. But these are the things that we're not gonna be able to do, which we had agreed to early on. And this might be something that you have to do on a quarterly basis because the business changes, the market's changing constantly. So this is one of the things that's gonna happen recurring, but you have to make sure that everyone's aligned on what are we working on and what are we expecting to see as a result of it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. In your experience, in addition to not saying no, what are the common pitfalls in the alignment stage?

Joe Ort: Trying to do too much. So if you have three, four big projects going on, there's just too many things going. If you can't allocate enough time to get things done, then people start asking, why is this taking so long? So trying to do — from a resource allocation standpoint, how much — what's the expected time frame, whether you're just doing T-shirt sizing on projects or however you wanna do it, use whatever tools that you wanna do — are we trying to do too much in a short period of time? That's number one. The second big one that I've seen in my past is what's the ability for the field to absorb from a change standpoint? So if we're gonna be rolling out a new tool and we're gonna roll out a new sales process and we're gonna roll out a new x, y, and z, that's just too much change for the field to absorb in one go. I've had that happen a couple of times. We called it change fatigue, but we were also constantly changing things. Every two, three, four weeks, there was a new thing coming out. You just can't do that to sellers. They need to be consistent. They need to be able to just go and sell. So wherever you can, try to keep that in mind.

Janis Zech: Great. Yeah. I mean, we see it all the time. This is one of the most common conversations we have. It always depends, right? I think there are some things you can do that are actually helping sellers, things that are happening in the background, removing fields, improving maybe some of the validations, building some flows that automate stuff and actually can take pain away. But then there's also a lot of, you know, tooling that can just — oh, suddenly there's like five new clicks that every seller needs to make if they wanna close an opportunity or close lost it, and then it becomes a frustrating exercise that they need to go through over and over again. And just adds to their day and — I mean, might be like a small thing, like hey, just two, three clicks more, but it adds up. Right? Like, and you feel it. It trains you mentally. So yeah. I mean, I'm basically just talking from the seller perspective right now because I had like five sales meetings today and I can totally feel it. Not that our process is overly complex, but I think it just adds up.

Joe Ort: Even one of those small things like a product leader wants to know, if we lose to product, what's the specific reason why? That's just one little new field, and all those things just keep adding up after a while. But even the stuff that you're talking about before — not trying to battle some of that tech debt — it's one of those things when we look at the align step in terms of prioritization. A lot of those things always get pushed down to the bottom. It's those important but not urgent kind of things. There's no real KPI that's gonna be tied to getting rid of a bunch of old fields. So that's one that's always tough to get prioritized. It's one of those things that you just never really get to. And then you're building out this whole big project and you get stopped because, okay, we can't add any more new fields, but we need to be able to do that to finish this project. And now you're on a fire drill. So it's one of those things that's just so tough. Anywhere you can to make sellers' life easier, I'm a fan of because I was one. So I always have empathy for what you're dealing with.

Janis Zech: Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I think you also make friends who will then be, you know, forgiving and have more patience when you start introducing new stuff. So, you know, those are important stakeholders. They may not have decision making power here, but, you know, you still want to make them your friends for sure. Maybe to move to the fourth step — architect. So again, you know, I would think in the top of my head, like you do the workshopping sessions, which I think is actually a great way to put it. Like you workshop with the decision makers and the other stakeholders to align. Wouldn't that already include sort of like the architecture, like architecting the plan? Or what does architecture mean in this case? Is it like very technical or — yeah. What sort of level are we talking about here?

Joe Ort: Yeah. Architect — I use this specifically because I always talk about the system side being the plumbing behind how all this stuff works. So the architect stage is where you're looking at things like workflow redesign, looking at data standardization, data structures. How does all this stuff end up working together? So we talked before basically about, hey, we need to be able to track this measure. Now we're going to go out and build — how are we going to build the infrastructure to support that measurement side of it? So it's all the workflow redesign. It's tech stack optimization. It's all the automations that you can do. And then figuring out, even from a customer standpoint, where can you reduce friction throughout this whole process, whatever you're going to be working on. So all the stuff here is definitely more of the — I call it a puzzle. It's always like, okay, we can do this. How can we do this? Let's figure out the best approach to solve for whatever that problem is. Part of this too then is also developing the playbooks and the standard operating procedures so you're gonna be able to continually hand this stuff off back to the organization, be able to put this in your enablement platform, your Wiki, whatever — make sure that you've got the documentation on this so that you don't have people continually going to your RevOps team asking how do I do this. You have that documentation in there as well. That's something that always gets skipped in RevOps. So make sure that you've got it done while you're building it so you know why did we do this, what needs to happen on it. Having all that done through the architect step makes it easier for yourself because you're in it. You've got it. You don't have to go back six months later from now and try to remember, okay, how did we do this? How did we build this? What do they need to be doing when you're asked to create some documentation to support some of this from an enablement perspective? So the architect step is all the plumbing that goes in behind the scenes to affect the change that you've aligned on in the prior step.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I really like this because I think that often the executives, they actually don't care how you do it. They just wanna align on what you do and why you do it and what it drives in terms of measurable outcome. But then how you do it is actually up to you. So before you actually spend a lot of time on designing a solution, you actually come in with, okay, these are the different things that we could do to really drive impact to our KPIs. And then you architect the how. So yeah, I think it can actually take a lot of time away from doing that too early. So I really like that it's actually after the alignment stage.

Joe Ort: It goes back to work on the things that matter. And so if you're out building something that the executive team doesn't feel is really gonna drive the needle at all, that's a waste of time. And there's so much to do. That's why you gotta make sure that you work on what matters.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I feel like we could probably spend like another episode on just, you know, how you architect solutions, but we don't have the time, unfortunately, today. So let's talk about accelerate. Right? Like, I assume that's the phase where you then, you know, roll out those changes that you designed, but maybe I'm completely off. So yeah. What is it and what are ways to make this successful? Because I assume that is actually when the reality hits and we all know that sometimes, you know, the plan, the execution of the plan, and then the reality of actually getting the desired result is vastly different. So yeah, curious what it is and what the challenges are there.

Joe Ort: Yep, you're exactly right. This is the change management side of this. So we've got all our stuff. We're ready to roll it out. How do we do that? How do we basically do the knowledge transfer? So there's the training and enablement side for the teams internally to consume what this is going to be. If there's any certifications that would be involved, all that's going to be rolling out here. So you think, hey, we're going to do a new sales process, and you want to certify your sellers on that. Then we need to go and make sure there's certifications. So building all the training enablement, helping it from a change management perspective, and also looking at the performance tracking of this. So how well are we managing to the metrics that we had decided back in the align step? Some of those things will be early on adoption type of metrics, but they also might be, hey, we're doing this thing from realigning our territories or redesigning our ICP. Can we start to see what our lead volumes are and the conversion rates? We can see some of those earlier stage conversion metrics to see how well are we improving. Are we seeing the effect that we were looking for? You have to have all those dashboards built out in advance, but then it's also the continuous improvement side of this. So, okay, we're starting to see a slight improvement, but not what we were expecting. Let's go and start to understand why. So there might be a thing underneath that that we missed. Or, hey, we're just not seeing the volume yet because it's a seasonality component of it. So it's the hard part in terms of change management because change is hard. It's also the fun part to see, okay, let's look at the improvements and the effect of all that hard work that we just did and see what the change is to the business. So it's hard, but it's fun. And then, you know, ongoing, it's the how do we scale this out? Whether it's things that we learned from this from a postmortem standpoint — hey, these are the things that were helpful throughout this process, here are things that we would change and improve. So if there was something that, you know, product wanted to get this one other thing in there, like I was talking about before — next time when we're going to do something like this, we're gonna pull it and make sure product is included in here so they're at least aware of this and if there's any additional information that they're going to want to capture or report on, that they've got that insight. Or finance, however. So how do we scale this, and how do we make sure that the training and enablement side is completed? Those are the biggest ones because your team now is gonna go through this rollout, but you're gonna still be hiring people down the road. So you're gonna have to be able to make sure that they have some information to understand what the process is, how do they execute on it, and try to get that into a standardized place so that they have that information. So it's not one of those one and done types of things. If you've ever seen the training where it's like