Lessons from Leading a Unified RevOps Function - Julia Kim

Episode 33 • 20th May 2024 • RevOps FM • Justin Norris

I'm a really big believer in the idea of a unified RevOps function supporting all the go-to-market teams.

But I'll be honest, sometimes it's a little discouraging when I look at how RevOps is done in practice, because outside of a few examples, I usually see essentially a sales ops function with a new name.

So I wanted to find people who are actually leading a unified RevOps team in the real world and to understand how they're doing it and how it's working out for them.

Today's guest is leading a very mature RevOps function at Electric and has a ton of practical insight to share.

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About Today's Guest

Julia Kim is VP of Revenue Operations for Electric and an Adjunct Instructor at Columbia University. She has over 10 years experience as an operations executive and has launched award-winning consumer and SaaS products mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Forrester, and TechCrunch.

Before Electric, she led GTM operations for 4 profitable acquisitions. In addition to her RevOps experience, she has a technical background with a recent focus in artificial intelligence and predictive data modelling.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliajuleskim/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[01:50] - Definition of Revenue Operations
[03:40] - RevOps at different stages of maturity
[09:09] - Deep dive on Julia’s team structure
[14:00] - Collaboration within the RevOps team
[21:52] - Addressing concerns about unifying the ops functions
[28:07] - Identifying biggest opportunities for impact
[37:19] - Relationship with data team
[40:11] - Change management and enablement
[47:37] - RevOps and AI
[55:11] - What’s a current challenge?

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Justin Norris: 00:00:14

I'm a really big believer in the idea of RebOps as a function,

Justin Norris: 00:00:17

supporting all the go to market teams, marketing, sales, customer success.

Justin Norris: 00:00:22

Quite often partner ops or data ops to this belief is one of the

Justin Norris: 00:00:27

reasons for the name of this show.

Justin Norris: 00:00:28

And it's really why I try to take a broad view across the entire go

Justin Norris: 00:00:32

to market function in terms of the episodes and the guests that we have.

Justin Norris: 00:00:36

But I'll be honest, sometimes it's a little discouraging when I look

Justin Norris: 00:00:38

at how Rev Ops is done in practice.

Justin Norris: 00:00:41

And when I look at job descriptions for Rev Ops leaders, because outside

Justin Norris: 00:00:44

of a few examples, I usually see essentially a sales ops function with.

Justin Norris: 00:00:49

So I posted on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, thinking out loud and asking who's

Justin Norris: 00:00:54

actually leading a unified rev ops team in the real world, where are all

Justin Norris: 00:00:59

these people and how are they doing it and how's it working out for them?

Justin Norris: 00:01:03

And lo and behold, I got connected with a bunch of really smart

Justin Norris: 00:01:05

folks who you'll be hearing from in the weeks and months ahead.

Justin Norris: 00:01:08

And first on that list is Julia Kim, VP of revenue operations at electric,

Justin Norris: 00:01:14

where she leads a unified rev ops team.

Justin Norris: 00:01:17

Julie has been an operations executive for over 10 years now, and is also an

Justin Norris: 00:01:20

adjunct professor at Columbia university.

Justin Norris: 00:01:23

So she's got a ton of good stuff to share with us.

Justin Norris: 00:01:26

Very excited to chat with you today, Julia.

Julia Kim: 00:01:28

I'm absolutely thrilled to be here because I absolutely

Julia Kim: 00:01:32

know what you're talking about.

Julia Kim: 00:01:33

It is a challenge.

Julia Kim: 00:01:34

I think a lot of people think of RevOps as a sales ops function, but

Julia Kim: 00:01:39

you're missing out on so many of the benefits of revenue operations

Julia Kim: 00:01:44

if you think in sort of that silo.

Julia Kim: 00:01:46

And so I'm really glad we're going to be able to talk about

Julia Kim: 00:01:48

that today.

Justin Norris: 00:01:50

Amazing.

Justin Norris: 00:01:50

So maybe let's start there with revenue operations.

Justin Norris: 00:01:54

How do you think of it?

Justin Norris: 00:01:55

If you had to put it in a nutshell, what's the scope and

Justin Norris: 00:01:57

what is the mandate of RevOps?

Julia Kim: 00:02:00

So here at electric, it really is very cross functional

Julia Kim: 00:02:03

and very much focused on the go to market teams and motion.

Julia Kim: 00:02:07

So, if you think about what teams typically are included in a go to market

Julia Kim: 00:02:12

team, You know, kind of scope, it would be sales, marketing, customer success,

Julia Kim: 00:02:17

partnerships or business development a little bit of finance thrown in but lots

Julia Kim: 00:02:23

of different opportunities to collaborate when it comes to generating revenue,

Julia Kim: 00:02:27

whether it's through new business net new.

Julia Kim: 00:02:30

or retention through existing customers and then utilizing your relationship

Julia Kim: 00:02:35

with those customers to grow revenue.

Julia Kim: 00:02:37

And so when I think about revenue operations, I really think about it

Julia Kim: 00:02:41

in the context of all of those teams.

Julia Kim: 00:02:43

And then also thinking about it from the perspective of data.

Julia Kim: 00:02:47

What data do we have?

Julia Kim: 00:02:49

How are we collecting that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:50

How are we storing that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:51

How are we reporting on that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:53

The process.

Julia Kim: 00:02:55

in terms of what's different between a marketing process that may be

Julia Kim: 00:02:58

top of funnel versus a customer success workflow in, retention.

Julia Kim: 00:03:04

And then also thinking about it from a tech stack perspective, because one of

Julia Kim: 00:03:08

the biggest drivers and one of the things I leverage all the time is technology

Julia Kim: 00:03:13

because that is a multiplier for you.

Julia Kim: 00:03:16

A lot of times RevOps teams don't get a ton of support internally.

Julia Kim: 00:03:19

Fortunately for me here at Electric, there's a ton of support for RevOps,

Julia Kim: 00:03:24

but in many organizations you don't get a lot of the support that you need

Julia Kim: 00:03:28

in the form of resources or people.

Julia Kim: 00:03:30

And so what do you do?

Julia Kim: 00:03:31

You can absolutely use technology to help multiply all of those benefits that you

Julia Kim: 00:03:36

would get from a unified RevOps team.

Justin Norris: 00:03:39

/one of the things that I think about a lot.

Justin Norris: 00:03:42

Is where does the responsibility of the function itself and,

Justin Norris: 00:03:47

where does rev ops begin?

Justin Norris: 00:03:48

I mean, there's certain things like technology is a, is an area where

Justin Norris: 00:03:51

it's usually quite unambiguous.

Justin Norris: 00:03:53

And then I find that there are sometimes gray areas where it's a partnership.

Justin Norris: 00:03:57

There's some push and pull.

Justin Norris: 00:03:59

how do you think about that?

Justin Norris: 00:04:00

like, where do people say, like, we need to bring ops in for

Justin Norris: 00:04:02

this sort of problem in your

Julia Kim: 00:04:04

it really depends on where you are in the spectrum of

Julia Kim: 00:04:08

maturity for your organization.

Julia Kim: 00:04:11

And I think this is a piece that is sometimes missed because I think a lot of

Julia Kim: 00:04:15

times people just kind of have a blanket approach to how they balance that ratio of

Julia Kim: 00:04:20

operational tactical things and strategy.

Julia Kim: 00:04:24

And so When I first came to Electric, I was actually actively recruited

Julia Kim: 00:04:27

to join two fixed rev ops there.

Julia Kim: 00:04:30

There was a lot that was going on.

Julia Kim: 00:04:32

were more on the immature side when it came to the

Julia Kim: 00:04:35

operations and tactical pieces.

Julia Kim: 00:04:37

And so when you think about an organization that's in that state, you

Julia Kim: 00:04:41

really have to think about What is going to benefit the organization the most?

Julia Kim: 00:04:46

And it's usually the more operational processes, less on the strategy.

Julia Kim: 00:04:50

It's the doing and getting things done and kind of cleaning things

Julia Kim: 00:04:53

up and right sizing things.

Julia Kim: 00:04:55

And so if you're in an organization where you're sort of on that immature

Julia Kim: 00:05:00

side of that spectrum, you're spending a lot more time doing Less time

Julia Kim: 00:05:05

on the responsibility of coming up with the strategy and the direction.

Julia Kim: 00:05:09

However, as the organization matures, and this is where electric is today,

Julia Kim: 00:05:15

we're fairly mature on the operational And that's where RevOps has come in

Julia Kim: 00:05:19

more recently to be much more strategic.

Julia Kim: 00:05:22

So one of the things that I try to align at every stage of RevOps

Julia Kim: 00:05:28

organization is your org design.

Julia Kim: 00:05:31

So if you think about your org design, it's who are the people

Julia Kim: 00:05:34

that are on your RevOps team.

Julia Kim: 00:05:36

In Electric, it's a stand alone team.

Julia Kim: 00:05:38

some organizations, RevOps as a function is embedded within the

Julia Kim: 00:05:42

different go to market teams.

Julia Kim: 00:05:43

So there might be an ops person on marketing, an ops person on sales,

Julia Kim: 00:05:46

but at Electric, everything is centralized into a central team.

Julia Kim: 00:05:49

And that's actually worked out really well.

Julia Kim: 00:05:51

And when I first started, It was more focus on the operational aspects.

Julia Kim: 00:05:57

So we could get all the things done, build those processes, get the data in

Julia Kim: 00:06:01

the systems be able to report on how we're doing and what's happening in the

Julia Kim: 00:06:05

systems and the processes that we have.

Julia Kim: 00:06:08

But as we became more mature.

Julia Kim: 00:06:11

The strategy piece became a larger and larger component of what RevOps is.

Julia Kim: 00:06:16

And so as part of that, I actually added a new team within

Julia Kim: 00:06:20

RevOps called Revenue Programs.

Julia Kim: 00:06:23

And essentially what Revenue Programs does is it is very much forward thinking.

Julia Kim: 00:06:28

They are thinking about piloting testing out those operational processes

Julia Kim: 00:06:32

at a very small scale, sometimes manually, sometimes with light.

Julia Kim: 00:06:37

Technology or light automation just to make sure that one, we're seeing the

Julia Kim: 00:06:41

outcomes that we want, that we kind of work out all those kinks that, you

Julia Kim: 00:06:44

know, can exist in any process because, anyone can come up with the process,

Julia Kim: 00:06:48

but does it actually work right?

Julia Kim: 00:06:49

you don't know sometimes until you actually roll it out and the

Julia Kim: 00:06:52

mistake and, you know, For a lot of organizations, I think, is when you

Julia Kim: 00:06:57

roll something out with expectation that it's just going to work perfectly

Julia Kim: 00:07:00

on day one, and that's not the case.

Julia Kim: 00:07:02

I think if you are an organization like Electric, where you're a

Julia Kim: 00:07:05

startup, you need to move quickly.

Julia Kim: 00:07:08

Things are shifting constantly.

Julia Kim: 00:07:10

You really do need to take a more iterative and agile approach.

Julia Kim: 00:07:13

And so, Revenue Programs is actually a new what I call a pod.

Julia Kim: 00:07:17

So, we have a Sales Ops pod.

Julia Kim: 00:07:19

A marketing ops pod, a CX pod partnerships and business development

Julia Kim: 00:07:24

actually falls under the sales ops pod.

Julia Kim: 00:07:26

We also have a tech ops pod that supports all of the tech stack that we

Julia Kim: 00:07:29

have, but we now also have a revenue programs pod because that is where we

Julia Kim: 00:07:34

do a lot of our experimentation and say, Does it make sense to you know,

Julia Kim: 00:07:39

roll out this type of payment plan?

Julia Kim: 00:07:40

Does it make sense for us to have the CSMs own this part of, you know, the process?

Julia Kim: 00:07:45

And it's been really great because as we shift and continue to grow, I

Julia Kim: 00:07:50

think strategy is going to be a larger and larger part of what Rev Ops does.

Julia Kim: 00:07:55

But for many organizations where you're sort of in the earlier

Julia Kim: 00:07:58

stages, it's probably not feasible to be as strategic or.

Julia Kim: 00:08:02

Own a lot of that directionality you're talking about because

Julia Kim: 00:08:06

there's just too many things on

Julia Kim: 00:08:07

fire.

Justin Norris: 00:08:08

It's kind of a hierarchy of needs, almost, if we think about it that

Julia Kim: 00:08:11

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:08:12

Absolutely.

Justin Norris: 00:08:14

run an email campaign, then you're not necessarily going to

Justin Norris: 00:08:16

be thinking deeply about strategy until you have those fundamentals in place.

Julia Kim: 00:08:21

Yes.

Julia Kim: 00:08:21

people are like, well, what's the value of revenue operations if they

Julia Kim: 00:08:24

can't even get in your example, right?

Julia Kim: 00:08:26

An email campaign, you know, standardized and have it deliver in terms of, click

Julia Kim: 00:08:32

through rates or things like that.

Julia Kim: 00:08:34

And so again, it's really focusing on where can you provide the most value?

Julia Kim: 00:08:39

And once you hit those.

Julia Kim: 00:08:41

points, that's when you have to really think about, okay, well, how

Julia Kim: 00:08:43

can I shift more of to that strategy?

Julia Kim: 00:08:46

So we're not in a place where we're being reactive because I think a lot

Julia Kim: 00:08:49

of rev ops teams are very reactive.

Julia Kim: 00:08:52

And so how do you shift from being very reactive to being more proactive?

Julia Kim: 00:08:57

It's also part of that maturity, right?

Julia Kim: 00:08:59

Because when you're strategic, you can almost put those processes in

Julia Kim: 00:09:02

place to help you be more strategic.

Julia Kim: 00:09:04

But you can't get there without kind of cleaning house and making

Julia Kim: 00:09:07

sure your own house is in order.

Justin Norris: 00:09:09

I'm fascinated by the structure of your team.

Justin Norris: 00:09:11

And so I want to just pull those different pods apart a bit that you described.

Justin Norris: 00:09:15

Maybe we'll just start with the tech podcast, perhaps it's the easiest

Justin Norris: 00:09:19

for everyone to understand, but it sounds to me like kind of almost like

Justin Norris: 00:09:21

a business systems function embedded within your team runs the technology.

Justin Norris: 00:09:25

Is that an accurate way of thinking about it?

Julia Kim: 00:09:27

Yes, absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:09:29

they are responsible for primarily for our CRM system.

Julia Kim: 00:09:32

We use Salesforce at electric.

Julia Kim: 00:09:34

And a lot of what they do is.

Julia Kim: 00:09:38

day to day in terms of ticket management, because obviously there

Julia Kim: 00:09:41

are many issues that might come up or, you know, people want different

Julia Kim: 00:09:45

fields or different functions.

Julia Kim: 00:09:47

They're also responsible for things like tech debt.

Julia Kim: 00:09:50

You know, with any systems you often have things that you really need

Julia Kim: 00:09:53

to think about cleaning up in order to kind of maintain the system.

Julia Kim: 00:09:58

And then also strategy in terms of how can we expand the use of our

Julia Kim: 00:10:02

systems in order to make it better?

Julia Kim: 00:10:04

So one great example is we use Salesforce primarily for

Julia Kim: 00:10:10

sales cloud and service cloud.

Julia Kim: 00:10:12

We also have Salesforce CPQ and billing, but is what we have in

Julia Kim: 00:10:18

place good enough or supporting the partnerships and business

Julia Kim: 00:10:23

development we're trying to accomplish?

Julia Kim: 00:10:25

Right now we're okay, but I think we'll soon get to a point Because of the

Julia Kim: 00:10:30

partnerships that we have, because of the partner ecosystem, we have that we

Julia Kim: 00:10:35

will likely need to think about, you know, are there more ways that we can

Julia Kim: 00:10:40

leverage salesforce or some other tool that maybe integrates with salesforce

Julia Kim: 00:10:45

to better enable both internal folks.

Julia Kim: 00:10:48

And also external partners, right?

Julia Kim: 00:10:51

And so really thinking about that and starting to do discovery around

Julia Kim: 00:10:56

that and really having a milestone in place that says when partnerships

Julia Kim: 00:11:01

looks like this might be a good time for us to kind of pull the trigger and

Julia Kim: 00:11:04

start really being serious about this.

Julia Kim: 00:11:07

But that's where tech ops has been, you know, an amazing partner

Julia Kim: 00:11:10

for many of these go to market teams, because it's not just about.

Julia Kim: 00:11:15

Making sure that the systems are running, but it's also thinking strategically

Julia Kim: 00:11:18

about what are their needs in the future,

Justin Norris: 00:11:20

And are they running all the technology that

Justin Norris: 00:11:23

the go to market teams use?

Justin Norris: 00:11:24

Or are there like, let's say your marketing automation system, or

Justin Norris: 00:11:27

maybe even smaller, tools with a, with a narrower scope, are those run

Justin Norris: 00:11:31

by some of the other pods directly?

Julia Kim: 00:11:33

So it used to be that a lot of those tools were actually centralized

Julia Kim: 00:11:37

and tech ops, but again, part of this maturity model that I'm talking about.

Julia Kim: 00:11:42

You sometimes get to a point where you need to really dig deeper

Julia Kim: 00:11:46

into the tools that you have.

Julia Kim: 00:11:48

And at that point, you need someone who's almost a subject

Julia Kim: 00:11:51

matter expert in that tool.

Julia Kim: 00:11:52

So it's not just about administering the tool, like adding users or

Julia Kim: 00:11:56

removing users or turning on features.

Julia Kim: 00:11:58

It's almost thinking about what are we not using or what are we

Julia Kim: 00:12:03

using that we could use better?

Julia Kim: 00:12:05

And so now the shift has actually been.

Julia Kim: 00:12:08

Exactly what you're saying.

Julia Kim: 00:12:10

We are now moving a lot of these core systems, for example, like our marketing

Julia Kim: 00:12:15

automation platform, which is Marketo, or our customer engagement platform,

Julia Kim: 00:12:19

which is Gainsight, we're moving them now into the Ops Manager's domain, because

Julia Kim: 00:12:24

they're likely to have much better insight and how we can leverage those tools.

Julia Kim: 00:12:29

They can build those relationships with our vendors.

Julia Kim: 00:12:32

And so it's really about figuring out how can we dig even deeper,

Julia Kim: 00:12:39

and I think this also aligns with what a lot of companies are doing.

Julia Kim: 00:12:42

the economy is not that great.

Julia Kim: 00:12:44

And so a lot of RevOps teams are being asked to, you know, be strategic, do

Julia Kim: 00:12:48

some tech consolidation seeing how they can reduce expenses, right, And

Julia Kim: 00:12:53

so part of that for us at electric has been how can I have my team, Almost

Julia Kim: 00:12:59

say, is this really a tool or is there another tool that we're using that

Julia Kim: 00:13:04

has the same exact features, but we can incorporate a lower costs or maybe

Julia Kim: 00:13:08

it's already included in our contract.

Julia Kim: 00:13:10

A great example is a chat feature.

Julia Kim: 00:13:12

We had actually three different tools that had chat, and one of the nice things

Julia Kim: 00:13:17

about Marketo was that they talked about this AI driven dynamic chat feature that

Julia Kim: 00:13:23

they rolled out last year, and we were clearly not leveraging because we were

Julia Kim: 00:13:27

using two other chat, you know, platforms.

Julia Kim: 00:13:30

And so that's a great opportunity for us to say, okay, well, let's

Julia Kim: 00:13:34

not pay for these other two tools.

Julia Kim: 00:13:36

Let's consolidate in a tool we have, Marketo.

Julia Kim: 00:13:39

Leverage the AI features that they're saying are fantastic and really make

Julia Kim: 00:13:44

that experience for our prospects even better than they were before.

Julia Kim: 00:13:48

And so I think that's a strategy that anyone can take, especially at a

Julia Kim: 00:13:53

time like this, when a lot of finance teams are saying, Hey, you know,

Julia Kim: 00:13:56

we're spending a lot on these tools.

Julia Kim: 00:13:58

What can we do?

Justin Norris: 00:13:59

And what you just described in a way, to me, it highlights

Justin Norris: 00:14:03

some of the benefits ostensibly that we should gain from RevOps and

Justin Norris: 00:14:07

that we, we don't have these silos where like, you know, sales ops has

Justin Norris: 00:14:10

a tool and marketing ops has a tool.

Justin Norris: 00:14:12

Um, The team's actually can look at things holistically together.

Justin Norris: 00:14:16

And I'm curious, how do those different, like, you've got your marketing ops

Justin Norris: 00:14:19

pod, your sales ops pod, and your CFs pod, aside from the fact that they all

Justin Norris: 00:14:22

roll up to you, how do they collaborate together on like a day to day basis

Justin Norris: 00:14:25

to make these sorts of decisions?

Julia Kim: 00:14:28

Yeah, there's a few different ways that I've built

Julia Kim: 00:14:31

collaboration into our team.

Julia Kim: 00:14:34

It really starts with just us being humans and getting to know each

Julia Kim: 00:14:38

other and enjoying, the day to day and working with each other.

Julia Kim: 00:14:42

So, I do a lot with my team to really build up our personal relationship,

Julia Kim: 00:14:46

because if you don't enjoy working with them, and we're at work for

Julia Kim: 00:14:49

many hours a day, that's a problem.

Julia Kim: 00:14:51

And so we've built 1, a really strong team of high performers.

Julia Kim: 00:14:55

And then 2, we have a lot of activities where we're.

Julia Kim: 00:14:59

maybe not talking about RevOps, but we're getting to know each

Julia Kim: 00:15:02

other, we're solving problems together, we're having fun together.

Julia Kim: 00:15:05

We have a weekly meeting on Friday afternoons called Weekly Wins.

Julia Kim: 00:15:09

It started out with a whole was a win that I had from a professional perspective

Julia Kim: 00:15:14

to what did I have as a personal win?

Julia Kim: 00:15:17

But What we found was, we knew so much about what was happening week over

Julia Kim: 00:15:20

week that wasn't really that engaging.

Julia Kim: 00:15:23

And so we actually now have it essentially a half hour game time together.

Julia Kim: 00:15:27

And so we break up into teams, we have different formations, we are

Julia Kim: 00:15:30

competitive, we solve problems.

Julia Kim: 00:15:32

And so all of those things are ways that aren't focused on our day to

Julia Kim: 00:15:36

day, but we're still getting to know each other, build culture, and then

Julia Kim: 00:15:40

learn to solve problems together.

Julia Kim: 00:15:42

On the flip side, when it comes to projects and visibility, we have a

Julia Kim: 00:15:47

weekly team stand on Tuesday mornings where we go through high priority

Julia Kim: 00:15:50

projects, people kind of flag different things that they're talking about.

Julia Kim: 00:15:54

We also have systems in place to help us because as much as we all

Julia Kim: 00:15:58

want to be creatures of habits.

Julia Kim: 00:16:00

There's a lot of things that are often being thrown at RevOps teams, so having

Julia Kim: 00:16:04

systems in place to help collaborate, so we're very active on Slack.

Julia Kim: 00:16:08

We have dedicated, internal Slack channels for different things.

Julia Kim: 00:16:13

we use the Atlassian suite.

Julia Kim: 00:16:14

So we use Confluence for documentation.

Julia Kim: 00:16:17

That is so important to us.

Julia Kim: 00:16:19

I was looking at just the sheer number of documents that we

Julia Kim: 00:16:21

created in the last six months.

Julia Kim: 00:16:23

And it's, over 150 pages that we created, which is incredible the more

Julia Kim: 00:16:27

information that you're sharing, the better, not just for us internally,

Julia Kim: 00:16:31

but for the entire organization.

Julia Kim: 00:16:33

And then we use JIRA as another tool.

Julia Kim: 00:16:35

Again, to help with collaboration.

Julia Kim: 00:16:37

So the way that every day starts is that we actually have a 9 a.

Julia Kim: 00:16:40

JIRA stand, where we go through all the tickets that came

Julia Kim: 00:16:43

through together as a team.

Julia Kim: 00:16:44

It's really quick.

Julia Kim: 00:16:46

On average, it's about 7, 10 minutes, but we allocate about

Julia Kim: 00:16:49

15 minutes every morning.

Julia Kim: 00:16:51

So we're, going through things that are high priority, any

Julia Kim: 00:16:53

incidents that come through.

Julia Kim: 00:16:55

And then we're leaving most of the day to work on different projects.

Julia Kim: 00:16:59

And between the weekly team stand touch point, and then just the constant

Julia Kim: 00:17:06

communication that happens on Slack and usage of JIRA, we are in pretty

Julia Kim: 00:17:13

good communication and fairly aware of what's happening from marketing

Julia Kim: 00:17:19

all the way to, customer success.

Julia Kim: 00:17:22

The one thing that.

Julia Kim: 00:17:24

I have been consciously doing from an internal perspective to even broaden

Julia Kim: 00:17:29

our understanding because 1 of the things that electric has been doing

Julia Kim: 00:17:32

in the last 6 months is shifting from a sales led organization to a

Julia Kim: 00:17:36

much more product led organization.

Julia Kim: 00:17:38

So the emphasis is much more on the product is really educating everyone

Julia Kim: 00:17:43

on what that means and bringing in engineering, bringing in product into

Julia Kim: 00:17:49

those conversations and really trying to, break down those silos that has been one

Julia Kim: 00:17:55

of the things that we've been actively working with all of the teams around.

Julia Kim: 00:18:00

And I think we've been able to make this transition into a

Julia Kim: 00:18:04

more product led organization.

Julia Kim: 00:18:05

We have a ways to go because our product, we revamped our product

Julia Kim: 00:18:09

in November and relaunched it.

Julia Kim: 00:18:11

And that's newer.

Julia Kim: 00:18:12

And so there's still a lot of growth there, but there's a ton of collaboration,

Julia Kim: 00:18:16

a ton of communication, not just within RevOps, but outside of RevOps that is

Julia Kim: 00:18:22

also feeding back within the team itself.

Julia Kim: 00:18:24

So it's really about building all of that communication and collaboration

Julia Kim: 00:18:30

at many different levels so that there isn't one thing that's solving the

Julia Kim: 00:18:34

problem, but it's all these little things that are contributing to a

Julia Kim: 00:18:37

much more smooth and standardized and I would say even consistent process.

Justin Norris: 00:18:44

My friend Paul Wilson has a phrase that's really stuck with

Justin Norris: 00:18:46

me about teams that run the business and then other teams that change the

Justin Norris: 00:18:49

business and how you kind of need both.

Justin Norris: 00:18:51

Is that how you think about it as well?

Justin Norris: 00:18:53

Like the programs team is really there to come in and like disrupt

Justin Norris: 00:18:56

business as usual and figure out better ways of doing things?

Julia Kim: 00:18:58

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:18:59

A great example is that with our new product, you can

Julia Kim: 00:19:04

actually buy Result software.

Julia Kim: 00:19:06

You can buy services from us.

Julia Kim: 00:19:08

You can buy hardware like a new computer and bundle it with a

Julia Kim: 00:19:12

monitor and all kinds of things.

Julia Kim: 00:19:14

And so the question was, where does it live in terms of, Hey, we want to

Julia Kim: 00:19:21

experiment with a flexible payment plan.

Julia Kim: 00:19:24

Where does that live?

Julia Kim: 00:19:24

Does that live in product?

Julia Kim: 00:19:25

Does that live in engineering?

Julia Kim: 00:19:27

Does that live in finance?

Julia Kim: 00:19:28

Does that live?

Julia Kim: 00:19:28

with the customer success team, like where does that live?

Julia Kim: 00:19:32

And I think a lot of companies struggle with that question.

Julia Kim: 00:19:35

And so you end up wasting a lot of time trying to find the right home

Julia Kim: 00:19:39

or someone says, Hey, you know what?

Julia Kim: 00:19:41

I think I'm going to lead this project, but they don't have the right support.

Julia Kim: 00:19:44

They don't have the right resources.

Julia Kim: 00:19:46

They don't have the right access.

Julia Kim: 00:19:47

And so the project just stalls for a period of time.

Julia Kim: 00:19:51

And then people are like, what happened to that project?

Julia Kim: 00:19:53

thought we were going to do, flexible payments.

Julia Kim: 00:19:56

And so that revenue programs pod essentially answers that question, it's

Julia Kim: 00:20:01

not that they have full ownership of all the aspects of flexible payments

Julia Kim: 00:20:06

in this example I'm sharing with you.

Julia Kim: 00:20:08

But they have the ability to bring in the right people at the right time.

Julia Kim: 00:20:14

They have the ability to project manage that project and essentially put some

Julia Kim: 00:20:18

stakes in the ground saying, hey, let's do discovery and see what comes out of this.

Julia Kim: 00:20:22

Let's see, what we can, Push out as an initial product offering, does

Julia Kim: 00:20:27

it mean from a legal perspective?

Julia Kim: 00:20:29

Let me go back to sales ops and see how that looks within that process, or

Julia Kim: 00:20:34

let me go to the procurement team and let me understand what that looks like.

Julia Kim: 00:20:37

So it provides those really important initiatives a home, but maybe not

Julia Kim: 00:20:43

ownership, because at the end of the day, there's probably a different

Julia Kim: 00:20:47

team that needs to own that.

Julia Kim: 00:20:48

Maybe it's finance.

Julia Kim: 00:20:49

Maybe it's.

Julia Kim: 00:20:50

product, I'm not sure, but it allows us to still move forward and maybe get to

Julia Kim: 00:20:56

the point where end owner is obvious.

Julia Kim: 00:20:58

And not only that, but we have some real data about what happened, we put

Julia Kim: 00:21:02

a social post up and people actually click the button and raise their

Julia Kim: 00:21:06

hand and saying, I'm interested.

Julia Kim: 00:21:07

But I think it provides us an ability to move forward without all the pieces in

Julia Kim: 00:21:12

place, because I think that's the biggest killer for a lot of startups, right?

Julia Kim: 00:21:16

Do you have this assumption you need every single thing in place

Julia Kim: 00:21:19

in order for us to be successful?

Julia Kim: 00:21:20

And that's not true.

Julia Kim: 00:21:22

You can.

Julia Kim: 00:21:23

Essentially build the train as you're running down the track and so that's

Julia Kim: 00:21:28

really the value that I see in a pod or structure like revenue programs.

Justin Norris: 00:21:35

I think it's a pillar that a lot of teams are missing or

Justin Norris: 00:21:37

haven't identified or other people do it ad hoc and it creates some tension

Justin Norris: 00:21:41

because I've got to focus on, you know, all these businesses, usual things and

Justin Norris: 00:21:46

keeping the trains running on time.

Justin Norris: 00:21:47

And then when do I have time to focus on those other things?

Justin Norris: 00:21:49

So I find it really interesting that you split that out.

Justin Norris: 00:21:52

There are a lot of folks out there who have concerns about bringing the

Justin Norris: 00:21:57

teams together, whether it's that, you know, a unified function won't be as

Justin Norris: 00:22:01

responsive to the needs of the functions they serve as they would be if they

Justin Norris: 00:22:06

were embedded within it, or that, you know, there can be power disparities.

Justin Norris: 00:22:10

Like I know a lot of marketing ops functions, frankly, are afraid of just

Justin Norris: 00:22:13

being like swallowed up by a bigger sales ops fish and being run by a sales ops

Justin Norris: 00:22:17

leader that doesn't understand marketing.

Justin Norris: 00:22:19

I spoke to a CS ops leader who said that there are similar concerns there.

Justin Norris: 00:22:22

So have you seen those challenges?

Justin Norris: 00:22:24

I guess would be the first question.

Justin Norris: 00:22:26

And how did you address them if so?

Julia Kim: 00:22:28

Yes they exist, but I work really hard to

Julia Kim: 00:22:32

try to reduce those impacts.

Julia Kim: 00:22:35

And it's really at again, many different levels.

Julia Kim: 00:22:40

Uh, Number 1.

Julia Kim: 00:22:43

is that the, again, the org structure makes a lot of difference.

Julia Kim: 00:22:48

And so having a similar structure between the different operational

Julia Kim: 00:22:53

pods is very important.

Julia Kim: 00:22:55

So for example the sales ops pod has a ops manager and an analyst,

Julia Kim: 00:23:02

and there's an enablement person.

Julia Kim: 00:23:03

CX ops has ops manager, analyst enablement.

Julia Kim: 00:23:07

You know, they essentially have a dedicated tech ops person that they

Julia Kim: 00:23:11

can go to someone who's stronger on the sales cloud side, someone who's

Julia Kim: 00:23:14

stronger on the service cloud side.

Julia Kim: 00:23:16

so there's a sort of a mirroring of the org structure that provides

Julia Kim: 00:23:21

just a organizational harmony or equality in those teams.

Julia Kim: 00:23:28

But of course, you have teams like marketing, which

Julia Kim: 00:23:31

tends to be smaller, right?

Julia Kim: 00:23:32

Marketing tends to be smaller than a sales team or a CX team or CS team.

Julia Kim: 00:23:38

And so that's the case here at electric.

Julia Kim: 00:23:41

The marketing pod is quite small.

Julia Kim: 00:23:43

It's one individual right now we have a marketing ops manager, but they can

Julia Kim: 00:23:48

leverage time and work and resources from.

Julia Kim: 00:23:53

Either the sales ops or CX ops pods.

Julia Kim: 00:23:58

So there's ability to leverage resources from different pods.

Julia Kim: 00:24:04

And not only that, but again, thinking about to make that fear go away.

Julia Kim: 00:24:12

there isn't a clear answer for this, but I think the biggest thing is just try it

Julia Kim: 00:24:17

and see if it works because at electric, they actually had the ops teams embedded

Julia Kim: 00:24:23

within the different go to market teams.

Julia Kim: 00:24:25

It didn't work at all.

Julia Kim: 00:24:26

It failed miserably.

Julia Kim: 00:24:28

And so they were very open to a different type of structure.

Julia Kim: 00:24:33

There is really nothing to lose.

Julia Kim: 00:24:35

And the benefit there was that we actually were able to get a ton more productivity.

Julia Kim: 00:24:40

And then you got things like collaboration between Marketing Ops and Sales Ops.

Julia Kim: 00:24:46

I think traditionally, Marketing and Sales and Marketing Ops and

Julia Kim: 00:24:49

Sales Ops, as you were saying, can be a little bit of a conflict.

Julia Kim: 00:24:53

But because we're under one single umbrella, because we're doing the work

Julia Kim: 00:24:57

to, work together, be humans, know that we are all trying to get to that

Julia Kim: 00:25:04

end goal of generating revenue and retaining revenue for our company.

Julia Kim: 00:25:09

We work really well together.

Julia Kim: 00:25:10

And I think it does take the right type of organizational structure and leader,

Julia Kim: 00:25:16

just because you bring everyone together, doesn't mean that it's going to work.

Julia Kim: 00:25:21

And again, I've been very thoughtful in hiring for the team because We

Julia Kim: 00:25:26

want to make sure that everyone is able to have those hard conversations.

Julia Kim: 00:25:30

Sometimes there are problems and it's not that you're the problem or they're the

Julia Kim: 00:25:35

problem or someone caused that problem.

Julia Kim: 00:25:38

There is a problem.

Julia Kim: 00:25:40

And so some wild investigation to figure out what happened.

Julia Kim: 00:25:45

Really, our time is better spent on solving that problem and figuring out

Julia Kim: 00:25:50

how do we move on from here and so having those individuals on the team that have

Julia Kim: 00:25:55

that type of mentality is so important I specifically have been trying to make sure

Julia Kim: 00:26:02

that our culture supports an environment where things are going to not work.

Julia Kim: 00:26:06

Things are going to fail.

Julia Kim: 00:26:07

People may get upset, but the most important thing is how do we identify

Julia Kim: 00:26:13

a solution and how do we move forward?

Julia Kim: 00:26:15

Because if we can, then we're all winning, right?

Julia Kim: 00:26:19

. Justin Norris: I think that is 100 percent the most healthy attitude.

Julia Kim: 00:26:22

And last quick org structure question.

Julia Kim: 00:26:24

I'm just curious, who do you report into?

Julia Kim: 00:26:26

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:26:26

I currently report into our CRO.

Julia Kim: 00:26:29

when I first started, we had a senior VP of sales and I reported

Julia Kim: 00:26:32

into that senior VP of sales.

Julia Kim: 00:26:34

And at some point I had reported into finance, but I think this particular

Julia Kim: 00:26:40

structure, and I was actually talking about this with someone over the weekend.

Julia Kim: 00:26:43

Is most optimal because we've actually renamed our go to market teams from

Julia Kim: 00:26:48

go to market teams to revenue teams.

Julia Kim: 00:26:51

Partnerships actually wasn't originally underneath revenue it

Julia Kim: 00:26:55

was actually underneath product.

Julia Kim: 00:26:57

And so that shift and thinking about go to market and thinking about it

Julia Kim: 00:27:03

from a revenue perspective, made us.

Julia Kim: 00:27:07

Very quickly realized that, you know, what partnerships actually belongs

Julia Kim: 00:27:11

under revenue, it is generating revenue.

Julia Kim: 00:27:13

And so, more recently partnerships in the last few months has moved

Julia Kim: 00:27:18

underneath the revenue teams and.

Julia Kim: 00:27:21

Everything kind of revolves around this idea of, are we doing the best

Julia Kim: 00:27:27

we can from a revenue perspective?

Julia Kim: 00:27:30

And not to lose sight of the customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:35

How do you generate revenue?

Julia Kim: 00:27:38

It's through your customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:39

So at the end of the day, if you actually drill down and drill down,

Julia Kim: 00:27:43

it always ends up the customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:45

And so, having RevOps report into our CRO has been fantastic because we have

Julia Kim: 00:27:49

been able to one really bring together all the revenue teams, have revenue as

Julia Kim: 00:27:56

a clear line of sight, build our OKRs around that, but then also again, how do

Julia Kim: 00:28:01

we generate revenue through our customers?

Julia Kim: 00:28:04

And so not lose sight of our customers.

Justin Norris: 00:28:07

It's a good launching off point for the next thing I wanted to ask

Justin Norris: 00:28:10

about, which is, how do you identify where you're going to have the most impact?

Justin Norris: 00:28:16

And it seems like a simple question in a lot of ways, but a hundred percent,

Justin Norris: 00:28:20

let's say revenue operations teams have way more on their plate than they

Justin Norris: 00:28:23

could handle besieged by requests.

Justin Norris: 00:28:26

And so it's a really important capability to have that discernment, to have

Justin Norris: 00:28:31

good judgment about what you take on.

Justin Norris: 00:28:33

So how do you think about that problem about like where your

Justin Norris: 00:28:36

team can make the biggest impact?

Julia Kim: 00:28:39

it is a little easier because we use OKRs.

Julia Kim: 00:28:43

And so what that means is that right now for 2024, our top three are one

Julia Kim: 00:28:50

called fund the future second called efficient funnel and third is MVP

Julia Kim: 00:28:56

is basically most valuable partner.

Julia Kim: 00:28:59

So short of those things and.

Julia Kim: 00:29:02

allocating some time for important things like dealing with tech debt

Julia Kim: 00:29:07

or, just system critical things that essentially very much aligns our priority.

Julia Kim: 00:29:15

Because there is a distribution in the work that we do for each of these OKRs.

Julia Kim: 00:29:22

So the majority of it being on the efficient funnel side,

Julia Kim: 00:29:25

obviously, but not neglecting The MVP OKR or fund the future OKR.

Julia Kim: 00:29:34

So we are constantly looking at it from that lens.

Julia Kim: 00:29:39

And not only that, but also having the right tools in place to be able to capture

Julia Kim: 00:29:45

information that you can then leverage to make that case back to the business.

Julia Kim: 00:29:50

And the reason why I say this is because when I first came to electric there

Julia Kim: 00:29:54

wasn't really a ticket tracking system.

Julia Kim: 00:29:56

There was a little bit of a sauna here and there, some Excel, but

Julia Kim: 00:30:00

it really was a free for all.

Julia Kim: 00:30:02

I think people were just like, Hey, this thing needs to be done.

Julia Kim: 00:30:05

And people are like, okay, yes, I'll do it.

Julia Kim: 00:30:08

And that's a terrible way to function.

Julia Kim: 00:30:10

And so you're absolutely right.

Julia Kim: 00:30:12

People get frustrated.

Julia Kim: 00:30:13

Like, why did you do this?

Julia Kim: 00:30:14

And why didn't you do this?

Julia Kim: 00:30:15

Or I need this.

Julia Kim: 00:30:16

And what do you mean?

Julia Kim: 00:30:17

It's going to take you three weeks.

Julia Kim: 00:30:18

The first priority was we it doesn't seem like you're doing anything right?

Julia Kim: 00:30:22

Number one priority was one, put some sort of system in place where we can actually

Julia Kim: 00:30:27

track what requests we're getting, have them documented and sort of use that

Julia Kim: 00:30:33

as a framework for us to evolve from.

Julia Kim: 00:30:35

And so that's how we ended up with JIRA.

Julia Kim: 00:30:37

It wasn't perfect, but it was like, let's start with a sprint.

Julia Kim: 00:30:46

I think sprint 45 right now, which is fantastic.

Julia Kim: 00:30:50

And we have been able to measure as part of this process, how many tickets

Julia Kim: 00:30:57

get submitted every single day.

Julia Kim: 00:30:59

How many of them are high priority?

Julia Kim: 00:31:01

many of them are low priority or middle, and see how long does

Julia Kim: 00:31:05

it take for us to close tickets, which ones, generate other tickets

Julia Kim: 00:31:09

because there's a little too broad.

Julia Kim: 00:31:11

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:31:11

But it's provided us with so much data and it's been able to provide

Julia Kim: 00:31:15

us with information that says we need more resourcing on this side because

Julia Kim: 00:31:20

there's a lot of things happening on this side or oh my gosh it looks like

Julia Kim: 00:31:24

we have a serious enablement issue because all of the tickets that have

Julia Kim: 00:31:27

been coming in for the last two weeks have all been questions that you know

Julia Kim: 00:31:31

could be solved by enablement rather than a you know technical change or

Julia Kim: 00:31:36

you know a process change it's just people just weren't sure what they were

Julia Kim: 00:31:39

doing and so That, that system was such a valuable piece and having the OKRs

Julia Kim: 00:31:47

align with the things that we're doing.

Julia Kim: 00:31:50

We've since evolved because it has been, instrumental to

Julia Kim: 00:31:53

being able to manage priorities.

Julia Kim: 00:31:55

But we've since evolved since day one when I said, Hey we're

Julia Kim: 00:31:58

going to start using JIRA.

Julia Kim: 00:32:00

and there was honestly some pushback.

Julia Kim: 00:32:01

There was.

Julia Kim: 00:32:02

Concern about how do we maintain something like this?

Julia Kim: 00:32:05

And it's like, okay, well, let's just try it.

Julia Kim: 00:32:08

But we're now at the point where we actually have bi weekly

Julia Kim: 00:32:11

sprint planning meetings where we can actually fill out things.

Julia Kim: 00:32:15

We have regular meetings with different stakeholders saying, Hey,

Julia Kim: 00:32:19

what do you want in our next sprint?

Julia Kim: 00:32:21

Which gives people so much joy and excitement.

Julia Kim: 00:32:24

Cause they're like Oh, That thing I asked for, can you do it in Sprint 46?

Julia Kim: 00:32:28

You know, yes, absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:32:30

Or, you know, actually that's going to have to wait until

Julia Kim: 00:32:32

47 because that's dependent on something that's being done in 46.

Julia Kim: 00:32:36

So having that framework has been so important in being able

Julia Kim: 00:32:39

to balance those priorities.

Julia Kim: 00:32:41

And I think one of the challenges RevOps org and dealing with the

Julia Kim: 00:32:47

sort of prioritization issues and how, to manage that process.

Julia Kim: 00:32:53

Having a tool, even though there's overhead in having that tool is so

Julia Kim: 00:32:57

valuable because it gives you actual data and actual, leverage to say,

Julia Kim: 00:33:03

it's not reasonable for you to expect an email to go out after you just

Julia Kim: 00:33:07

sent it to me 30 minutes ago, right?

Julia Kim: 00:33:10

poor marketing ops manager.

Julia Kim: 00:33:11

Right.

Justin Norris: 00:33:12

you've mentioned tickets and working with your stakeholders, and

Justin Norris: 00:33:17

then we've also talked about strategy you know, a team that is sort of

Justin Norris: 00:33:20

proactively identifying opportunities to evolve strategy and make impact.

Justin Norris: 00:33:26

This is something that I think about a lot.

Justin Norris: 00:33:28

How do you think about.

Justin Norris: 00:33:30

balance or how to wait, taking requests and working with teams

Justin Norris: 00:33:35

to fulfill those requests.

Justin Norris: 00:33:37

In other words, giving GTM teams what they asked for versus proactively

Justin Norris: 00:33:41

looking yourself at data or process and saying, I actually think

Justin Norris: 00:33:45

we need to go in this direction there's these two different motions.

Justin Norris: 00:33:48

They're both important.

Justin Norris: 00:33:49

How do you split your effort between them?

Julia Kim: 00:33:52

I would say it's probably 60% managing requests at this point

Julia Kim: 00:33:56

and 40 percent driving a lot of that.

Julia Kim: 00:34:00

Like, Hey, did you notice this?

Julia Kim: 00:34:03

What do you think about?

Julia Kim: 00:34:05

and I think it's going to shift more in the coming year.

Julia Kim: 00:34:09

it's because of where we are but.

Julia Kim: 00:34:12

want to be clear that for that first 60%, we aren't just taking

Julia Kim: 00:34:17

any ticket and saying, okay, sprint 44, sprint 45, you know, done check.

Julia Kim: 00:34:22

No, we do really think about.

Julia Kim: 00:34:26

One, how does it impact data that we have existing in the system?

Julia Kim: 00:34:31

How does it impact other systems?

Julia Kim: 00:34:33

Because our go to market or RevOps tech stack is highly integrated.

Julia Kim: 00:34:38

We have a ton of integrations, not just to.

Julia Kim: 00:34:42

Existing vendors, but to our product and our legacy product and many different

Julia Kim: 00:34:47

services that we have to provide from a service delivery perspective.

Julia Kim: 00:34:51

And so really important for us to ask those questions and be sort

Julia Kim: 00:34:55

of the gatekeepers around that, but then also really think about.

Julia Kim: 00:34:59

what is the true problem, right?

Julia Kim: 00:35:01

Because we get a lot of requests where they're like,

Julia Kim: 00:35:04

I'm trying to build a report.

Julia Kim: 00:35:06

But I can't get Salesforce to give me this data.

Julia Kim: 00:35:08

Can you add this field?

Julia Kim: 00:35:09

I just need you to add this field so I could build my report so

Julia Kim: 00:35:13

I could send it to X, Y, and Z.

Julia Kim: 00:35:14

And one of the things that I have been really pushing this year with support

Julia Kim: 00:35:21

from our data we have a dedicated engineering data team is really thinking

Julia Kim: 00:35:27

about our CRM as a transactional system.

Julia Kim: 00:35:32

And our snowflake data warehouse as a reporting system.

Julia Kim: 00:35:36

And I think people tend to conflate the two because a lot of times, I mean,

Julia Kim: 00:35:40

Salesforce does have some really great reports and dashboards, but we have

Julia Kim: 00:35:44

become more mature as an organization where we want to integrate product data.

Julia Kim: 00:35:48

We want to integrate other sources of data that don't originate Salesforce.

Julia Kim: 00:35:53

And yes, we can absolutely put that stuff in Salesforce, but.

Julia Kim: 00:35:57

What is the purpose behind that?

Julia Kim: 00:35:59

how is that going to serve us better?

Julia Kim: 00:36:01

And is that really the true purpose of Salesforce?

Julia Kim: 00:36:05

As much as we call it our system of truth, and that is absolutely true, it

Julia Kim: 00:36:10

can still be our system of truth if it's pushing data into our data warehouse

Julia Kim: 00:36:15

and we're reporting there, right?

Julia Kim: 00:36:16

And so, Tools like Looker, Tableau, any BI tool that you have, or

Julia Kim: 00:36:22

even any, data management tools.

Julia Kim: 00:36:24

They're going to do a much better job of slicing and dicing and visualizing

Julia Kim: 00:36:27

the data that you want than Salesforce.

Julia Kim: 00:36:29

As much as Salesforce tries, I mean, they really do try.

Julia Kim: 00:36:32

But, the thing that I think we've come to that point in our

Julia Kim: 00:36:37

maturity level is Salesforce needs to be a transactional database.

Julia Kim: 00:36:42

Anything that has to do with transactions lives there.

Julia Kim: 00:36:44

Anything that has to do with data lives in our data warehouse.

Julia Kim: 00:36:48

And so we can do this ticket, but that's not actually what we need to do here.

Julia Kim: 00:36:53

What really needs to happen is, are you able to generate that report in Loker

Julia Kim: 00:36:58

or Tableau or whatever the system is?

Julia Kim: 00:37:00

And if you're not, Can I help you communicate with our data team?

Julia Kim: 00:37:05

So you can get that information that you need.

Julia Kim: 00:37:07

So it's really kind of thinking about it from that perspective, because as much

Julia Kim: 00:37:11

as it is like it is ticket resolution, it's also thinking about things as in

Julia Kim: 00:37:15

terms of like, what is the true problem?

Julia Kim: 00:37:17

What are we trying to solve?

Justin Norris: 00:37:18

you've touched on data.

Justin Norris: 00:37:20

What's the relationship between your data team and your team?

Justin Norris: 00:37:23

Because obviously there's a lot of codependency there.

Julia Kim: 00:37:27

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:37:27

So Salesforce related, Marketo related.

Julia Kim: 00:37:33

And then the data team is fully responsible for our

Julia Kim: 00:37:36

Snowflake data warehouse.

Justin Norris: 00:37:38

One of the challenges I've found with reporting, out of a

Justin Norris: 00:37:42

data warehouse or using that entirely as the system of reporting, and I

Justin Norris: 00:37:45

think a reason why a lot of people just relapse into Salesforce is Even though

Justin Norris: 00:37:50

it's more powerful and ultimately more flexible, there can also be a rigidity.

Justin Norris: 00:37:53

It's like, Oh, actually this table doesn't have this.

Justin Norris: 00:37:55

I'm going to have to do a request and there's friction.

Justin Norris: 00:37:57

So I'm just going to create a quick Salesforce report because it's not right,

Justin Norris: 00:38:01

but it's, the path of least resistance.

Justin Norris: 00:38:03

how have you thought about that in terms of your relationship with that team and

Justin Norris: 00:38:06

making sure that the reporting environment is going to serve those needs so that

Justin Norris: 00:38:09

you can push people towards that place?

Julia Kim: 00:38:12

Yeah, so, that's a really great question.

Julia Kim: 00:38:14

We actually have a data council specifically for that purpose.

Julia Kim: 00:38:18

And the data council is comprised of people from the data team, obviously

Julia Kim: 00:38:22

people from RevOps, there's someone from finance, there's someone from product.

Julia Kim: 00:38:27

There's a lot of different people who are part of that council

Julia Kim: 00:38:31

specifically to talk about.

Julia Kim: 00:38:33

Those questions and almost get ahead of those things.

Julia Kim: 00:38:35

Because a lot of times you have a project that's coming up and it's

Julia Kim: 00:38:39

like, there's probably going to be a data component to this project.

Julia Kim: 00:38:42

So let's make sure that you're aware of it and that we're really thinking about it.

Julia Kim: 00:38:47

The other piece too, is that as we've become more rigorous or a little bit

Julia Kim: 00:38:51

more structured from a rev ops internal process perspective, we have been.

Julia Kim: 00:38:57

Doing more around incorporating UAT or user acceptance testing in our process.

Julia Kim: 00:39:02

And really, it's been an evolution of incorporating the Agile methodology and

Julia Kim: 00:39:07

having sprints and do sprint planning, using JIRA to help manage that.

Julia Kim: 00:39:12

for what we consider medium projects, that might be quick user acceptance

Julia Kim: 00:39:16

testing and, you know, pulling in the data team to help with that user acceptance

Julia Kim: 00:39:21

testing by the ops managers before it gets rolled out, or maybe the enablement

Julia Kim: 00:39:27

manager, and then it gets rolled out for larger projects that are maybe

Julia Kim: 00:39:31

three months in duration or longer, We actually have dedicated testers, either

Julia Kim: 00:39:37

end users from the business or different people that are a part of that process.

Julia Kim: 00:39:42

And we build enablement as part of that testing process too.

Julia Kim: 00:39:46

And the data team is involved there.

Julia Kim: 00:39:48

So we're trying to build multiple touch points so that any data

Julia Kim: 00:39:53

discrepancies or issues and integrating data are caught early.

Julia Kim: 00:39:58

Because we are trying to integrate more of that.

Julia Kim: 00:40:01

Testing and collaboration and knowledge and understanding of what is coming out

Julia Kim: 00:40:07

of this project earlier in the process.

Justin Norris: 00:40:11

think that's really important.

Justin Norris: 00:40:12

And you touched on user acceptance testing.

Justin Norris: 00:40:14

You've also mentioned enablement and all that to me speaks to, you know,

Justin Norris: 00:40:19

the importance of change management.

Justin Norris: 00:40:21

it's something that RevOps teams in general, maybe don't give as much

Justin Norris: 00:40:25

emphasis as they should in all cases.

Justin Norris: 00:40:28

And honestly, I think it's one of things like they can can make or

Justin Norris: 00:40:31

break, particularly with functions like sales ops or CS ops, where

Justin Norris: 00:40:35

you have to change the behavior.

Justin Norris: 00:40:37

Sometimes have a large number of users, you know, for your project

Justin Norris: 00:40:40

to be successful users who may not necessarily be very interested.

Justin Norris: 00:40:43

Like they want to hit their quota.

Justin Norris: 00:40:45

They're not necessarily care about the success or failure

Justin Norris: 00:40:47

of your project, intrinsically, unless you can make them care.

Justin Norris: 00:40:51

And so I guess the question is, how do you make them care?

Justin Norris: 00:40:54

You know, when you have a project that you're rolling out to those

Justin Norris: 00:40:56

teams, how do you get their buy in so that you can succeed?

Justin Norris: 00:41:00

I am really fortunate that at electric the messaging is consistent

Justin Norris: 00:41:06

from the very top levels down.

Justin Norris: 00:41:09

And so when we have all hands meetings every month, it's pretty

Justin Norris: 00:41:14

clear, like what we care about.

Justin Norris: 00:41:17

You know, Hey, we have a new partnership.

Justin Norris: 00:41:19

This is a focus for us, or Hey, this is a channel that's important for us.

Justin Norris: 00:41:23

This is a process that we're excited about.

Justin Norris: 00:41:26

And so it's that messaging makes it easier to then break that down to

Justin Norris: 00:41:31

what is that specific thing as you were talking about that and cares

Justin Norris: 00:41:36

about that might motivate them.

Justin Norris: 00:41:38

And it could be a financial component, right?

Justin Norris: 00:41:40

It could be a specific could be maybe the way that their comp

Justin Norris: 00:41:42

plan is structured or whatever.

Justin Norris: 00:41:44

Or, you know, for the CSM, maybe it's, you know, Ooh, I don't want my

Justin Norris: 00:41:49

customer to submit a negative NPS, survey or whatnot, but it really is

Justin Norris: 00:41:56

leveraging the clarity that starts in the transparency that starts at the top.

Justin Norris: 00:42:01

And then just then customizing it, and just really understanding who

Justin Norris: 00:42:06

your true end users are internally.

Justin Norris: 00:42:10

But I think it's also a strength of enablement.

Justin Norris: 00:42:14

I think people think of enablement as just training.

Justin Norris: 00:42:19

And I think that's where, again, I have made a conscious effort to differentiate

Justin Norris: 00:42:24

what I think of as enablement.

Justin Norris: 00:42:26

And it actually answers one of the earlier questions you had around You know how do

Justin Norris: 00:42:32

you, how proactive are you about things?

Justin Norris: 00:42:35

And that's a great area for enablement.

Justin Norris: 00:42:37

When they're past the sort of traditional things you think about

Justin Norris: 00:42:40

from an enablement perspective, like training or putting materials

Justin Norris: 00:42:44

together, that's great and everything.

Justin Norris: 00:42:46

And I'm having my enablement manager leverage or analysts more

Justin Norris: 00:42:51

to kind of get some of that done.

Justin Norris: 00:42:53

The real value of enablement is saying, what, where are the gaps in productivity?

Justin Norris: 00:42:59

Because it's not just about learning.

Justin Norris: 00:43:01

It's also about productivity from their perspective from their roles perspective.

Justin Norris: 00:43:06

And so one of the things that my enablement manager and I are actively

Justin Norris: 00:43:10

working on is leveraging her expertise and how people learn, how people

Justin Norris: 00:43:16

ingest information, how people, the different ways that people have to

Justin Norris: 00:43:21

like see or feel or engage with things.

Justin Norris: 00:43:25

And knowledge within the tool.

Justin Norris: 00:43:27

So for example we were just looking at Gong and saying, Hey, you know, maybe

Justin Norris: 00:43:31

there's a better way we can expose some of these dashboard widgets and stuff

Justin Norris: 00:43:35

for people that are in there, or is there a way we can actually kind of

Justin Norris: 00:43:39

pull out some of this information and have it in Salesforce in a better way?

Justin Norris: 00:43:42

We, we actually have an integration, but in a better way.

Justin Norris: 00:43:45

And so.

Justin Norris: 00:43:47

Enablement then becomes not just about training, not just about teaching

Justin Norris: 00:43:51

them about like a sales process.

Justin Norris: 00:43:53

It's almost like, yes, okay, that is the basics of what you need to do.

Justin Norris: 00:43:56

But the real value in enablement is for an AE that now understands

Justin Norris: 00:44:01

what the sales process is.

Justin Norris: 00:44:03

How much time are they spending on emails?

Justin Norris: 00:44:04

How much time are they spending on calls?

Justin Norris: 00:44:06

And is that distribution look okay?

Justin Norris: 00:44:09

So if there's someone who's being much more successful in close winning,

Justin Norris: 00:44:12

how opportunities and they happen to have maybe a 40 60 ratio of like, you

Justin Norris: 00:44:18

know, emails to calls being greater.

Justin Norris: 00:44:21

Maybe that's a tactic that other people on the team can do.

Justin Norris: 00:44:24

And how great is it that enablement can say, Hey, I've been looking at the

Justin Norris: 00:44:28

data, you know, sales director or sales manager, and we've noticed that these

Justin Norris: 00:44:32

2 people or these 3 people are not.

Justin Norris: 00:44:35

quite performing as well, but they're also not doing these other things as well.

Justin Norris: 00:44:39

I know, I think there are some AEs, especially some high performing

Justin Norris: 00:44:43

AEs that have their own kind of method, and it works for them.

Justin Norris: 00:44:46

But I think for the most part, many people maybe just aren't doing

Justin Norris: 00:44:50

the things that they need to do.

Justin Norris: 00:44:52

And it's not just this one time, hey, let's train them

Justin Norris: 00:44:54

and get them knowledgeable.

Justin Norris: 00:44:55

It's a lifelong learning process.

Justin Norris: 00:44:57

And so I think that's where an enablement can be because they can almost, you

Justin Norris: 00:45:03

know, Be a productivity coach, and that can be applied across the board.

Justin Norris: 00:45:08

It's not just eight years.

Justin Norris: 00:45:09

It's not just S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

It's not just C.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

Or A.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

Justin Norris: 00:45:13

You could almost think about this from a project perspective.

Justin Norris: 00:45:16

Like, are we doing projects in a way that are conducive to collaboration, right?

Justin Norris: 00:45:22

and so that's what we're trying to do with enablement and take

Justin Norris: 00:45:24

it to the next level beyond just

Justin Norris: 00:45:26

training.

Justin Norris: 00:45:26

I love that example, as A case of how ops can really drive impact, beyond

Justin Norris: 00:45:33

just, yes, we have a request, we have to partner on those things, but also kind of

Justin Norris: 00:45:38

challenging the business, being somebody who's there, like having a second set of

Justin Norris: 00:45:41

eyes, are we doing this in the best way?

Justin Norris: 00:45:44

Is this what great looks like?

Justin Norris: 00:45:46

How can we move this forward?

Justin Norris: 00:45:47

That's such an important part that often gets missed.

Justin Norris: 00:45:50

I think his teams often don't have time to do it and in full fairness,

Justin Norris: 00:45:53

but having those folks that have that as part of their scope.

Justin Norris: 00:45:56

I think it's just so important

Julia Kim: 00:45:58

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:45:59

And I think one of the best examples I can think of how enablement helped

Julia Kim: 00:46:05

me really again, consolidate our tech stack and therefore save money is I

Julia Kim: 00:46:12

asked our enablement manager to do an analysis and look at our sales stages in

Julia Kim: 00:46:18

the pipeline and see what was the level of usage across all of those stages.

Julia Kim: 00:46:24

And of course, some of it makes sense, right?

Julia Kim: 00:46:25

Like in the beginning, you know, they're having a lot of calls with people.

Julia Kim: 00:46:29

So gong is like high usage, right?

Julia Kim: 00:46:31

And then you can kind of see Salesforce is maybe consistently used maybe a little

Julia Kim: 00:46:34

bit more when you're negotiating but that sort of heat map of how different

Julia Kim: 00:46:40

tools were being utilized, the level of usage, the duration of usage.

Julia Kim: 00:46:45

And the sales stages made it so obvious which tools provided the most value

Julia Kim: 00:46:50

consistently across all the sales stages and then also which ones had sort of like

Julia Kim: 00:46:56

the most impact when and that's a great example of how if you don't think of

Julia Kim: 00:47:02

enablement as just that training function.

Julia Kim: 00:47:06

That is a huge piece of value because you want to make sure that if AEs

Julia Kim: 00:47:10

are spending a ton of time in Gong in the beginning, that they really are

Julia Kim: 00:47:14

leveraging the tools within Gong that are going to help them really move

Julia Kim: 00:47:19

those stages to that next stage, right?

Julia Kim: 00:47:21

And so it's really another efficiency approach in aligning your tech

Julia Kim: 00:47:29

stack, the data you have, the people you have, the process you have.

Julia Kim: 00:47:34

Using a team like RevOps.

Justin Norris: 00:47:36

when we think about technology and go to market, obviously

Justin Norris: 00:47:41

the thing that looms over over us all, uh, right now and for the past

Justin Norris: 00:47:44

year or so has been AI and all the changes that have happened there.

Justin Norris: 00:47:47

No, this is something that you have thought a lot about and

Justin Norris: 00:47:51

have been doing some work there.

Justin Norris: 00:47:52

What are the main use cases that you see, where you think there's an opportunity

Justin Norris: 00:47:56

to drive real value with AI and rev ops?

Julia Kim: 00:48:00

may be alone in this, but I feel so strongly that AI is

Julia Kim: 00:48:05

one of those things that a RevOps team can absolutely leverage and

Julia Kim: 00:48:10

it doesn't have to be homegrown.

Julia Kim: 00:48:12

I was just at a, the Stripe conference last week in San Francisco

Julia Kim: 00:48:16

and Jensen Wong, who is the CEO of Nvidia, was a speaker on one

Julia Kim: 00:48:21

of the days of the conference.

Julia Kim: 00:48:23

And he had this really great quote where he talks about, first you as an

Julia Kim: 00:48:28

individual, so, people are always afraid that they're gonna lose their job to ai.

Julia Kim: 00:48:32

And he said, you're not gonna lose your job to ai, you're gonna lose

Julia Kim: 00:48:35

your job to someone who is using ai.

Julia Kim: 00:48:38

so don't worry about the AI, worry about the person who's leveraging AI.

Julia Kim: 00:48:42

But I think the most impactful statement he said was the second one, which is that

Julia Kim: 00:48:48

your company isn't competing with AI.

Julia Kim: 00:48:50

It's not like your company versus AI, open AI or any of these other, you know,

Julia Kim: 00:48:55

like Microsoft or Google or whatnot, meta.

Julia Kim: 00:48:59

It's competing with another company that is using AI strategically, right?

Julia Kim: 00:49:05

Because you can do all the operational.

Julia Kim: 00:49:08

excellence, tactics, all of that, even strategy, but if you don't have

Julia Kim: 00:49:12

that special sauce of AI you're not going to win against all the others.

Julia Kim: 00:49:19

And so I thought that was so interesting And I think this is where,

Julia Kim: 00:49:23

because there's such a technical component to revenue operations.

Julia Kim: 00:49:27

And because there are so many great tools that are spending millions of dollars

Julia Kim: 00:49:32

within the RevOps tech stack, that you can leverage all of those benefits.

Julia Kim: 00:49:37

Oftentimes these things are already included in your contract.

Julia Kim: 00:49:40

You just don't know about them, or maybe you're not sure.

Julia Kim: 00:49:44

And, you know, you can kind of talk to your rep and say, Hey, I don't want to

Julia Kim: 00:49:47

pay an extra, you know, God knows what for this AI feature, but I would love to

Julia Kim: 00:49:52

pilot it out to see what the ROI might be.

Julia Kim: 00:49:56

But such a great opportunity to leverage all the things that are happening.

Julia Kim: 00:50:02

And really understand what are your true needs around AI.

Julia Kim: 00:50:06

And then if it is something that you need to customize, you

Julia Kim: 00:50:09

can work with your data team.

Julia Kim: 00:50:10

You can work with your engineering team to build out those very custom models or

Julia Kim: 00:50:16

custom machine learning algorithms that might be specific to your industry, but.

Julia Kim: 00:50:22

today, literally today, you could say, Hey, I have gong.

Julia Kim: 00:50:26

How can I leverage those AI features and get started and be competitive?

Julia Kim: 00:50:30

But the areas that, you know, I really think that AI is going to benefit.

Julia Kim: 00:50:35

Rev ops is one around predictive ai.

Julia Kim: 00:50:38

You know, a lot of rev ops teams, I am, you know, one of them

Julia Kim: 00:50:42

have to think about forecasting.

Julia Kim: 00:50:44

What are sales gonna look like?

Julia Kim: 00:50:46

What is spend going to look like, you know, is this customer going to churn?

Julia Kim: 00:50:51

And there are some really great built in features across again, all of those

Julia Kim: 00:50:56

tools in our RevOps tech stack that can help you leverage those use cases.

Julia Kim: 00:51:00

But I think again, predictive AI is such an important area where we can utilize

Julia Kim: 00:51:06

it today and make some contribution to the bottom line for our companies.

Julia Kim: 00:51:10

The other area that's so important is generative AI.

Julia Kim: 00:51:14

And I always think of generative AI, not just about content creation, but

Julia Kim: 00:51:18

really around productivity, right?

Julia Kim: 00:51:20

So it's, you know, if you have outreach, use those gen AI tools in order to,

Julia Kim: 00:51:25

you know, generate those email follow ups you know, use those call summaries

Julia Kim: 00:51:31

and other action item features that are built into, again, the tools

Julia Kim: 00:51:34

that you have in your tech stack.

Julia Kim: 00:51:36

For the most part, those are things that, you know, it's just time consuming

Julia Kim: 00:51:39

for an AE or a CSM they just had a call to do, and great, you know, now they

Julia Kim: 00:51:45

don't have to worry about it anymore.

Julia Kim: 00:51:47

And then one of the other areas that I just think is so

Julia Kim: 00:51:50

great is conversational AI.

Julia Kim: 00:51:52

So you think about how a lot of times AEs spend time trying to

Julia Kim: 00:51:58

explain what the product is doing, what services you're providing.

Julia Kim: 00:52:01

But if you have an inbound prospect that's interested and they can have a

Julia Kim: 00:52:06

very short and meaningful conversation that seems very human like, almost

Julia Kim: 00:52:10

like there's a person behind it and learn and kind of get assets and then

Julia Kim: 00:52:14

talk to an AE when they're ready.

Julia Kim: 00:52:16

That saves time and energy, right?

Julia Kim: 00:52:18

And it increases the likelihood that they're going to ask

Julia Kim: 00:52:21

you the right question.

Julia Kim: 00:52:21

So you can identify the pain points that they truly have

Julia Kim: 00:52:25

that your product can solve for.

Julia Kim: 00:52:26

And I would say the 3rd area that's important is what

Julia Kim: 00:52:29

they call descriptive AI.

Julia Kim: 00:52:31

It's really about, you know, taking unstructured data and

Julia Kim: 00:52:35

finding visibility or insights through that unstructured data.

Julia Kim: 00:52:38

So, Gong is a classic example of that, right?

Julia Kim: 00:52:41

You can't go through every single call recording you have, but it does a

Julia Kim: 00:52:44

really great job of sentiment analysis and just kind of flagging different

Julia Kim: 00:52:48

things within a call at scale, right?

Julia Kim: 00:52:51

And so when you're thinking about, how do I know if our AEs

Julia Kim: 00:52:56

are mentioning our new product?

Julia Kim: 00:52:58

Well, set up a trigger in Gong and see if, you know, if

Julia Kim: 00:53:01

it's actually being discussed.

Julia Kim: 00:53:03

Those are very low lift ways that you can incorporate AI into your day to day

Julia Kim: 00:53:08

RevOps processes and tech stack so that you can actually raise your hand when exec

Julia Kim: 00:53:14

is like, what are you doing for me today?

Julia Kim: 00:53:16

You're like, we've got AI covered.

Julia Kim: 00:53:17

That is such an easy thing to start with now.

Julia Kim: 00:53:20

going back to what Jensen Wang said, at the conference last week.

Julia Kim: 00:53:24

Julia Kim: 00:53:25

There is a lot of hype.

Julia Kim: 00:53:26

There is a hype cycle around A.

Julia Kim: 00:53:28

But it's not going away.

Julia Kim: 00:53:29

It is a fundamental technology, a fundamental way of doing business that is

Julia Kim: 00:53:35

going to change many different industries.

Julia Kim: 00:53:37

And.

Julia Kim: 00:53:38

How great, you know, from a rev ops perspective, would it be if you could

Julia Kim: 00:53:42

kind of lead and control how that's used rather than being sort of told?

Julia Kim: 00:53:47

Oh, my gosh, why are we not doing AI?

Julia Kim: 00:53:50

And almost being sort of forced into being in that reactive mode.

Julia Kim: 00:53:54

Whereas you can be very proactive and a lot of, the reps for these

Julia Kim: 00:53:58

vendors are going to be so happy to talk to you and say, Hey,

Julia Kim: 00:54:02

here's some, you know, suggestions.

Julia Kim: 00:54:03

In fact, if you haven't had a QBR recently, or maybe, you know, an

Julia Kim: 00:54:07

executive review recently, schedule one.

Julia Kim: 00:54:10

I'm always interested in learning about what's happening in the roadmap.

Julia Kim: 00:54:14

Maybe you're, hearing about other tools that are being used in the industry.

Julia Kim: 00:54:19

But this is something where.

Julia Kim: 00:54:21

Such a powerful lever, especially if RevOps can kind of say, Hey,

Julia Kim: 00:54:25

I have ownership of this and I can fundamentally change how our

Julia Kim: 00:54:29

business works using this tool.

Julia Kim: 00:54:33

so amazing.

Julia Kim: 00:54:34

So I'm, very much excited about AI.

Julia Kim: 00:54:36

If you cannot tell,

Justin Norris: 00:54:38

Yeah, I mean, I think there is huge opportunity, and I think there is

Justin Norris: 00:54:42

a lot of learning, that needs to be done.

Justin Norris: 00:54:44

That's one of the things that has impressed itself upon me.

Justin Norris: 00:54:47

It's one thing to have AI, but it's another thing to know how to prompt it

Justin Norris: 00:54:51

very well, to understand how to leverage the outputs, how to debug things if

Justin Norris: 00:54:56

you're not getting the results that you want, which, none of which I claim

Justin Norris: 00:54:59

to be expert in, but just speaking to people like yourself, It is a new skill.

Justin Norris: 00:55:03

So to your point about, you know, losing your job to the person who knows how

Justin Norris: 00:55:06

to use AI, there's a real thing there and it is something to keep in mind.

Justin Norris: 00:55:10

Maybe we'll just to end on, uh, you know, a slightly introspective note.

Justin Norris: 00:55:14

You have a very mature team.

Justin Norris: 00:55:16

It seems very high performing.

Justin Norris: 00:55:17

You've told us about all the great things you do.

Justin Norris: 00:55:19

It's interesting also to note the, like we all have challenges.

Justin Norris: 00:55:23

No matter where we are in our career, what are some of the things that you are

Justin Norris: 00:55:27

finding difficult today or that you just don't have totally figured out just yet?

Julia Kim: 00:55:31

working in a startup environment, things shift so

Julia Kim: 00:55:36

quickly and I guess a really big thing.

Julia Kim: 00:55:40

And then a sort of small, big thing.

Julia Kim: 00:55:42

The biggest thing is how can you consistently support the changes that

Julia Kim: 00:55:50

happen day to day, week over week, month over month as a startup and keep

Julia Kim: 00:55:57

your team feeling motivated and driven?

Julia Kim: 00:56:02

Because sometimes.

Julia Kim: 00:56:04

It seems like there's a change in priority, but there isn't.

Julia Kim: 00:56:08

It's just maybe the slight focus, but at the end of the day, the things

Julia Kim: 00:56:12

that you need to accomplish are the same, but people get distracted by

Julia Kim: 00:56:16

maybe the messaging or what's being said, but it's balancing sort of

Julia Kim: 00:56:22

the chaos of being in a startup, the instability of doing new things, right?

Julia Kim: 00:56:27

If you're a startup, that's trying to make a difference in the world.

Julia Kim: 00:56:31

You're doing something that other people have not been doing, And how

Julia Kim: 00:56:34

do you balance that with stability for a team that needs some stability,

Julia Kim: 00:56:39

some structure, some consistency in order to work effectively, right?

Julia Kim: 00:56:44

Because when you think about operations, or you think about

Julia Kim: 00:56:46

things like forecasting or reporting, you can't report if everything's

Julia Kim: 00:56:51

constantly changing every second.

Julia Kim: 00:56:52

Right.

Julia Kim: 00:56:53

And so by the nature of operations, by the nature of

Julia Kim: 00:56:55

process, you need some stability.

Julia Kim: 00:56:58

And so that is the biggest and hardest thing to manage or balance

Julia Kim: 00:57:03

when you're in a startup environment.

Julia Kim: 00:57:05

And I think the second piece for me is, how do you keep people inspired?

Julia Kim: 00:57:11

Because a lot of times, Your day to day is not that sexy, right?

Julia Kim: 00:57:16

You know, it's troubleshooting.

Julia Kim: 00:57:18

Why is Marketo not syncing with

Julia Kim: 00:57:20

Salesforce

Julia Kim: 00:57:20

and I think as humans, as people.

Julia Kim: 00:57:23

As much as we, you know, we're like, yeah, we can do this day in,

Julia Kim: 00:57:26

day out we're curious, we want to learn, we want to grow, we want

Julia Kim: 00:57:30

to have pride in what we're doing.

Julia Kim: 00:57:32

And so, the second hardest thing for me is how do you create that environment

Julia Kim: 00:57:38

where people feel like they're growing?

Julia Kim: 00:57:41

Even when they're running a, you know, at 110%, because all of that 110

Julia Kim: 00:57:46

percent is for the business, right?

Julia Kim: 00:57:47

Because they're doing all these things to optimize revenue.

Julia Kim: 00:57:50

And we may or may not see that some people get comped, you know, maybe because

Julia Kim: 00:57:54

they have a bonus structure that, you know, benefits them when the company's

Julia Kim: 00:57:57

doing well, some people aren't right.

Julia Kim: 00:57:59

And so how do you make people feel like they're growing?

Julia Kim: 00:58:02

How do you make them feel like, wait, here's a way that I can.

Julia Kim: 00:58:06

Make my team better.

Julia Kim: 00:58:07

I mean, I had a really great one on one with one of my analysts earlier today

Julia Kim: 00:58:12

where she said, I know that we talked about like me working on these projects

Julia Kim: 00:58:16

and I'm working on them and hear my status updates, but you know, I was thinking

Julia Kim: 00:58:19

about something you said, where you said, you know, it's really important for us

Julia Kim: 00:58:23

to alignment and service our internal end users as much as our external, end users.

Julia Kim: 00:58:29

And then I think one way I could do that, would be to help clean up page

Julia Kim: 00:58:34

layouts and Salesforce, which everyone in the world totally understands.

Julia Kim: 00:58:36

Cause it's always a nightmare.

Julia Kim: 00:58:37

she was like, but I, you know, I think our sales ops manager is doing it.

Julia Kim: 00:58:41

But, the second thing I thought of is like, maybe I can make it easier for

Julia Kim: 00:58:44

people to submit juror tickets with us.

Julia Kim: 00:58:46

Cause I think we've gotten so many different form fields that

Julia Kim: 00:58:49

now it's a little confusing.

Julia Kim: 00:58:51

Amazing.

Julia Kim: 00:58:52

And I think she had the bandwidth to think about that because

Julia Kim: 00:58:55

we gave her space for growth.

Julia Kim: 00:58:56

So one really important thing that I do for my team, and this is so important,

Julia Kim: 00:59:01

I think as a RevOps team is that there is some kind of growth from a technology

Julia Kim: 00:59:06

perspective, from a skillset perspective.

Julia Kim: 00:59:10

We have a monthly certification accountability group that we do.

Julia Kim: 00:59:14

It's just 30 minutes.

Julia Kim: 00:59:16

Half the time we're like, yeah, we meant to, get through modules X, Y, and Z.

Julia Kim: 00:59:20

And we didn't cause it was a crazy month.

Julia Kim: 00:59:22

But I think making that space for people on your team, so you can not

Julia Kim: 00:59:27

just grow the business, but grow them as individual so that they can take the,

Julia Kim: 00:59:35

that knowledge and take that investment in them as a person and then bring that

Julia Kim: 00:59:40

back because it does come back tenfold.

Julia Kim: 00:59:42

I mean, I just gave you that example of again, this analyst who was like.

Julia Kim: 00:59:46

I want to make things better and here's an example of how I can tangibly do that.

Julia Kim: 00:59:49

But I think she was able to do that because we have been

Julia Kim: 00:59:52

investing in her career growth.

Julia Kim: 00:59:54

We've been investing in her ability to upskill, getting her exposed to different

Julia Kim: 00:59:58

tools that she's never used before.

Julia Kim: 01:00:01

And so it's really not just thinking about how can RevOps help the business, but

Julia Kim: 01:00:07

you also have to feed yourself, right?

Julia Kim: 01:00:09

So how do you feed your internal RevOps team so that they can be even more

Julia Kim: 01:00:14

stronger, even more aligned with what's happening in the industry or technology

Julia Kim: 01:00:20

wise so that they can be very effective.

Julia Kim: 01:00:22

And so that's the second thing that keeps me up at night.

Julia Kim: 01:00:26

how do I keep my team interested, growing without disrupting day to day operations.

Justin Norris: 01:00:33

I love it.

Justin Norris: 01:00:33

So important.

Justin Norris: 01:00:35

Julia, really glad you could join us today.

Justin Norris: 01:00:37

It was super inspiring hearing about what you're doing.

Justin Norris: 01:00:40

And, lots of folks out there are going to find it interesting too.

Justin Norris: 01:00:42

So thank you so much for sharing with us.

Julia Kim: 01:00:45

Well, thank you so much for having me.

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