Quote-to-cash: it's messy, it's technical, and every project takes WAY longer than planned.

It's also absolutely vital. If you can't get quotes out the door, or if you can't collect money from your customers, you don't have a business.

Because of their complexity, these systems tend to change infrequently, and in-house operators may not get the repetitive exposure necessary to master the intricacies of CPQ or billing system projects.

So when I wanted a crash course on quote-to-cash, I turned to Nick and Tony at Hyperscayle—former operators who've built a RevOps agency with a focus on lead-to-cash operations.

We go deep into the process and systems, discuss technical gotchas, and explore the change management issues that must be addressed to make quote-to-cash work smoothly.

Thanks to Our Sponsor

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About Today's Guests

Nicholas Rose is Co-Founder of Hyperscayle, a RevOps consulting firm covering lead-to-cash operations. He's previously held senior operations roles at Dell and Mendix (acquired by Siemens AG).

Tony Tarantino is Chief Architect at Hyperscayle. Previously, he was a technology consultant at Accenture and application architect at Mendix.

Key Topics

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [00:56] - Making the jump from in-house to agency
• [05:17] - Quote to cash definitions
• [10:25] - Design phase and cross-functional alignment
• [14:06] - When does a company need CPQ
• [16:41] - Why are CPQ projects so messy
• [22:34] - Product configuration
• [28:01] - Ideal tech stack
• [32:26] - Data quality and deal desk
• [36:20] - Role of RevOps

Thanks to Our Sponsor

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Resource Links

• Hyperscayle RevOps Advisory & Implementation Services

Learn More

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Justin Norris: 00:00:14

Welcome to RevOps FM.

Justin Norris: 00:00:15

Today, we're going to tackle a subject that is not for the

Justin Norris: 00:00:19

faint of heart, quote to cash.

Justin Norris: 00:00:21

It's tough.

Justin Norris: 00:00:22

It's technical, it's complicated.

Justin Norris: 00:00:24

so we're going to chat with two guys who are some of the best in the business, Nick

Justin Norris: 00:00:28

Rose and Tony Tarantino from Hyperscayle.

Justin Norris: 00:00:31

I've actually known Nick and Tony for quite a while.

Justin Norris: 00:00:32

They were clients of mine back when I was on the agency side.

Justin Norris: 00:00:35

They worked for a SAS company called Mendix later acquired by Siemens.

Justin Norris: 00:00:39

But now for the past few years, Nick and Tony have been building their own

Justin Norris: 00:00:43

RevOps agency called Hyperscayle where quote to cash is a big area of focus.

Justin Norris: 00:00:48

So I'm super excited to deep dive on this topic today.

Justin Norris: 00:00:51

Fellas, welcome to the show.

Nicholas Rose: 00:00:53

Thanks.

Nicholas Rose: 00:00:53

funny how things have turned.

Justin Norris: 00:00:55

it really is.

Justin Norris: 00:00:56

I mean, before we dive into the theme of the day, I'd love to And the

Justin Norris: 00:01:01

process from your point of view of going from the in house world, setting

Justin Norris: 00:01:05

up your own shop, what drove you there, the challenges, just love to

Justin Norris: 00:01:09

hear a little bit about that journey.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:11

Yeah.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:11

So, we got bought by Siemens and, Tony's worked for Accenture.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:18

I worked for Dell.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:19

We've been in the large corporation side for a very long time.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:22

We both went to the startups.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:24

Side and done successful.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:25

We got to a buyout, but the question really kind of came up

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:28

for like, what's the next thing.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:30

And, you we really wanted to be into Rev Ops overall into the Rev Ops space.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:34

personally, I was looking out and interviewing and I couldn't

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:38

find a place that I wanted to go work for personally, because they

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:41

all had some of the same issues.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:42

And I just didn't want to go the same rim and order of going through the

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:46

same process and Not really have a lot of control in playing the politics.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:49

and and I were sitting on the train and Ben's like, why don't

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:52

we just start our own company?

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:53

And I was just like, you are crazy.

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:56

and you know, after more and more, some certain things

Nicholas Rose: 00:01:58

happen at Midnix and Siemens.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:00

And I was like, you know what, let's go do it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:02

Right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:03

we started off, on our own, mainly because we want to have more control

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:07

in our own destiny and kind of create a culture of what we wanted a company to be.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:11

and so we did that and it has been amazing.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:14

If you ask me, we would be where we are today.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:18

I would tell you.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:20

No, but we have been growing like crazy, and having a lot of fun really

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:26

trying to solve more of customers big pain points and problems.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:30

and you know, it's been great.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:31

Tony.

Nicholas Rose: 00:02:31

I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:33

Yeah, the big thing for me was, as like we scaled Mendix,

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:37

you know, we started at a 50 percent company to, I think it was close to 5,

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:41

000 when we left, did a lot of things right, made a lot of mistakes, learned

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:45

a lot of lessons, I wanted to take those lessons and apply them elsewhere, and

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:49

this was the perfect opportunity to do so, was to learn from all the things

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:51

we did right and all the things we did wrong, and Help other companies,

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:54

but the fact that that foundation to scale from a boss perspective in place.

Tony Tarantino: 00:02:58

And I thought that was a super fun challenge to solve.

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:00

And every company is a little bit different, but it's still the basis

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:03

of getting your data in place, getting your process in place,

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:06

getting your systems in place.

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:07

And I just love that challenge and be able to do it over and over and

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:09

over again is super exciting to

Tony Tarantino: 00:03:11

me.

Justin Norris: 00:03:11

I've been through a bit of that agency experience myself

Justin Norris: 00:03:15

and there's, when you think about like your product and positioning and like

Justin Norris: 00:03:18

you're So you're a new product, right?

Justin Norris: 00:03:19

So I'm curious about what your, your menu of service offerings is going to be.

Justin Norris: 00:03:21

There's a few different ways to play it.

Justin Norris: 00:03:23

In my past life, we were really focused on one platform and

Justin Norris: 00:03:26

going deep into that ecosystem.

Justin Norris: 00:03:28

And you've chosen more of like a, discipline strategy where you're going to,

Justin Norris: 00:03:31

you're focused on RebOps as a discipline.

Justin Norris: 00:03:34

You have a broad menu of products that you partner with.

Justin Norris: 00:03:37

How did you think about what sort of agency you wanted to be

Justin Norris: 00:03:39

in terms of service offering?

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:41

Oh, it's a good question.

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:43

I don't know if we really thought much about it, To be honest, it was like,

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:47

we know we were good at lead to cash.

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:50

I knew marketing ops and sales ops really well.

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:52

And even customer success ops, we had people that can play in all those areas.

Nicholas Rose: 00:03:56

And, I think one of the things that we've centered around was, is it's

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:00

really hard to have marketing ops people.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:03

Work on systems and not have a downstream impact.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:05

They don't know what happens like on the Salesforce or CRM

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:07

side and vice versa, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:09

There's been countless of times when even bigger companies are doing

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:12

something on the sales side and they mess up the marketing side, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:15

Because they don't know the downstream or upstream impacts.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:18

And so I think, where I kind of mean, Tony drew the line the same.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:20

It was like, we're going to go do this.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:21

We're going to do lead to cash.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:23

And this is going to be our competitive advantage.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:25

and we're going to know what happens from downstream and upstream.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:29

And so I think it was just more like, this is who we are and what

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:31

we're going to be in particular.

Nicholas Rose: 00:04:33

We want to rev ops.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:34

My perspective, I'm a huge believer in understanding the end to

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:38

end business process of every client that I work on, like, I want to understand.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:42

From market to cash, like how data flows, how it's structured,

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:46

the architecture of the systems.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:48

And if we're going to do that, we're going to spend the time

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:50

and learn all that information.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:51

It might as well support all those elements of that process as well.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:53

So that was like a, big driver for me.

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:55

It's like, we're moving the silos and making sure that we're thinking about

Tony Tarantino: 00:04:58

every project, every solution, every functionality that we build as kind of

Tony Tarantino: 00:05:02

a, How it impacts not only the individual piece of the process that we're working

Tony Tarantino: 00:05:05

on, but downstream and upstream.

Justin Norris: 00:05:07

I think there's huge advantage to being able to position

Justin Norris: 00:05:09

yourself as solving a business problem rather than being like, I'm your Mercato

Justin Norris: 00:05:14

shop or I'm your HubSpot shop or whatever.

Justin Norris: 00:05:17

So I want to dive into the big picture of quote to cash.

Justin Norris: 00:05:20

And I'll confess it's not an area that I'm super well versed in.

Justin Norris: 00:05:24

I've touched bits and pieces of it in different ways, but taking on,

Justin Norris: 00:05:28

the standard, big process of rolling out CPQ and rolling out some of these

Justin Norris: 00:05:32

systems, it's not something I've done.

Justin Norris: 00:05:33

So I'd love, for the benefit of myself and perhaps others who haven't gone

Justin Norris: 00:05:38

deep there, maybe just set the stage for what this is, why it's important.

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:42

so kind of let's start with the definitions between Quote

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:45

to cash and cpq right because they're usually insomnious together, but they

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:49

really usually do separate projects, And some of it's kind of obvious,

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:52

But I think when people go into these motions, they kind of gets lost,

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:57

especially within the organizations.

Nicholas Rose: 00:05:58

But quote to cash is really the business process from, you know,

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:02

obviously, when sales creates a quote or configure something like that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:06

And then it goes into what we, you know, we say, Cash, which would be

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:09

trained from an opportunity into a quote, into an order or invoice, and

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:14

then the collections process right between the business side, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:17

So capturing that from a net suite or ERP system for the money, Not

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:21

really sexy money means, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:22

But like, those are the pieces, And there's a lot of business

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:24

process that goes underneath that, which makes it complex.

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:27

Because you're usually having to bring in sales, could be marketing,

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:31

depending on where it sits, which some people don't realize, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:33

Especially if you're like a product or product marketing side standpoint,

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:37

operations, but in finance.

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:39

Now, the CPQ section, configure price quote, usually the details around.

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:45

how do you get sales to create a quote, configuring out and getting into the part

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:50

of that, which is a sub piece of that process, but it's also really important,

Nicholas Rose: 00:06:54

Because when you talk about getting things to move harmoniously between the systems,

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:00

you know, very good example, like usually your CPQ and ERP systems have to mirror.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:05

And if you don't do that process, well, you can create a lot

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:08

more work for your manual work.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:10

Right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:10

But that business process is important because it all ties

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:13

back into the CBQ process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:15

that's kind of like setting the stage there.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:17

and you know, really, it's important is especially when you

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:20

do it from a scaling perspective.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:21

I feel like 20 salespeople or 50 salespeople, a lot of times they don't

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:26

have a coding process, but that's when they'll kind of like start looking

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:29

into it because the cost savings and the time for them to somehow do

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:33

some of these quotes, especially if they're complex, just becomes way more

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:36

worth it or configuring out costs.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:39

Like some of the times we've done these CPQ systems because.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:42

There's a business problem on say, like the warranty or the support

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:45

side, and it's costing them millions of dollars to go fix this as support

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:49

because sales is selling something incorrectly or wrong or missing the item.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:55

And from a CSI, they have to go support that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:07:57

Right.

Tony Tarantino: 00:07:57

I think the other thing that I would add is how often

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:00

I've seen clients, who have the sales process, well documented, well

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:06

figured out, well implemented in their systems, but we're leaving so much

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:10

money on the table because everything post sales, they weren't focusing on.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:14

And that's so important because that's how you're getting paid.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:17

That's how you're generating cash.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:18

That's how you're invoicing your customers.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:20

It's such an important part of, your total go to market process.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:23

That is sometimes especially technically underserved, like there's companies

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:27

that have full Salesforce CRM teams that Have one part time Netsuite consultant

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:31

who's not handling the ERP stuff at all.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:33

it's a really, really important process that is actually

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:36

doing the revenue generation.

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:37

It is invoicing that you are getting paid for that, always amazed about

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:42

how so many companies don't focus enough and are missing thousands of

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:47

dollars because they don't have their invoice process buttoned up and aren't

Tony Tarantino: 00:08:50

getting the revenue that they need.

Nicholas Rose: 00:08:52

And like, the industry's kind of like monetize it in some ways.

Nicholas Rose: 00:08:56

But it's really complicated because like, no one really owns the CPQ

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:00

process if you think about it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:02

But then everyone also owns it because usually the people that have to control

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:05

it only control bits and pieces of it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:07

that's what makes it really complicated.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:09

So like finance would own like the approval process, but usually sales

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:12

wants to own the approval process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:14

And a lot of times we'll have troubles with that because everyone

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:16

wants to be in the approval process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:18

And usually you have 13 people in the approval process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:20

It's like, guys, you can't have 13 people.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:21

But those are the humans that aspects into that because everyone wants to touch it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:25

And then you get to things like product or product market.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:27

Like someone has to define the playbook that encapsulates what actually

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:32

needs to be configured and priced.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:33

And a lot of times people don't have that figured out or the

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:36

structure or strategy to go to that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:38

someone else owns that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:39

And usually you have ops in the middle, like going like, Hey, we need

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:41

to push this together and try to push and pull these organizations, but

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:45

they don't understand the full piece.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:46

that's makes it, So complicated.

Nicholas Rose: 00:09:48

no one owns it, but everyone does at the same

Tony Tarantino: 00:09:50

CPQ.

Tony Tarantino: 00:09:51

I think it's truly the single hub that is relevant to every single go

Tony Tarantino: 00:09:55

to market group that there is like sales, marketing, finance, CS, all

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:00

have a really, really important.

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:02

Need for a CPQ that fills their needs.

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:04

So it's, a one thing and all of our go to market processes that literally touches

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:09

every single relevant group and with, obviously more people at the table, more

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:13

opinions, that's a lot of the struggles you see with CPQ is everyone's got away,

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:17

everyone's got an opinion on how it should go they have such a huge role.

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:20

It impacts their lives so much.

Tony Tarantino: 00:10:22

That's what makes this work really complicated.

Justin Norris: 00:10:24

you took it just actually where I was going to go, I was

Justin Norris: 00:10:26

just reflecting on all the different players involved product marketing

Justin Norris: 00:10:30

and defining those packages in many cases, sales actually being the ones

Justin Norris: 00:10:33

who have to work with them users of the system finance being stakeholders.

Justin Norris: 00:10:37

Cause everything that has to mirror over into the ERP world.

Justin Norris: 00:10:41

It's hard enough sitting down as like a marketing operations consultant or

Justin Norris: 00:10:44

sales operations consultant with just one or two stakeholders when you've

Justin Norris: 00:10:48

got four or five, six departments, what does that engagement look like for you?

Justin Norris: 00:10:52

Just from a design and discovery phase, that must be fun.

Nicholas Rose: 00:10:55

So one of the things that we always require is an executive leader

Nicholas Rose: 00:10:59

and the executive leader has to sit above everyone because installing or setting

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:07

up the technology for CBQ is not hard.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:10

I would say in a lot of sense, and Tony will jump in and probably say, there's

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:13

some subtle nuances and things like that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:15

But like, we're not doing rocket science, The things that make it harder where

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:19

delays come from are people and it's usually politics, That comes out of it

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:23

most, and I'll give a great example.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:26

You know, we've had two times.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:27

It's like who owns what the product book needs to look like.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:31

And if you haven't had a clear product definitions of how you want to go

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:35

sell something, how is the system supposed to handle it and take it?

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:39

And how is sales are supposed to handle and can vote and

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:42

configure and quote that, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:43

Especially if you're supposed to define what's on the back of

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:45

the truck, so to speak, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:47

For sales.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:48

Once the back of the truck is defined and that's where they can go sell,

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:51

lot of times we'll use some of this is like cells is selling a deck.

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:55

They don't care what nails are in those skews, whatever else is in the

Nicholas Rose: 00:11:59

deck or how many pieces of lumber they know they're selling a deck.

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:02

You're selling a solution.

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:03

You guys need to tell them what's in that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:05

But if they don't have that configured, Sales doesn't if they need to sell a two

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:10

story deck or a three story deck, how much more weight do they need to go have?

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:13

That's not defined easy enough for a person to understand.

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:16

You're never going to have it in place enough for a system to understand,

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:19

especially if there's too many decisions.

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:21

And so like, that's one great example where I would say probably 60 or 70

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:25

percent of CPQ projects like stall is ones like everything else is

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:29

specialized or they don't really have that defined yet for what, like the

Nicholas Rose: 00:12:33

80, 20 rule exists for their company,

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:36

You asked a question about, how the design process goes and

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:39

it made me chuckle but I think the design process always goes really smoothly.

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:43

all the people at the table are very excited about, Oh, we can automate

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:46

approvals and we can, remove all of these clicks I have to make.

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:49

And my email is going to decrease.

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:51

It's going to be great.

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:51

I love letting the system do the work, but it always breaks down when

Tony Tarantino: 00:12:57

it becomes real, like at the point of like, okay, now that we're no longer

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:00

going to remove Approvals from every single group of closed deal and you

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:05

have to trust the system to do its work.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:07

That's when everyone freaks out and that's what actually slows down the deal.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:10

So like early on, they love it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:12

They love the idea of automating.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:13

They love the idea of being removed from the process, but as it gets closer and

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:17

they get to a real point where, oh, no, I don't, I'm not gonna have eyes on every

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:20

single deal that goes through our system.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:22

I have to trust the system and trust the data.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:25

That's when everyone like, Oh, I got it freaks out and decides

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:28

that we have to slow down and they get scared of that change.

Tony Tarantino: 00:13:31

That's so important.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:32

Yeah, Tony makes a good point of this and that usually

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:34

times like, oh, well, we thought this work would be a lot quicker.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:38

yeah, but by the time we get to this point of approvals, or we get to

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:41

this point of we need to go live.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:43

We're not going to make that because everything that everyone's agreed on.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:46

They're going to stop at the one yard line and we're gonna have to go

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:49

back and you as an executive leader is going to have to push them to

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:52

make sure that they're okay with it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:54

And that's really hard for some people.

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:56

If you don't have like an executive sponsor for a design process

Nicholas Rose: 00:13:59

to help force those decisions saying, this is where we go.

Nicholas Rose: 00:14:03

The design process is easy, but that piece gets really rough.

Justin Norris: 00:14:06

I'm curious if there's a dividing line between where you

Justin Norris: 00:14:09

would recommend a company needs this sort of infrastructure in place.

Justin Norris: 00:14:13

And when you're like, you're good.

Justin Norris: 00:14:14

Like I'm thinking of.

Justin Norris: 00:14:15

new company rolls out a product and maybe they've got like tiers, like,

Justin Norris: 00:14:19

freemium Pro team, just very simple and they don't have that many salespeople.

Justin Norris: 00:14:25

Is there a place for like you're good keep going for a bit more

Justin Norris: 00:14:28

and you don't need this yet

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:30

It very much, and I hate this answer, but it's

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:32

the answer I'm going to give.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:33

It very much depends.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:34

and I think CTQ specifically is so dependent on the complexity for

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:38

product offering that if you have a.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:42

Fairly straightforward product.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:44

thinking about like us at Mendex, okay.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:45

It was, we sold a platform and that was it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:47

We never needed CPQ because it wasn't relevant regardless of how big we got.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:51

but if you have a fairly straightforward product that you can get by a lot longer

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:54

without introducing complexity to the CPQ.

Tony Tarantino: 00:14:56

But that being said, like if you have a, a lot of specific bundles and

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:00

packages and product configuration rules and all these different things

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:03

that, you know, are important.

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:05

To success of your customers.

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:07

And then I would even say earlier is probably better, like

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:10

earlier than you would think a CPQ is necessary is important.

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:13

So like, again, a long, non answer, but, the idea is it very much depends on

Tony Tarantino: 00:15:18

how complex your product configuration is and how you're trying to sell it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:22

Yeah.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:22

So my monetary answer back into like, depends on the

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:25

complexity of the product, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:27

So if you have something that has a lot more quote mine items, right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:31

And the cost of getting that wrong is higher on the customer

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:36

support or service side.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:37

And you're talking, you know, 200 and 500 K more cost to the business,

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:41

then there's probably a good reason.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:42

Like you should go look at a CPQ system, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:46

And that can be five reps, 10 reps.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:47

It doesn't really matter.

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:49

It'll depend on the ASP, what you have, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:51

But like, if you back into a system cost, you can get a CPQ system for

Nicholas Rose: 00:15:55

1500 K depending what you are for the volume of transactions, So like

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:00

from a customer standpoint, if that is a leakage in the funnel, that's

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:02

a great area to go at it from.

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:05

the sale side, if the cost of them from a time perspective is

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:09

saving them roughly around the same amount of costs in time, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:14

And it's easy way to go figure out if you cut the quoting processed for rep down to

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:18

an hour, hour times the number of costs.

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:21

600 hours that equals close to like, a hundred to 500 K.

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:26

And then, yeah, there's probably a good reason to go do a CPQ

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:30

from that standpoint, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:31

Because your ROI is gonna be anywhere from like five to 10 X at that point, and it'll

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:35

be an easy scaling conversation, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:16:37

that's the monetary answer backed into the complexity of the coding process.

Justin Norris: 00:16:41

It makes sense.

Justin Norris: 00:16:41

And so thinking about like CPQ as a system and just the process of rolling

Justin Norris: 00:16:46

that out, as I said, I've never done that hands on, but I've been adjacent to

Justin Norris: 00:16:51

many of them, most often in the context of like, we'd like to do this project,

Justin Norris: 00:16:54

but we have to wait till, you know, next fiscal year when the Salesforce

Justin Norris: 00:16:58

team is finished with their CPQ project, It's always this sort of like looming,

Justin Norris: 00:17:02

goblin under the bed or this, menacing thing that is going on in the background

Justin Norris: 00:17:07

somehow that's never going to end.

Justin Norris: 00:17:09

And so I'm just wondering why does this tend to be so bumpy and complicated?

Justin Norris: 00:17:12

We talked about the people side.

Justin Norris: 00:17:13

Are there other technical reasons?

Justin Norris: 00:17:15

Or is it really just, the organization ends up getting bogged down somewhere

Justin Norris: 00:17:18

along one of these milestones?

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:21

The organization usually gets bogged down on

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:23

one of these milestones, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:24

And a lot of times.

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:25

there are technically and I'll go into technical pieces, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:27

But they'll get bogged down and usually it's a lot of

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:30

rework back from the CPQ team.

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:32

But there are technical pieces and like if you're going to like

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:35

integrations between like a CBQ system within the CRM back to an ERP,

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:41

those get really complicated, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:43

And a lot of times too, those systems have to mirror each other, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:47

And there's like integration as tools such as like MuleSoft, and I usually would

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:52

recommend Boomi or something like that, those systems need to talk to each other.

Nicholas Rose: 00:17:56

Now, the problem that what makes it difficult is those systems have to sink.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:00

What I mean by that is the product book that is in CRM has to match the

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:04

product book in the finance side.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:07

Oftentimes, when this is a first time install at a company that has not

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:11

done this, they usually don't match, And finance is not taking an easy way

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:16

of looking at it for the contracts or something else for invoicing.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:20

And the sake of simplifying the process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:23

Or sales has done something different from what finance has, but

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:25

like that takes time to match up.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:28

And so like, we're going through a great example where we're having

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:30

to amend and do all the contracts for our customer back and rewriting

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:35

them back into the ERP system.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:38

So when we go back into the CPQ, they match back for when

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:42

a item gets sent across as a sales order back into NetSuite.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:46

And so like, those are some of the technical pieces that happen

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:49

that from a business process are.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:52

Arrive because they weren't doing it correctly, but that labor or

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:54

work has to happen to get it right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:18:57

And sometimes people don't realize that when they do the CPQ project,

Nicholas Rose: 00:19:00

because not a lot of people in the company, however, go do one, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:19:05

you're not like installing CPQs every year, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:19:08

So you don't have a lot of experience of that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:19:09

And that's why you should look at an agency, but those are the things

Nicholas Rose: 00:19:12

that happen that slow it down.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:14

Yeah.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:14

I think a couple of things come to mind for me.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:16

And I think that the big one, I mean, we talked about kind of the product catalog

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:19

and make sure that's well defined that's obviously important, but there's Very

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:23

often I find so much tribal knowledge that lives within sales groups, like

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:28

how they sell things, how they configure their products, how they configure their

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:31

product, it's not documented at all.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:33

you have a senior salesperson, it's all in their head.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:36

And like the process of getting that out, making it real, making it systematic

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:40

enough where you can build logic to support that is always very cumbersome.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:44

that's always a huge problem.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:46

So many companies have these sales guys that just know how to quote

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:49

and they've been doing it for a long time and they have never written

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:51

it down and that's a process.

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:54

Another thing to Nick's point is that you have these organizations

Tony Tarantino: 00:19:57

that have Salesforce teams because they use Salesforce every day.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:01

or CRM teams and buy Salesforce versus CPQ and they think they can just.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:05

Automate Salesforce within their CPQ, not realizing like how different those

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:09

functionalities are, and they don't necessarily play super well together.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:13

So I've seen a lot of my clients, have these really complex CPQ.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:18

that's all like automated with flows and apex and just like really complex

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:23

Salesforce specific functionality while under leveraging all of the

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:26

CPQ stuff that's built to be CPQ.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:28

So again, back to the point of.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:30

Make sure that you understand and are experts in the system that you're

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:34

using for your CPQ and not forcing your automation that you know how to build

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:39

to work with CPQ because that's going to have dashering that that's big time.

Justin Norris: 00:20:42

Tony I'm just really curious as you described that to dig

Justin Norris: 00:20:45

into like a concrete example, you could make one up if you like, but what's

Justin Norris: 00:20:48

like a configuration process and what would be like the CPQ way of doing it?

Justin Norris: 00:20:51

And then how do people duct tape it with Salesforce automation?

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:54

Not to get too technical and bore our audience,

Justin Norris: 00:20:56

No, we can go, technical.

Justin Norris: 00:20:57

They won't be bored.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:58

okay.

Tony Tarantino: 00:20:58

I think the big one that you see is when a quote is created, you

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:01

want to automate all of this stuff.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:03

you want to, when a quote is created, you want to automate that automatically

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:06

add this product and get with this price point and configure this

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:10

together and do all of this stuff.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:11

And because again, you know, Salesforce, you know, flow, it's a

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:15

very nice tool, very easy to use.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:16

So go create a flow to go do that.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:18

When reality.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:20

CPQ, Salesforce CPQ specifically is a product built on force.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:24

com, but has all this backend code that's running.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:27

That's based on actual individual records, price rolls, product rolls.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:31

So you basically go to the record, the tab in Salesforce, create a price roll.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:35

Create a product rule and it will allow you to do all of that

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:38

logic, within the interface of CPQ, because that already exists.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:41

If you automate on top of that, both of those pieces of logic are

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:45

functionality right at the same time,

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:47

and it's going to bog down your system.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:48

So like once people do that and then their quotes get, Large in

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:51

their system times out all the time.

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:53

They're like, what's going on?

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:54

It's because you're basically automating on top of already existing automation

Tony Tarantino: 00:21:58

because you didn't, properly utilize actual built for CPQ piece of automation.

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:03

And we've seen this multiple times, like that timeout

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:05

happens and you see your whole Salesforce instance timing out.

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:08

And so you're like, oh, Apex timeout issues, your CPU issues.

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:10

You're like, wait, this is a cloud instance.

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:13

Like, why is this happening?

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:14

Right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:22:14

And it's because you basically cut it in half.

Justin Norris: 00:22:16

Yeah, that's weird.

Justin Norris: 00:22:17

Hey, so they kind of get a car and then they hook it up to horses

Justin Norris: 00:22:20

and get the horses to pull the car without turning on the car's engine.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:23

That's a very, very good analogy.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:25

Cause there are no horses and I get it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:27

Like I had no Salesforce.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:27

I've been looking at Salesforce for a long

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:29

time.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:29

I bought a Salesforce product.

Tony Tarantino: 00:22:30

I should be able to use Salesforce, but that's not the reality.

Justin Norris: 00:22:33

That's really interesting.

Justin Norris: 00:22:34

And so like a lot of the things that we're trying to configure when we

Justin Norris: 00:22:36

think of like price books and products.

Justin Norris: 00:22:39

Make these things up.

Justin Norris: 00:22:40

And it was just in a conversation today about, their product marketing

Justin Norris: 00:22:43

team, like how many different ways you can slice and dice this.

Justin Norris: 00:22:45

You can have different plans that include features.

Justin Norris: 00:22:48

You can have core products and then like upsell products.

Justin Norris: 00:22:50

you can, Take the stuff that your system or your, product offering does and

Justin Norris: 00:22:55

arrange it in a lot of different ways.

Justin Norris: 00:22:57

do you technically see that this is under developed or is it over architected,

Justin Norris: 00:23:01

over engineered and should be simplified?

Justin Norris: 00:23:03

How do you see the impact here from a product marketing point of view?

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:06

I wouldn't necessarily say from product marketing, I have seen where

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:09

it gets away from product marketing and it gets overdeveloped, Like when you consider

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:13

like partner skews, Oh, well, we need to give every option to partner because

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:17

we need to give every option partner.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:18

We create 15, 000 different bundles.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:21

Nobody asked the question like, Oh, how many are they actually going to sell?

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:25

So then you end up only using like five skews out of a hundred and

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:28

everything else, which creates a more to maintain, um, in a bigger

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:31

playbook and everything else.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:33

But when it gets out of hands for product marketing, some point, But most of the

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:37

time it'll be overcomplicated, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:39

Oh, we need to have different versions because of this edge case to sell.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:43

Well, sales doesn't feel really confident that they need to have every option in

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:46

case they go down to, well, no sales.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:49

It goes back down to the 80, 20 rule.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:50

Like you guys only sold two of these bundles in the year.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:54

And so like, think a lot of people will come with like anecdotal evidence, not

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:57

really looking at factual information.

Nicholas Rose: 00:23:59

And so either way you go through the process, you have it for a year

Nicholas Rose: 00:24:02

and you go, all right, guys, this is how many bundles you actually

Nicholas Rose: 00:24:04

sold to this and then cut it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:24:05

But most of the time I see him being overly complicated.

Nicholas Rose: 00:24:09

I haven't really seen any prompts from people's overly simplifying it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:24:12

I mean, have you told me, I can't imagine any

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:14

I could, it's not necessarily overly simplifying, but I

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:17

do have a number, numerous examples in my head of companies that are paying for

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:20

CPQ and their CPQ instance is just a long list of products that their salesperson

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:25

are going in and searching for the right one and adding it, like, there are

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:28

scenarios like that where, because they don't have that process well defined,

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:33

they're just, I've done the bare minimum of CPQ and maybe are just using it for

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:38

the approval side of the house, which again, it may be there's a use case there.

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:42

There are elements of not using the capabilities.

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:45

Of CPQ as they're built meant to be used.

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:48

And I've seen that plenty of times as well.

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:50

there's honestly, I was thinking about it as you're asking that question and

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:52

I've seen both sides of the equation very often where it's like, see a lot

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:56

of like, why is this so complicated?

Tony Tarantino: 00:24:57

Your business process is that it's not that unique.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:00

And also a lot of other ones that are like.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:03

paying a lot of money for this application.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:04

You're not really using it as it's meant to be used.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:06

So I've definitely seen both sides of the coin for

Justin Norris: 00:25:08

Do you guys have a preferred like Goldilocks zone between

Justin Norris: 00:25:13

the place where every single feature is almost like its own product and.

Justin Norris: 00:25:17

as you're describing that.

Justin Norris: 00:25:18

I'm like, well, you could really just could use native Salesforce quotes

Justin Norris: 00:25:21

and native Salesforce products and just like build it up, you know, like

Justin Norris: 00:25:24

a list of ingredients in a recipe.

Justin Norris: 00:25:25

So there's that extreme.

Justin Norris: 00:25:27

And then there's the other extreme where like every single possible combination

Justin Norris: 00:25:30

is like bundled as a separate SKU and you have the 15, Like you also described,

Justin Norris: 00:25:35

what's the happy path in between there that gives you some efficiency of things

Justin Norris: 00:25:38

already being put together without making it too rigid hard to adapt to.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:43

It's honestly a really good question.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:44

It's something that we're still trying to figure out because again, it is complex.

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:48

and I think with CPQ specifically, because it's so dependent on,

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:52

again, the products and the product configuration, it all goes back to

Tony Tarantino: 00:25:55

that kind of monetary quantitative calculation you need to go do of like.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:00

If I were to bundle this out, how many deals am I making a year with

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:05

this particular configuration?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:07

How much money is it?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:08

How much time does it save my salespeople?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:10

there things that are often left off that is costing us revenue down the line?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:14

Like, it's really about finding those pain points and understanding,

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:18

quantitatively, like, where can we use our system to minimize time

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:22

that our salespeople are spending?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:23

Minimize mistakes, and I think that's kind of where you find that answer, and there's

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:27

not really a one size fits all here.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:29

I don't think it's all about the complexity of the product and in the

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:33

pains that they're currently feeling.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:35

all about doing that double click.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:36

And that's why discovery and understand the end to end process is so important

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:40

because I need to understand.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:42

What is their driver?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:43

Why are they doing this?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:44

What are their go to market process?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:45

Like, what are their salespeople actually selling?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:47

And when I do CPQ projects, I listen to sales calls.

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:49

I will take time and I will just listen to how are the salespeople talking

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:54

about this product to their clients?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:55

Like, how are they bundling these conversations?

Tony Tarantino: 00:26:59

I think it's really, really important in, telling me what I need to know about

Tony Tarantino: 00:27:02

how they're thinking about it is how I want to make sure that I build it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:27:07

So their language is.

Tony Tarantino: 00:27:08

Yeah,

Justin Norris: 00:27:10

Right.

Justin Norris: 00:27:10

Cause for SAS, you have to mirror the selling process.

Justin Norris: 00:27:14

It's not like with your deck example, and I have a, brother in law who's a carpenter

Justin Norris: 00:27:18

and builds decks and he's kind of got it in his head where you can say, all right,

Justin Norris: 00:27:21

I'm going to build a deck, it's this big.

Justin Norris: 00:27:23

I know I need this much lumber, this many nails, this many screws.

Justin Norris: 00:27:26

Like you.

Justin Norris: 00:27:27

can kind of figure that out.

Justin Norris: 00:27:28

But with SaaS, it's like you can just do it any which way.

Justin Norris: 00:27:30

It's all just make believe, so to speak.

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:33

Well, and it gets even more complicated when you do

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:35

like software and product, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:37

So there's a company we were worked with and did warehouse

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:39

spots and software along with that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:41

That's a really complicated selling process gets really costly too.

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:46

So going back to the Goldilocks answer, it really depends on the product and

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:51

offer anything more than anything else for the complexity of that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:54

but like, to your point, like that tribal knowledge, like someone knows it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:27:58

It's just, how do you pull it out and get it written down into a good structure?

Justin Norris: 00:28:01

So getting opinionated about tech for a second.

Justin Norris: 00:28:03

Do you have an ideal stack?

Justin Norris: 00:28:04

No budget, just put in the best of breed for CPQ tech.

Justin Norris: 00:28:08

What would your stack look like?

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:10

I think it depends on what is the CRM and what is the ERP,

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:14

those are the first two questions, because a lot of times we see a

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:17

lot of Salesforce and NetSuite.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:20

then the next question comes down to is like, how complicated is the quote

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:23

and how many line items for the quote?

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:25

if they're in HubSpot, like, I mean, the HubSpot feature for quoting is can

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:29

get you pretty far, honestly, most of the feature sets in HubSpot, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:32

It goes, it's a mile wide and it goes an inch deep, but like a lot of

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:34

people don't need much more than that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:37

So I think those are the questions we ask is like, all right,

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:39

how complicated is the quote?

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:41

What CRM instance in ERP?

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:44

So then, it's not a really complicated, quote process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:46

I would stick to like a Salesforce or Steelbrick, Because still, I like it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:51

It's nice in that sense, because.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:52

You don't have to do a lot of customization.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:54

It's pretty, like, straightforward.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:57

on the quote guide path.

Nicholas Rose: 00:28:58

for most businesses, it will work really, really well.

Nicholas Rose: 00:29:01

When you get into, like, SaaS or subscription offerings, like,

Nicholas Rose: 00:29:04

Tony, you've got more thoughts about some of those other pieces.

Nicholas Rose: 00:29:07

what would you like?

Nicholas Rose: 00:29:08

It's

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:08

another thing that I think is really unique about CPQ it

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:11

could include so many different things like CPQ can just be quoted, can just

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:15

be guided selling, but it can also include your closed deal approvals that

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:19

can include your contract management, it can include maybe some CPQs that

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:23

can extend beyond also is like a light ERP so like document generation, quote

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:28

generation, it can do all those different things, And when you're evaluating

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:32

the tool that you want to use, like which of those are important to you?

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:35

Subscription management, another one, like Salesforce CPQ is not a

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:38

great subscription management tool.

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:39

So that maybe go to Zora route or you said there's so many different

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:42

variables of different pieces of functionality that you can buy within.

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:47

A CPQ instance.

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:48

It's about, finding what's the most important to you, what you're

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:51

going to use, and then picking the best and breed of those individual.

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:54

And I do like Salesforce CPQ because it's pretty good at all of that.

Tony Tarantino: 00:29:57

it provides an element of, all of those individual pieces pretty

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:01

well, but like, if you really wanted a super advanced approval.

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:04

process as part of your quote approval process, there's probably a better tool

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:08

that does a little bit better than you.

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:09

So it's just all about finding the different pieces of

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:11

functionality that is CPQ driven.

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:13

what do you care the most about?

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:15

What are you going to leverage the most out of that group?

Tony Tarantino: 00:30:17

And then you decide from there.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:18

Yeah, and I would say most of the time in that sense,

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:20

like if we see, like it'd be like a Salesforce instance, CRM NetSuite.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:26

You do like a SteelBrick or the Salesforce CPQ, and then you do like a

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:29

NetSuite suite billing if it's a SaaS or subscription management, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:32

Because like there's not really a good subscription management

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:34

feature set out of that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:35

So it just depends on what you're going for.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:38

those are kind of like the main setups.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:39

I would probably say a large portion of them are out there.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:43

if you have a really good complex subscription management piece.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:47

That matters and kind of goes up and down and like Zora would probably be better.

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:51

especially if you want to do a lot of customization, because if

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:53

you're doing a lot of customization, that's where Salesforce, I would

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:57

say doesn't do so well, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:30:58

Because it's not, set up for that, you're using the wrong tool.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:02

If you need to build your own adventure, so to speak, right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:05

And it's got a lot of the complexities into it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:08

You just can't customize it as much.

Justin Norris: 00:31:09

So you've got CRM and I think we all know what that is.

Justin Norris: 00:31:12

You've got ERP, which is your finance playground.

Justin Norris: 00:31:15

And then CPQ, which is more about how do salespeople configure a quote

Justin Norris: 00:31:20

in terms of adding products and SKUs and bundles and all those things.

Justin Norris: 00:31:24

And then there's this, CLM or, contract life cycle management.

Justin Norris: 00:31:28

Like whole document generation piece.

Justin Norris: 00:31:29

Is that an optional thing for some companies or is that

Justin Norris: 00:31:32

always part of the solution?

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:34

again, it goes back to how complicated is the contract, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:38

It's Let's take SAS, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:38

Cause I think a lot of people follow SAS and it's usually the living piece of that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:43

Some companies you'll have legal review every contract, And there's going to

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:46

be a lot of pieces that need to be like redline changed and et cetera.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:51

And that usually needs a full CLM contract life financial for that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:55

And, getting a system in like that place, like DocuSign or something's

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:57

going to be really important, or Congo.

Nicholas Rose: 00:31:59

And I example, those are usually the main two, I would say, but those

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:03

are needed because you just have to have the legal reference and

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:06

framework that's in the company, but you'll have some companies that are

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:09

clicked to buy product led growth.

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:12

Doesn't even have to touch a contract.

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:14

And you don't need it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:15

It depends on your coding process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:32:17

Which I hate that answer, but it does.

Justin Norris: 00:32:19

I think about, accounting systems and I, funnily enough, a lot

Justin Norris: 00:32:23

of my first jobs, when I was going through college, we're kind of in the

Justin Norris: 00:32:26

accounting world, I was like a bookkeeper.

Justin Norris: 00:32:28

I've worked with ACPAC, QuickBooks.

Justin Norris: 00:32:30

And so I have a decent understanding of accounting systems.

Justin Norris: 00:32:33

They don't tolerate, data quality issues.

Justin Norris: 00:32:37

to the same degree Like we talk about dirty data and CRM.

Justin Norris: 00:32:39

I'm not saying every accounting system is perfect, but you need

Justin Norris: 00:32:41

to balance at the end of the day.

Justin Norris: 00:32:44

in this business process, which is about actually putting data back and

Justin Norris: 00:32:48

forth between those two worlds of like sort of order and then sometimes semi

Justin Norris: 00:32:52

anarchy, how do you bridge the data quality gap between those two places?

Tony Tarantino: 00:32:56

the major difference here, again, every,

Tony Tarantino: 00:32:59

CPQ go to cash project that we do.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:01

There's always going to be an element of, manual process.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:04

And I think that very point of when you close a deal, when an account is

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:07

transferring to a customer, like that data integrity is so, so important,

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:11

that's where you really, really need a deal desk, team, a process of someone

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:16

that is confirming that data, making sure that that data is correct before it

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:21

enters the next stage in its life cycle.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:23

So like that part.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:23

It totally agreed.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:24

So important.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:25

You can not have dirty data in your, in your ERP.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:27

You can have dirty data in your finance system because revenue impacting mistakes.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:32

as much as I'm automation and system driven, you need humanize sometimes.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:36

And that's like the scenario where I always.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:39

We'll say, Hey, let's, think about who needs to confirm this deal.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:42

Who needs to get from the data and make sure that the paper

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:44

contract matches your quote.

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:46

And again, CPQ will help with a lot of that, but there's always needs to be

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:49

an element of humanize here because of, to your very point, you can't have data

Tony Tarantino: 00:33:53

mistakes in your accounting system.

Nicholas Rose: 00:33:55

you go back to the original question.

Nicholas Rose: 00:33:56

I was just like, why did we start Hyperscayle?

Nicholas Rose: 00:33:58

Like, this is kind of like the exact reason.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:00

Cause if you go with like an implementer, like a conga or whatever else out

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:04

there, that's totally around that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:06

Like they're going to focus on that part of the data and the technology piece going

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:11

in there, which is like perfectly fine.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:12

Like that's what they're set for.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:14

I'm not trying to.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:15

Dog on them, so to speak, but like, they're not going to come back and ask

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:18

the business process to the business question back to you as the person of

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:22

like, how does my closing process or business, deal that's going to go work.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:26

And if you don't have one, if you've never done one, like

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:28

it's the blind, lean, the blind.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:31

And it's important in this case, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:32

Because the finance data piece of data quality should

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:34

never even be in a question.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:35

If the business process or the deal does process it's closed very well,

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:39

because like that is the Last line of defense, so to speak, to get into the

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:43

finance system and make sure it's right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:34:46

And everything is good and to ensure data quality happens on the finance side.

Justin Norris: 00:34:50

Is it usually only when a deal closes that

Justin Norris: 00:34:53

ERP kind of enters the picture?

Justin Norris: 00:34:55

In terms of passing data over, or is it before that even sometimes.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:01

deal closes cancellations, renewals in those aspects.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:05

those will be big things I would say, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:07

Like contract and money generating events.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:10

but you could also have from the ERP side back into the CRM side of like.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:15

Bill collections, Dunning process, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:17

Late for that piece.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:19

you know, something issue and payment that can come up through that, you could also

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:23

have, you know, renewals that come back from a time perspective too, depending

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:25

on how big you want to go through it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:27

But then you'll also tie back into like support pieces, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:30

Or credits.

Nicholas Rose: 00:35:32

So, short answer is no, but there's a way longer

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:34

Yeah.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:35

I think, I think my point to be there ERP as soon as possible.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:42

But you would need a really, really, really tight data management process.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:45

You need a really tight integration though.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:47

Exactly.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:47

Like when that data is being pushed over, when it's updated, like you need

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:51

to have that process really well defined and feel really good about your data.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:55

that's why I, most of the clients that we work with don't have that.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:57

So that's why I always say.

Tony Tarantino: 00:35:59

Wait until the deal closes, wait until human eyes have been on it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:01

And then we'll push that data because that's when I feel most

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:03

comfortable with it in a perfect world.

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:05

Like if I had more control over the end of my process, I do agree.

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:09

It would be nice to have it there earlier, but that's not the world that we live in.

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:12

Like most of the time there's data is not ready to be pushed to the

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:14

RP until again, it's been closed.

Tony Tarantino: 00:36:17

And we've gone through that kind of deal desk process.

Justin Norris: 00:36:19

So then when I think about the role of Rev Ops here,

Justin Norris: 00:36:23

obviously, quoting is inherently a sales and a Rev Ops process, but the cash

Justin Norris: 00:36:28

part, like it's much more finance led and, contracts it's very much legal.

Justin Norris: 00:36:34

and yet I do see like.

Justin Norris: 00:36:36

Quote to cash very often listed as one of the responsibilities

Justin Norris: 00:36:39

and Rev Ops job descriptions.

Justin Norris: 00:36:40

So I guess my question is how did Rev Ops kind of end up at the center here?

Justin Norris: 00:36:43

Is this a good thing for the profession of Rev Ops?

Justin Norris: 00:36:46

And what is the role that, that we as a discipline have to play?

Nicholas Rose: 00:36:49

So I think it's a good thing.

Nicholas Rose: 00:36:51

RevOps just entered into this role, right, because, like, back to my

Nicholas Rose: 00:36:53

original statement, like, everyone owns it, but no one owns it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:36:56

And if no one owns it, someone needs to fill in that role.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:01

And usually RobOps is the best person to go fill in that role because they're

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:04

already interfaced with everyone.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:06

And they can understand it'd be like the art writers, right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:09

Or mediators between the different groups.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:12

And they can also lead the group down the right path.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:16

Making sure they can explain why do we need to do X and Y and the

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:19

reason why does you have impact on this person's impact and job?

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:23

Because most of the time, if you have legal, they don't understand

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:26

the sales process necessarily.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:28

It's very few between, or legal doesn't understand the

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:30

finance process, and vice versa.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:32

you got people trying to learn about the different roles and

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:35

everything else that slows it down.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:36

And so I do think this is good, and it's growing more of

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:41

what RevOps and ownership is.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:43

Now, does that have some negative impacts and other impacts?

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:48

negative is not the right word, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:50

But like, if Rev Ops is filling these roles, I think it does

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:52

have some other impacts.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:54

Into the organizations around like system ownership and things like that, right.

Nicholas Rose: 00:37:58

Between like the business process, who owns actually

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:01

doing the work of the system.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:02

Cause I see that shifting and moving up more towards Rev

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:05

Ops of owning the full thing.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:08

We're like, what is IT's role in that?

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:10

And that's the whole conversation we can get to later on.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:12

But like, that's where I see like that trade off though, is because

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:14

they have to go fill that role.

Justin Norris: 00:38:16

And yeah, you, kind of anticipated where my

Justin Norris: 00:38:18

next thought was going to be around like IT business systems.

Justin Norris: 00:38:21

There's a lot of companies now where you have a go to market systems

Justin Norris: 00:38:24

role or business systems function.

Justin Norris: 00:38:26

It's kind of IT with another label that are owning a lot of these.

Justin Norris: 00:38:29

how do you see RevOps interfacing with these or what's the ideal ownership

Justin Norris: 00:38:34

state from your point of view?

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:36

Tony and I have this debate and conversation

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:38

every like, I swear three months.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:41

And I feel like he keeps coming more and more to my side.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:44

I'm going to make a statement that I think it is phasing

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:51

themselves out of a job, right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:55

that might scare a lot of people or some people might argue with that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:38:57

But if you think about it, you go to Scott breakers slides of how much technology

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:00

you've had in the last, what, 10 years, Like we've had like 150, 200, 000,

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:04

different pieces of technology that's been commoditized for the business user.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:11

The it side doesn't understand the business.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:14

They've gone deep down the path of code and everywhere else.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:17

And we come, all land from index of low code development,

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:20

no code, things like that.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:22

They have lost grass of what the business is, or they need to have requirements to

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:27

a certain key, which is kind of shifted them down the organization overall.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:32

And so like, no, it's it's still important.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:34

I think they're still important.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:35

So I don't say like you diminish, get rid of them.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:37

They're gone.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:38

But the roles are diminished very much down to like governance because a lot of

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:43

times we see is like RebOps taking more ownership of the the business operations

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:47

team because like they're closer to the business and the business process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:51

It goes off to it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:52

And a lot of times the sales organizations, the marketing

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:56

organizations who are paying the budgets for those people don't get the

Nicholas Rose: 00:39:59

answers that they need and ownership.

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:02

it's an interesting question you asked us because I feel like that's more

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:05

and more coming toward the rev ops and more coming towards the business side.

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:08

And that other section is not necessarily with it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:11

and it handles more governance and security, which could be

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:13

a whole other topic debate.

Nicholas Rose: 00:40:14

We've been going to for hours on end.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:17

I spent most of my career in an I.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:19

T.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:19

focus role in an I.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:20

T.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:20

group.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:20

I.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:20

T.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:20

has been my managers for a good portion of my career, and I do agree that I.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:25

T.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:27

Is that close to the business?

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:28

in today's world.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:29

And we deal with this with our clients all the time.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:30

They're becoming blockers more than becoming enablers.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:33

And that's a inherent problem for it.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:36

that being said, I also scared of a world where kind of rev offs,

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:39

business focused people are owning your data and owning your systems.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:42

And like, they don't have the understanding of governance data

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:45

integrity and all the different things you need to think about and security

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:48

and all these things that are super relevant from an IT perspective.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:52

It's going to be lost on a business focused robots person.

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:55

So again, I don't disagree that it needs to potentially reevaluate the role they

Tony Tarantino: 00:40:58

play in a lot of these organizations, but there is a place for them and

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:02

there's a place for find the right balance between the red tape and the

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:08

making sure that we're being as safe as possible and minimizing defects and

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:11

minimize data issues versus just getting in the way of actual value creation.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:17

From a rev ops group from, with our systems of records.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:20

it's a tough, and I mostly agree with Nick at this point where he asked me a

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:23

year ago and it was very, very different.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:26

but do think there's a place for it, especially if we become CPQ, because

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:29

we talked about CPQ as being that true hub of all these different systems

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:33

of record and revenue generating.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:35

processes.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:36

And like, if.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:36

You don't understand the integration.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:37

If you don't understand how the system architecture of how data moves up and

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:41

down your processes, you can cause some major upstream and downstream impact.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:45

So I do think there's a role there.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:47

But again, ownership of the development and solutioning of a CBQ it probably

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:54

should be rev ops with it support from a development standpoint.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:57

It's providing the governance that isn't necessary.

Tony Tarantino: 00:41:59

Okay.

Justin Norris: 00:41:59

It's funny, like many things, I find this problem, it has like a

Justin Norris: 00:42:03

few, spectrums, and it's hard to maximize both sides of it, but like, you want

Justin Norris: 00:42:07

your people working on these projects to be very close to the business, to have

Justin Norris: 00:42:11

business acumen, so that's like, alright, RevOps, or people embedded in functions,

Justin Norris: 00:42:15

so that they understand requirements, and so that they're thinking more about

Justin Norris: 00:42:19

the business side and not just, you know, the it only looking at things through the

Justin Norris: 00:42:23

lens of technology and governance and this fortress mentality at the same time, you

Justin Norris: 00:42:27

don't want people who lack kind of respect for elegance and architecture and systems.

Justin Norris: 00:42:33

Cause then you end up with technical debt and then you end

Justin Norris: 00:42:35

up with things poorly implemented.

Justin Norris: 00:42:37

So that speaks more to like it skills, specialized domain knowledge,

Justin Norris: 00:42:41

centralization, so that those people can work well together.

Justin Norris: 00:42:43

So like there's this tension all the time.

Justin Norris: 00:42:45

And.

Justin Norris: 00:42:46

I don't know how you end up with the perfect happy medium

Justin Norris: 00:42:49

between the two things.

Justin Norris: 00:42:50

I think we're yet to figure that out.

Nicholas Rose: 00:42:51

in my experience so far, the last 20 years, I

Nicholas Rose: 00:42:56

would actually argue with it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:42:58

You've had more technical debt being created within organizations because

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:03

they don't know the business process.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:05

They've gotten so far away.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:07

Like when the CMO has so much technology, I think that has been

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:10

the Genesis of it because they've always said, Oh, we can't support you.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:13

Go off on your own and run Marketo and everything else that you can go

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:17

do it because we don't understand.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:18

And it's not the core business.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:21

I think that's when it has lost the value into the organization because

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:26

you have shadow it on the marketing side, basically already at that point.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:31

We don't want to call it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:32

I mean, that's the genesis of

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:33

marketing operations and it's just, coming back down to the phone.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:37

Right?

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:37

Like all the marketing technologies have created all the sales

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:39

technologies have been created.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:41

All the customer success technology has been created.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:43

I see so many people in customer success of who runs gain site or

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:47

to Tango, not one person in it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:51

Who's doing the integrations, not one person in it because they've

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:54

gotten so far away or they gotten so non technical they missed with it.

Nicholas Rose: 00:43:58

And so the technical debt, they have no control over back in the business.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:03

And they've gotten away with it now for a finance or an ERP or governance was like

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:08

the finance pieces to manage the dollars.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:11

It's been great there.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:12

Cybersecurity it's been great there, but they moved so far away

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:17

from it that they've lost control.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:19

And I think operations has to stand there.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:22

my big view is you'll see a lot of operations.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:25

Or business ops systems owning the systems more and more specifically when you get

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:29

into Salesforce, and they'll have it getting sucked into those sides instead

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:35

of being in the finance or other areas.

Nicholas Rose: 00:44:37

And like 10 or 15 years,

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:39

make sure you have the right personnel in those roles.

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:40

you need that technical RevOps.

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:42

And again, I think the idea of, RevOps as truly removing those silos, like being

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:47

marketing ops, sales ops, finance ops, IT ops, CS ops, truly a RevOps organization

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:52

has people that can do it all.

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:54

And I do think that's the route that our group should go, because that's, going to.

Tony Tarantino: 00:44:59

Allow us to add the most value, an organization down the line.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:02

I can own help desk.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:03

They can own governance.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:04

They own security, That's where we go through and you'll see the systems

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:08

pieces go under the rev ops organization

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

it's super interesting.

Justin Norris: 00:45:11

And I've seen a variety of structures, but I think the one, eternal principle

Justin Norris: 00:45:16

that you've alluded to is like, it has to be responsive to the business.

Justin Norris: 00:45:18

As soon as a function gets.

Justin Norris: 00:45:20

Far away from the business.

Justin Norris: 00:45:22

Inevitably, the business just sort of recreates it closer to itself

Justin Norris: 00:45:26

and that's never a good dynamic.

Justin Norris: 00:45:28

So, we'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Justin Norris: 00:45:31

I want to thank you both.

Justin Norris: 00:45:32

This has been just like super educational for me to flesh

Justin Norris: 00:45:35

out this area of my knowledge.

Justin Norris: 00:45:36

Hope it was equally so for some of the folks listening where CPQ

Justin Norris: 00:45:43

or anything else RevOps related?

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:45

I would go straight to our website at hyperscayle.com.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:48

Reach out to us, connect to us

Justin Norris: 00:45:50

And that's,

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:51

hyper scale with Y S C A Y L E.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:53

the person who owns Hyperscayle.

Nicholas Rose: 00:45:55

com has been selling airplanes for 40 or 50 years, so we can't touch that one.

Justin Norris: 00:46:00

All right.

Justin Norris: 00:46:00

Thanks guys.

Justin Norris: 00:46:01

It was really great catching up and let's hope to speak to you again.

Nicholas Rose: 00:46:04

Thanks.

Nicholas Rose: 00:46:04

It was awesome.

Tony Tarantino: 00:46:05

Appreciate you,

Tony Tarantino: 00:46:06

tony-tarantino_1_07-11-2024_160501: Jason.