If Your Dashboard Isn't Changing Behavior, What's the Point?

00:13 Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into the world of revops, the function that's quietly becoming the backbone of every AI powered go to market motion. I have Chantelle Herschel on the show today and she is a revops leader with over a decade of experience in the space. She recently made the jump to sauna benefits after a long run at Hawkeridge Systems. Here's where we're focused on today. Chantelle's been in the trenches building systems from scratch and she has some really strong opinions on what actually works and what a revops leader should be focused on. In particular, she really looks at items like cost to value ratio when she's looking at software evaluation. She's heavy into flow charts, everything about lead routing from the outside looking in lead routing seems like it be simple. It is not. So we're going to dive into a little bit of that today. She also has a strong view as to what the future of what revenue operation should look like. So we're going to talk about the system she's put in place in her first year at Sana, how she evaluates new tools and what vendors get wrong when selling into someone like her in her seat. So. All right, let's get into it. Hey, Chantel, thank you so much for being here today talking about rev ops and AI. Welcome to the show.

01:20 Chantel Hirschel: Thank you, Warren, for having me. I'm happy to be here.

01:22 Warren Kucker: Awesome, awesome. So first, give us a little bit about your background, your transition at Hawkerage Systems into a revenue operations role, your evolution there, and then how things are going at your first six months at Asana Benefits.

01:35 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, sounds good. So I, it's funny, I actually have a degree in international relations. That's what my degree is in. It's not actually in business. But I graduated in the tail end of 2012, which was the very end of the recession, I'm sure you remember. And I took a job at a little company called Quest Integration that was founded on Craigslist. And it said you needed Microsoft skills. And I said to myself, I have Microsoft skills. And I actually got the job because I'd gone to high school with the owner's son and he remembered me and it was a good high school. So he took a chance on me even my international relations degree. That company eventually did get bought out by Hawker systems. So it looks on my resume like I've been there for about 12 years because it was essentially like a very linear career path there. When I was at Quest, I got to play around in Goldmine CRM, which if you've ever heard of Goldmine, it is like an ancient CRM that was on a like physical server. and I got to help us migrate for the first time to Salesforce. And we didn't do that until like 2016. And we ended up doing, yeah, I ended up learning how to build just tons of things. I had full control over the system. I got to play and then we got acquired by Hawk Ridge and I joined as pretty much their marketing operations leader because I do love Mops. Like Mops is always gonna have this deep spot in my soul. And at the time that Mops team did cover lead routing and it just eventually naturally progressed when they wanted a rev ops leader to take on the sales ops team too. So took that in and it was one of those moments where Hawkerage is a great company but I kind of realized like I probably need more industry experience in other areas and it's time to just like spread my wings a little bit. was, I'm only 35, so pretty young to have been already a director for a few years and I realized that if probably wasn't gonna retire there. And so it was time to do things. And it was hard to get a new job with 12 years on your resume, which feels odd because when we were younger, we were taught, hey, you're supposed to stay and loyalty will be rewarded. And it was like staying there, but it was harder to get a new job. Like people weren't convinced I was ready to move on. But SANA did take me and it's been a great experience. Totally different world, right? We're in like a startup space now. Very different than an established 20 plus year company at Hawkeridge. Smaller team again, I really enjoy that hundred person-ish state of a company. There's a lot more pivoting you can do rapidly. And yeah, it's been great. So it's kind of been my journey for the last 12 years, which is crazy.

04:24 Warren Kucker: That's awesome. Yeah. It may seem kind of foreign. And so I'm 40. So just like, I'd say five or six years ahead of you. Same deal. I went to college. You just thought about going into a corporate role and I got my first job at UPS and I thought I was gonna be the CEO of UPS. I thought I'd be there for 40 years.

04:40 Chantel Hirschel: So.

04:40 Warren Kucker: Right? Like that was just like, that was kind of the baseline default. Like it was almost like leave it to Beaver in 2005. Right? Like it didn't make any sense. Right? I feel like I don't know that that's shifted entirely. I assume they go into the workforce understanding that their first role will probably transition in two years, right?

04:56 Chantel Hirschel: I think they do because, you know, I mean, part of it was my dad retired from the same company after like however long he'd been there for forever. And so I had that mentality, but I remember like when I watched people negotiate for like salaries and like not take jobs the first time, like when the people who came not in the middle of the recession came out, like, then they were leaving and like going up to other ones. I was like so confused. Yes, I would say that, you know, I mean, you see on people's profiles now, like exit counts. in the startup space and it's just a completely different thing. The average, I think, millennial is like two years max.

05:32 Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah, it's how you get job pay increases now. It's just switching, right? It's a whole different world.

05:36 Chantel Hirschel: Mm-hmm.

05:37 Warren Kucker: But I still get, when I'm coaching folks on like job, like finding and seeking and just career placement, everyone's still worried about looking like a job hopper. And I'm like, listen, I don't like, that's never come up. As long as you're not leaving every four months, right? Like every two

05:49 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah. Yeah.

05:51 Warren Kucker: years, especially in sales, where like the average tenure of a rep is like 2.3 years, the average tenure of a CRO and like growth sales is like 1.8, like 1.8 years. Two-year stint isn't job-hopping anymore, which has its pros and cons, but it's funny to think that that wasn't how it always looked like. It doesn't seem like that. Now it seems like it's ridiculous to think that you would be at Quest for 40 years, right?

06:12 Chantel Hirschel: place for any time. Yeah, well, there's no pensions. There's no the things that existed then.

06:16 Warren Kucker: No, right. I lost a pension. I had one. cut pensions when I was at UPS and then they bought me out of it. So I had a pension, right? But there's no, there's,

06:23 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah.

06:24 Warren Kucker: RSUs is the only thing that's holding anyone to anything anymore, right? Restricted stock.

06:28 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, it's just, yeah.

06:30 Warren Kucker: I digress. That's fantastic. So great. So you've moved on to a new company. So like, it's interesting because so then Sana was like kind of your first, like, how do I analyze what I should be working on first, right? Like kind of role, right? Like, You were, you just kind of like grown with Queston and Hawk Ridge. Like now you're at a new role. How did you, what was your first three months like? How did you analyze what your priorities should be? And like, what were those priorities? What did you figure out?

06:57 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, so I is like, I think sometimes, know, rev ops loves to come in and say, don't build a dashboard. Like that's like a big language thing online right now with it. It's not just dashboards and like that is true, but if like they don't even have like basic dashboards, they do need those to see what they're doing. So I had to do a lot of basics. So I set up some dashboards that were more effective. I built in forecasting, like I turned on the forecasting model. and Salesforce kind of got those goals entered, know, did some of those things that were, they might seem basic, but I think that often in rev ops, we think it has to be this shining like overhaul, but sometimes like the basics and the solids and like getting those into place, especially if you're in like a company that's been in rapid growth, you need to go in and like clean up some of the cobwebs and like structure things correctly and get them. get the base ready for all those bigger projects that you want to do later. And so we did a lot of that, right? We did a lot of like analyzing how things are flowing. They looked at processes. You know, I did basic things. Like I went and watched some of my team enter data and I was like, why do we have all these fields? And so deleting those fields. And we intend to do an even bigger overhaul of that pretty soon because we changed, Saanis changed how it's done business dramatically since it first started. And there's a lot of stuff in there that just doesn't need to be there anymore. And so did a lot of that. They were in the middle of, they knew they wanted to decommission gamesite because it was just too expensive for what it was worth. And so we had to like talk about that and rebuilding all of like those flows in there into the new system. I also like, that meant that I was reading emails that hadn't been like really evaluated for a while. And... you know, working with the marketing team to get those updated and look good again. they, you know, that helped the marketing team already wanted to do a little bit of like an updated look. And so it gave them the opportunity to do that across the board and like have consistent branding, which I think some people think that rev ops, you know, again, they often think rev ops is just sales ops, but it's not. I got deeply involved with the marketing team almost immediately when I joined, because I think it's important that you're connecting. all the pieces there, right? And then we have lots of different aspects of our business. And so I was kind of just up in everybody's business asking what they were up to and how I could

09:29 Warren Kucker: Is there?

09:29 Chantel Hirschel: help. And yeah, a lot of watching, a lot of small fixes that made lots of like pain points go away. Yeah.

09:40 Warren Kucker: awesome. You know, so when I talk to rev ops leaders, I hear that I hear the same thing all the time. They are in a new role or let's say they're consulting or they're an engagement. And it's immediately like a dashboard exercise, right? Like, I don't know who's saying don't talk about dashboards. I'm not in that that Reddit thread. let's but on top of like, It's always this, right? Like it's either that they don't have it or they're not looking at the right numbers. And when they're not looking at the right numbers, like drastically so, not like a little bit around the fringe, right? Like this is, why do you think that is? Every leader comes in and says that, does it, and then like there's no one that you go in and you're like, oh, this has been done. Why do you think there's that gap? Either it's not happening or like it's just not correct.

10:23 Chantel Hirschel: I think there's like two sides of it. And I've done massive dashboard builds that were like these complex things. I was like, yes. And then I've had people not use them. And

10:34 Warren Kucker: Right.

10:35 Chantel Hirschel: I think that the thing I think that's always interesting about rev ops and that can be almost tough is that you in general, as a rev ops leader, looking at more of a full scope picture of the business, right? So you're looking at those pitfalls. in certain areas and so like sometimes rev ops leaders just go build the dashboard that they think makes sense and doesn't like make sense to anybody else and they'll try to force it. I've definitely done that and those numbers probably are important but you haven't convinced anybody that those are important if that makes sense like they're they're worried about you know like how many holidays there were and you know and it's almost more about looking at what the other team across the way did rather than like your own success rate. And so, and I've had that happen where you're building these dashboards that are about like proving which team's doing what wrong, right? Those can happen. And then sometimes I think they don't listen to their sales leaders or their marketing leaders about what's actually important. That happens too, I think a fair amount of the time. And so they didn't even try to hear it. I also think that the biggest gap with dashboards is there's usually too much information.

11:50 Warren Kucker: Yeah

11:51 Chantel Hirschel: I try to get people to believe in like a big five, right? Like pick the five metrics that matter. And you can have like additional graphs. Like in my perfect dashboards, there's like five big metrics across the top and then like breakdowns by rep or whatever below it. But like, let's, what are the metrics that you're actually going to look at? And I think I saw it in an article once and it was like people become consumed by data like they have data and they just want to have more and they want to have more and they want to have more and they want to have more but why and that's where like that was a big when I read that article was like a big like hit point for me of like if your dashboard isn't driving you to change your behavior then what's the point? And so I think a lot of dashboards when you're talking about them, all that said, it was a long rambling way of saying like, most of the time dashboards don't get built to drive behavior. They're built just to look at numbers and that shouldn't be what they're doing. They need to drive

12:44 Warren Kucker: Right. Right. Yeah, it's almost like,

12:48 Chantel Hirschel: behavior.

12:49 Warren Kucker: yeah, like you're doing it because you are worried that there's gonna be like a number that's hidden that no one knows about. That's like the holy grail number. Something's going wrong and you don't know about it. But really like, you need to treat your leadership team, both sales, but more so the non-sales leaders around. Like you would treat like early reps. You don't go and implement the most complex methodologies early on. You make sure they know how to do discovery, right? So in the same token, a rev ops leader like yourself that gets hired, they want you to have a long-term vision as to how to guide the organization towards the right paths to the best revenue, right? So you come in and you do that, but oftentimes, people don't understand the simple relationship between pipe generation and win rates and how that impacts, right? Like, great, you have a 60-day sales cycle, you're at 4X pipe, and your win rate's at 18%, right? Those numbers are gonna show that you're not gonna hit your target, right? So we're like, Or it's like, great, we have a pipeline problem. We have nine X pipeline. Well, listen, like a 30 year deals have been in flow for 450 days and you have a 60 day sales cycle. Right. So it's like the simplest. And then honestly, like even sales leadership doesn't fully grasp in a way that makes sense. And then you come in and be like, great, like rep efficiency and LTV to CAC three years from now is much better on inbound pipeline and partner referrals. And then everyone and that combination doesn't necessarily work well. So I wonder like There's a crawl, walk, run situation where like you're brought in to run, not off with leadership. You assume you can run right away, but honestly, you probably need to crawl. It's pretty simple how pipe and win rate works. And I still have to explain it all the time. Is that, is that seem fair or am I off base anywhere there?

14:23 Chantel Hirschel: think it's super fair. And I think to some extent, rev ops is still viewed not as strategically as it should be to help drive those numbers, right? So rev ops might, your rev ops leader might build something that says this is a problem, but sales leaders have decided that that doesn't matter, right? And I think even they might even understand it logically, but they may not understand the full scope of that picture or like where rev ops will point out. areas of like change. Like I've noticed that because because rev ops people aren't sales people, there's an assumption that they can't help make choices that can help guide the business and they don't think of them as treated to your partner. They think of them as just an execution like

15:09 Warren Kucker: Right.

15:09 Chantel Hirschel: driven person. and I've seen it both ways, right? Like, and I think people are trying and they're seeing that shift, but it's in the name, right? You're not revenue strategist, your revenue operator.

15:20 Warren Kucker: It's interesting, maybe we should change the name. I actually had this mini debate with someone on LinkedIn the other day, it's just a naming problem that we're worried with. It's actually interesting, and I hadn't thought of this, like rev ops, I think maybe, and again, correct me I'm wrong, most rev op leaders don't treat it as a change management exercise for leadership in the way that they should. They assume that they should be literate in what you're talking about and run to the full picture. When really, as soon as I land in as a sales leader, I assess the skills of the sales team and I implement a program that honestly, I want to implement six programs, but no one can take on. They can't understand how to do good discovery, how to prospect, how to have full industry knowledge and run medic. When none of them have kind of done that theory across the board, I can't throw that much out of them. But from a leadership standpoint, you don't have the same mindset. You think you could throw it at them. It seems like we should. Again, you get into a new rebops role and it's again, you have to kind of like walk where are they at now? What's their rebops of literacy and how do I get them farther? Right? That's kind of like an interesting problem.

16:20 Chantel Hirschel: And what about, and what's their expectation of the situation too, right? Cause at the whole time you're also being asked to do things and more and more rev ops is sitting underneath sales leaders who are like, no, I need you to like move things and you need to prove

16:31 Warren Kucker: Big Salesforce. Yeah, right. Yeah.

16:33 Chantel Hirschel: that you're making things happen for the sales leaders that you're interacting with. And that can be tricky because you do need a paycheck and so you

16:42 Warren Kucker: Right.

16:43 Chantel Hirschel: need to do things. And so you, that's why I would also say like early in your early in whenever you come in, like you could come in and you could want to change the whole world, but you should get some quick wins under your belt with little things that are going to show like, hey, I care about the end user so that that way people trust you more with the big stuff.

17:01 Warren Kucker: That's really cool. All right, cool. Let's dive into a little bit of the system side of things. You moved in in Sana. What were from a systems and tools and prosody place? What was like target one, target two for you? And I'd like you to think about it in terms of like, great, if you were to get a new role tomorrow and you were completely blind, was that the good target one, target two? That's generally where you should be? Or is there something else when you're going into a new situation from a systems and tooling standpoint that you think would be better?

17:30 Chantel Hirschel: One of the things I did almost right away was tried to figure out who was in which system and which systems were and what was even the like cadence of like renewals that we were on for all the tools. There were

17:40 Warren Kucker: Okay. Yeah.

17:42 Chantel Hirschel: a lot of tools here, far more than I've usually seen. It's pretty large tech stack and there's a lot of different moving parts of the business. And so I started just like, I literally was like mind mapping, like this team's in this tool. And then I built out like a Google sheet that showed me like, how much we were spending on different tools and things like that. And then I was kind of like evaluating, you know, when's that renewal coming up and does it make sense? Like, what does this tool even do? So that was actually, I think almost step one. And then also like Salesforce, your CRM has always got to be like your, it's the lifeblood of the rest of the organization for a sales team, right? So, and then diving in. to whatever your CRM is and looking to see where's the pitfalls and things like that and what's happening there that's causing these friction points elsewhere. I think, so it's kind of two parts, right? Like pick one that you're gonna go do quick fixes on, but also make sure you're analyzing what the whole system is. Because a lot of times you're not aware that this tool over here is impacting this

18:51 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

18:52 Chantel Hirschel: one. also, I mean, if you couldn't find a tool where you can cut. you know, $12,000 like that. That's a big win for everybody, right? You just justified

18:59 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, right.

19:02 Chantel Hirschel: your value almost instantly.

19:04 Warren Kucker: So there's two signals again I haven't thought about. So if you're in go-to-market technology sales, a new revops leader should be like trigger number one, right? Like the first thing they're gonna try to do is understand what's the tech stack, what's kind of sprawled, and then great, like who's using what? At a role I had three or four roles ago, for opportunity management, reps were going into outreach, Jiminy, cluster, and one other tool that's escaping me. Four different ones, and they just picked randomly which one they would use. There was no rhyme or reason. So we had eight reps and four opportunity management tools. Like, why are

19:38 Chantel Hirschel: Thank

19:38 Warren Kucker: you using, I use this one for this and this one for this. There's no rhyme or reason for that, right? So like there's one, it would almost be like a great exercise there. And two, from like a churn standpoint, customer success and go to market, same deal, right? Like new rev ops leader, cool. Like churn alarms. Let me make sure that they understand, hey, 70 % of your reps are using it. They're using it for this. It's almost like I should send a white paper over really quick. Let me make your job really simple as to what my tool is doing for your organization. That'd be a good. Good signal on both ends.

20:05 Chantel Hirschel: Yes, like yeah, you want to get all if you there's a new rev up leader, you want to get them in quickly and you want to show them the value and make sure they understand your tool very swiftly. If you're a person selling to a rep ops leader and I think that that's something that vendors forget. They think, it's just fine. There's a there's a sales leader that loves me. A good sales leader is going to give all their tools to the rep ops person and bow out like they're

20:27 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah.

20:28 Chantel Hirschel: going to like follow and I've seen it go both ways. But in general. The sales leaders that are the most successful tools are the ones who let their rev ops leader just have it and go. And so if you're a vendor selling to a rev ops person and they, anyone comes in, yeah, you better be showing up and saying, this is what value I bring to you. This is what we're here for. I want to like partner with you. What's your big concerns. And as a rev ops leader who's in that situation, you don't want to just immediately decide to cut it, right? You want to go see, you want to test. The reason you're building a list is because you need to go. look at what's up and you want to know which priority order with renewal cycles of when you should be reviewing them, if that makes sense.

21:08 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah, a really smart customer success manager would serve that up to you in the back. Like, hey, it's day one, here's your, like, I'll give you two paragraphs. you don't have to worry about us, or you do have to worry about us, but that would be really intense, like, good signal. Like, something's gonna shift along the way. Interesting, okay, cool. So, again, you're in Asana for like, say, six, nine, 12 months. Let's look at 2027 for a moment. You're probably still in like, great baseline mode. For your vision of what could happen in order to make the revenue team more efficient 2027 beyond, what are your thoughts on either technology or processes that should change or could be something that you look at once you get past these table stakes, boots on the ground kind of work?

21:52 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, well, we're actually starting to dive into it now. know, there's a lot that I think scaling is one of the most underrated tools for rev ops in general, like tool skill sets. How do you scale your reps to do more? You know, my last company, I got measured by how many hours I saved a rep a week. How do I? Yeah, like how do I take? what we have within existing, and I think this is gonna become the bigger and bigger challenge for rev ops teams. How do I take, if I have one salesperson that's doing X, how do I 2X that for that salesperson? And it may not be like 100 % 2X, like it might be that you cut like overhead in some way for something or whatever it is, right? But the goal is you're scaling revenue without scaling head count. That is gonna be the rev ops challenge. I think that that's where we're at definitely in sauna and I expect to use different AI tools and different other things to just scale things without having to be crazy about head count. We need efficiency gains. This isn't about doing all these. crazy big things again, some of them, but some of them are going to be like whole process overhauls. If we've been doing something since the company started, it's time to look at a different way to do it. And I think that that's true of all organizations is you should walk in and cautiously because I always hate like, you know, there's that good, there's a reason it's a good phrase is like, don't, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That is true. Like, and it might work. So you have to ask yourself, is it working? It's the scale that we're going to need. because any organization, when you're trying to grow yourself, like if you're growing 2%, then yeah, it's probably fine. But if you're gonna try to grow, I don't know, let's just make a 10X number, your system that works at one million isn't gonna work at 10 million.

23:54 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

23:55 Chantel Hirschel: And that's, think, where it gets really tough to decide which pieces are gonna matter. But the main thing I think that scaling your sales teams by implementing tools and processes, not just tools, that work well is going to be what changes your business's profitability over time. And that's kind of, think, the message that I'm trying to get.

24:29 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Let me ask this. So I've been, I'm like a founder turned into like a sales guy over time. I've only been in sales, let's say for like eight, nine years. To me, has that always been the mantra of RevOps? How do I grow revenue without growing headcount? Is that a new mantra or is that something that's been around for the past 10 years?

24:52 Chantel Hirschel: I mean RevOps has only barely been around for four, if you really like a look at it.

24:55 Warren Kucker: Right? That's a point. Yeah. Yeah.

25:00 Chantel Hirschel: I think that there's always been this sales people be on the phones more and do that. And that's where there's a little bit of a question there, right? Of like sales, they're expected to cut the time and grow the revenue. And so a lot of times people think that that means they're gonna immediately see this like revenue jump. However, there's a couple other components that I think people forget about. Okay, I just cut two hours per rep because I implemented some tool and it's great. What

25:30 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

25:30 Chantel Hirschel: are the reps doing with those extra two hours? In theory, sales leaders are like, that means that they should be, you know, increasing their sales by 20 % if they got two more hours a day. Well, what

25:38 Warren Kucker: Bye.

25:38 Chantel Hirschel: did you actually require that the salesperson do to drive an extra 20 % of revenue with that extra two hours a week?

25:45 Warren Kucker: Right. Right.

25:48 Chantel Hirschel: Nothing. then what's the like, what's the point? So I think that it's always been there. I think the other piece of it is, I do think that yes, you're stewing it, but I think people forget when you're talking more like about EBITDA or things like that is like, you might not immediately see this huge revenue gain, hopefully you do. But are

26:11 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah.

26:11 Chantel Hirschel: you also seeing like a significant savings in your cost things, right?

26:16 Warren Kucker: Right. Yep.

26:17 Chantel Hirschel: I think that it's dangerous to assume your rev ops is failing just because Revenue is not necessarily going up. It could be that you're seeing increased, especially if it's like, if you have renewal cycles or things like that, maybe your renewal cycle is actually better.

26:32 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

26:32 Chantel Hirschel: A lot of people only focus on the new business side. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of barriers to success. Are you seeing customer satisfaction improve because the processes are going up, right? Revops is in charge of the customer buying journey for the most part, or it should be.

26:46 Warren Kucker: so this comes to a mini core thesis that I'm not 100 % sure about, but something that I've been circling around for about 18 months now is like, quota and revenue attainment for reps really haven't shifted in terms of real dollars since the 80s, right? So in the 80s, your quota was like 400, 500K, that's what you expected to bring in revenue-wise. You didn't have a computer, right? So on your desk. And so in real dollars, it's the same as a million dollar quota now, right? And last year, I think it was 81 % of reps missed that like million dollar quota, right? With a lot of fluff here, right? So like we're not hitting our quota targets after like 30 years of an evolution of technology and sales technology, right? So we haven't really done anything to make it so that a rep could sell more. And I want you to tell me where I'm wrong in just a moment too. So what does that mean, right? Like, so like when you look at, I agree, most of the time when you don't increase costs and you increase revenue, it's because you found a much more of way to a tap and untapped revenue source. Most people aren't doing increases on an annual basis like they should be or how you're upselling new products is a really challenging piece. Unlocking upselling of a new product. This is how you get more efficient. On the sales side, unless quota per rep is going up, right, we haven't really done anything to make it so we put a process in place so they could sell more in the same amount of time. And so like, and quota per rep unfortunately has to go up without cost per rep going up. Eventually, like, if it becomes twice as easy to sell because of technology, need to do a $2 million quota on 5 % commission. Otherwise, we haven't done anything. We just replaced the number of people we needed, right? So like from a business financial standpoint, I'm okay with like a societal issue. Like, great, like everyone just work less and make the same money. That's cool, right? But like, if like, a rep is just selling more and you have less reps and they make paid the same, nobody got better for it. So like, I actually think now we're on the precipice of that evolution. think computers didn't do it. And databases like Salesforce didn't do it for reps. think now you have a point where you could have tools that drive rep efficiency. What apart that little rant that I try to avoid when I'm a host of a podcast, am I wrong about? Like what am I wrong or what are you like exceedingly agreed with in that little diatribe?

28:58 Chantel Hirschel: First off, find it fascinating that like the quota thing, and that's a good point. And I have seen like them increase quotas right after like year over year. Like I have seen it. I don't

29:08 Warren Kucker: Good, good, okay.

29:09 Chantel Hirschel: think that they're as sometimes they are like I would say that the reps are like they're way too aggressive, right? Like they they don't see how they're going to make that. And, we could get into a whole conversation about inflation and all those things or whatever if we wanted to.

29:21 Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Right.

29:22 Chantel Hirschel: But that's not here. They're there. But it is interesting when you consider it. And it's like if. But if the rev ops team is scaling that much, then yes, they should be able to scale as well that much. But what it ends up being in my experience sometimes is you're asking me to do more. Mr. Salesperson is mad because you're asking me to do more. And Mr. Salesperson will say it's rev ops fault that it didn't work. And so

29:48 Warren Kucker: Okay, right.

29:50 Chantel Hirschel: like, instead of it being like a rev ops is like guiding the conversation, it's a reverse thing of like, no, all these things are wrong in our systems and tools and that's why I can't achieve it. But it's not, the rev ops person often isn't empowered to be the person like set the tools. Like they have a certain amount of autonomy, but

30:11 Warren Kucker: Right.

30:11 Chantel Hirschel: they don't always get to say, well, this is what the sales process should be, right? They're partnering with the sales leaders and the sales leaders here hearing from their sales rep saying, well, Chantel, it's the page layout. That's the problem again.

30:23 Warren Kucker: Right.

30:23 Chantel Hirschel: And so then RevOps is now having to like deal with this random fire thing that has become an issue that probably wasn't the main issue.

30:33 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah.

30:35 Chantel Hirschel: And so it's a tough balance and that's where like RevOps leaders have to learn how to say no. But again, you're trying to get a paycheck. So at some point you can only say no so many times before you're... RevOps is

30:46 Warren Kucker: Right, right, right, yeah. Yeah, then you just gotta go with it, right? Yeah.

30:49 Chantel Hirschel: a constant battle of... trying to make sure that you're making your end user happy enough to do it, but also trying to change how the world is functioning on a day-to-day basis to improve it. And the gap there is often like where you're seeing like the most tension between them or where people get really mad at rev ops. And yeah, so those, it's not an easy, it's not an easy thing, right? And I would also say that this is where RevOps teams, think, usually have less soft skills than the teams

31:24 Warren Kucker: All okay.

31:25 Chantel Hirschel: that they're supporting. And like, right, you're usually working with marketers and sales people are your primary people. Sales people are obviously good at selling something. They can convince you anything, right? Like, you know, your top

31:31 Warren Kucker: Right. Right. Right, right, right, right, right, yeah.

31:36 Chantel Hirschel: sales people, they've convinced me to do all sorts of things because yeah, they're good sales people. And like, and I do want to make them happy because they're making the company money. But, and then like, you got your marketeers who are going to like... tell you a beautiful story and all of these things and then you got your rev ops person's like, well, let me just tell you in a very complex like fashion about why that won't work. And like

31:54 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, right, right.

31:56 Chantel Hirschel: it just is such a bad thing in all of this. And so yeah, that's kind of a weird long explanation to say that I agree with you.

32:03 Warren Kucker: Yeah, I mean, it's like the operator title, right? Yeah, there's part of it like, so that's all operators in all industries, right? And then let's say we talk about like, there's a go to market engineering kind of term that

32:13 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah.

32:14 Warren Kucker: is out there, which is excellent. It's just a different name for rev ops people, right? So like, we could just, it's what we're always process engineering in

32:19 Chantel Hirschel: Yes, it's a yeah.

32:21 Warren Kucker: revenue teams is what rev ops has been doing for a long time. So like, I like go to market engineering better than revenue operations. Cause I think it is more fundamental, but from an engineering standpoint, when you're process engineering something, You're doing it from the outside looking in for people that are like, well, they didn't do the job. So it is a pure, I'm an industrial engineer, it's a pure change management exercise, right? But there's also the aspect of this. Let's say you truly did implement a process that saved sellers two hours a day, right? Cool, sounds good. That's awesome. One that's fantastic. That's an eight hour day. That's a 25 % improvement. Cool. What did you fill that time up with? If they didn't have more pipeline, good qualified pipeline to go after, you didn't fill the time up with anything that's gonna get you a revenue. So the one you're back to pipeline problem, which I hate putting pipeline at the root of everything, but in this case, it's the root of it. Cool. If I can give them more meat pipeline to fill that time, great. So let's say you didn't fill it up with more pipeline. What'd you fill it up with? Administrative work that they didn't do before or like training that isn't as value added as it should be. You didn't fill the bucket back up with more revenue. They can't take most of the time. I don't I've never gotten into an organization. They're like, you know what? We have my reps. I could be giving them more meetings and they can't take it. because they're too busy with admin. So I gotta figure out the admin piece. That's not what's happening, right? It might be they're not doing other things that can help close deals because they're kind of running from meeting to meeting, but doubtful, right? So like, we have to like work both sides of those coins. The efficiency aspect, if it's a pure efficiency play to save them time that's non-value added, non-selling time, you gotta fill the bucket back up or to say, great. Like, know what's cool about Son of Benefits? Our sales reps hit a million dollar in quota a year in five hours a day and then make that your like pitch. Right? Like, and that's cool because we're so efficient that all you have to do is sell. But I don't have enough pipeline to give you an eight million dollar, eight hour day. So like that would be like, that

34:07 Chantel Hirschel: No.

34:07 Warren Kucker: would be the pitch from a sign of benefits standpoint, which would be funny.

34:11 Chantel Hirschel: I think, yeah, I think that's where like it gets really hard because then you start to dip your toes more into the marketing side. And then this

34:16 Warren Kucker: Okay.

34:17 Chantel Hirschel: is where the blame game happens with like sales and marketing, right? Like whose job is it to drive pipeline? And

34:23 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

34:24 Chantel Hirschel: why are we not driving pipeline? And I think that that's where rev ops puts itself into a very dangerous place where it can offend people very easily because, or they can end up being the scapegoat in a pipeline conversation.

34:40 Warren Kucker: Right.

34:40 Chantel Hirschel: where marketing and sales meet, there's always a little bit of tension, unfortunately. It's just part of the nature of it. But I agree, is often the problem. And if pipeline isn't the problem, like I've seen it, maybe it's a close rate or something like that. And that's

34:56 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah.

34:57 Chantel Hirschel: more of like a sales training issue. But I also think right now too, most rev ops teams are staffed to addressing administrative problems once they finally realize that. So your pipeline has finally got good enough. Now your reps are annoyed. So then you bring in someone, but really you're just bringing in a low level operator to like remove basic friction. You're not bringing

35:18 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah.

35:19 Chantel Hirschel: someone in usually to say, let's fundamentally change how we do business so that we do it better. And let's fundamentally change. And to your point, if you're going to do that, you also bring in a, you need to bring in a strong pipeline generation system. And when we're talking about pipeline gen, is that rev ops? There's parts of it that are. because like revisiting and bringing old ops back up and those kinds of things. But if we're talking about straight up new business, that's less so. And that's where it gets tough.

35:48 Warren Kucker: I've never spoken to someone in go-to-market operations that wasn't at the forefront of the tension between sales and marketing, which drives me insane in that I don't understand why there's any tension between sales and marketing. If you have a VP of sales and a VP of marketing, the pipeline number is both your problems no matter what. No matter who's, what hole in the bucket there is, whether it's in sales or marketing, it does not matter. You're either generating enough pipeline or you aren't, and it's your two jobs to fix it no matter what. And this never happens. can't contemplate why this isn't the common ethos and why as a VP of sales, I would ever be mad at my marketing leader. I attribute it to one thing, but I'd love to hear your perspective on that as one of the last questions as we wrap up here.

36:34 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, think that it's because this is where like, again, the difference between rev ops and the rest of your org is probably a lot of just operations teams in general. Rev ops thinks of the business, right? What makes the business better? What makes the customer journey better? Because from the customer's perspective, they don't care where they're at with the marketing versus the salesperson, right? They're just, they're concerned about the journey. It's one picture to them. You know, your company is the one face of the company. They don't understand it internally, but internally there becomes these tension points. Right. And I think a big crux of the issue is that marketing numbers and attribution numbers are honestly magic math to some extent. Like attribution is just like, it's an art, not a science.

37:16 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

37:19 Chantel Hirschel: And, and so where sales has these like firm hard numbers of I sold a hundred dollars worth of things and marketing is like, well, I contributed to 50 % of that. And sales was like, really prove it. And

37:28 Warren Kucker: Right? Yeah.

37:30 Chantel Hirschel: it's. it creates this tension because people are worried they're gonna get fired because of it, right? Like, so it becomes more about, well, it's their fault for doing it and it's their fault for doing it. And they're making up a bunch of numbers that don't make sense. And well, we did have to obviously contribute to some of your dollars, otherwise you wouldn't have anything, because we had leads that we patched you and you didn't log them, right? And like, it becomes this whole thing. And it's like, well, obviously, and then it comes back to rev ops where it's like, well, rev ops didn't make it build a system that's good enough to track it all the way through. And it's like, whoa, like everybody's

38:04 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

38:04 Chantel Hirschel: just at each other's throats when it really, yes, I agree. They should be in there and doing those things. And like, you you and I chatted a little bit about off-sites. This is actually where off-sites are very good because it can help break down those walls and like make people human again. And I think that

38:20 Warren Kucker: point.

38:21 Chantel Hirschel: more teams need to work on doing that. And if you can keep a rev ops team that's a true marketing ops and sales ops team, it can help bridge that gap between the two of them. because oftentimes what sales and marketing means is a translator and rev ops can function like that well because if I say conversion rate, what's the immediate thing that you think of with conversion rate?

38:41 Warren Kucker: Conversion rate for me is pure meeting to qualified opportunity is what I think about from a sales standpoint.

38:47 Chantel Hirschel: Okay. Now from a marketing perspective, it's probably originally web to web to lead conversion. And then

38:53 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah.

38:54 Chantel Hirschel: also like there's, I'm as a rev ops leader, I think when I think of conversion, I can think of like five different points of conversion rates that I

39:00 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

39:00 Chantel Hirschel: need to be tracking. But if I just say it in a general thing, what does it mean? And so a lot

39:04 Warren Kucker: That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

39:07 Chantel Hirschel: of times like there's a translation issue between sales and marketing. And also there's just like, you know, I'm not sure if you've ever seen the color blocks of like,

39:16 Warren Kucker: Okay, now? I love Red Ops. Okay.

39:16 Chantel Hirschel: These are like the different like personality, like types that live inside like those things. And red is when it says it's be bright, be brief, be bright, gone. Blue is give me details. You yellow is involve me and green show me you care. Marketing people tend to live down here.

39:33 Warren Kucker: Okay. wow.

39:36 Chantel Hirschel: Sales people tend to live more like up here in my experience. RevOps leaders definitely are in these categories. So they work a little bit better with sales people I've seen.

39:46 Warren Kucker: Okay.

39:46 Chantel Hirschel: And when you're just considering like the general people that are like, not that it's a hundred percent, but in general, people are drawn to careers that align with their personalities and things like that. And there's just that natural tension of salespeople who are blunt and aggressive and get told no for a living. And the marketing people who are more like flowers and sunshine. And I think that people don't want to just say that sometimes, but you can't underestimate just how much personality differences can clash.

40:15 Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't thought about the personality differences. And this is probably, again, only a red box for someone to out blocks like that. So that was amazing. And it's probably actually the sales mentality, which is wrong, because the personality aspect is what I'm thinking about. It's a behavioral science. It's a process, and behavioral science is all sales, which is I love it now and thought I would never like it because I didn't realize that's what it was. But to me, the fundamental tension has actually been more black and white, which is funny because it's completely wrong. because I haven't thought about this personality aspect of it is like as a sales leader, why I think there's such as a CRO, I would tell my VP of sales and my VP of marketing. We have we either have enough pipeline. If you're winning 25 percent of your work and we only have three X coverage, this is both of your problems. If I find you arguing about whose problem it is rather than solving the problem, I'm going to fire you both. Right. Like there's no there's no way to separate a qualified opportunity between who contributed to it. You have the interest awareness stage of like a buyer's journey is completely intertwined between sales and marketing. You can't differentiate why someone outbounded or someone inbounded someone and whenever the final way they got into the booking that meeting is irrelevant in my mind as a CRO. So I don't care, right? So attributions are relevant to me. On the flip, when I think there's a fundamental tension where like marketing gets dollars to spend on stuff that isn't people. So I give you a million bucks, right? Like to run ads and go to conferences, right? So not to like oversimplify the marketing aspect. Where in sales, you also got a million dollars to hire eight people, but it doesn't seem like that. People doesn't seem like spend. And so for marketing, I'm like, great, I gave you a million dollars. What did I get out of it? Sales doesn't get to,

41:58 Chantel Hirschel: That's true.

41:59 Warren Kucker: doesn't answer that question the same way. And so that tension be like,

42:01 Chantel Hirschel: No, that's so true.

42:03 Warren Kucker: Sales is like great. Give me that million. I'll hire a BDR. So we'll be fine right now like the the dollar Explicitness of the dollars in the marketing sense as some weird tension between the two functions. That's also irrelevant

42:15 Chantel Hirschel: It really does.

42:16 Warren Kucker: It doesn't matter how like what you spent it on. It's just a visual So again, tell me where I'm wrong or what you agree on

42:22 Chantel Hirschel: I love that perspective because you're so right. Because I think I do believe that marketing teams get undersold because there's like this need to like have them prove it now. That's like, like I said, which attribution, like whatever. And yes, do teams need to be measured to prove that they're doing things well? And are there ways

42:38 Warren Kucker: course.

42:38 Chantel Hirschel: to do that effectively? Yes, there are. But at the end of the day, it's a rough estimate of how marketing contributed, but you're right. Like a million dollars is. in headcount versus the other one, one of those is just a wash operating expense. One of them needs to show that they did a million dollars meant that they got $10 million. And

42:59 Warren Kucker: Right.

42:59 Chantel Hirschel: that can be really hard sometimes as a marketing team, especially if something goes wrong on the rep operations team, or

43:07 Warren Kucker: Right.

43:08 Chantel Hirschel: especially if sales is just not following processes that have been set in stone that they're supposed to do, or just because, you know, maybe you did a million dollars worth of display ads. and you got in 20 million calls. But how do you track 20 million calls from an awareness campaign?

43:27 Warren Kucker: Exactly right. And if I have like Forex coverage on 25 % win rate and I'm hitting my target and I'm like, great marketing spend 10 million bucks. On one hand, like I want to know like, could I spend that money differently within marketing or with marketing and sales? But on the other hand, if I booked every single meeting on an outbound call, I still don't know that that wasn't because I spent 10 million dollars in awareness based advertising, right? So like that's you can't,

43:49 Chantel Hirschel: And that's, yeah.

43:50 Warren Kucker: if I took, if I was a sales leader, I was like, great, cut all 10 million of that. There's all. my pipeline generation is going to drop in half at least. Unless it's completely blind, unless the marketing leader doesn't know where the money went or who looked at it or whatever it was the case,

44:04 Chantel Hirschel: Yes.

44:04 Warren Kucker: then that's a problem. But if you're like, yeah, I got this spend in front of people that ended up booking meetings and who cares? It's just pipe gen. So get your pipe number and fix it. So this tension

44:12 Chantel Hirschel: Yes. Yes. Yes.

44:14 Warren Kucker: drives me insane. It really bothers me. sorry you hit a nerd. Great.

44:18 Chantel Hirschel: No, I'm here for it.

44:21 Warren Kucker: Yeah, this is because I'm a founder and not a sales guy. So if I was a 20 year sales guy, I'm sure I'd hate my VP of marketing all the time.

44:27 Chantel Hirschel: you

44:28 Warren Kucker: So anyway, last piece, what do you like, give me the what do think then the rev ops looks like three years out? Like, let's talk about you have a take on this go to market engineering rev ops, the evolution is it's doing the

44:39 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah.

44:40 Warren Kucker: rev ops finally getting to do the job it always wanted to do? Or is there an evolution that's happening?

44:44 Chantel Hirschel: I think that there is like, there's more rev ops people out there than there ever have been. It was one of the fastest growing careers for a while, right? I'm seeing more more VPs of rev ops, which tells me that the strategic value is becoming more of an awareness thing, right? Let's be honest, directors are usually heavy player coaches in the rev ops space. VP, I hope is less of a player than usual. It's usually a sign of when you've fully transitioned to the coach role. And so I'm hopeful on that. When it comes to GTM engineers, I think GTM engineers have a place on a rev ops team. Like if I was gonna structure my dream rev ops team, I would

45:28 Warren Kucker: to me. Yeah.

45:29 Chantel Hirschel: probably have one GTM engineer for a smaller team. And that would be the person who I expect to be able to do all the complex builds, right? I'm helping strategize what the vision looks like. And then I have this GTM engineer that can go build the complex stuff. And then I'd have some marketing operations operators and a sales, a couple of operations operators. And sales operations tends to be more administrative work at the baseline. So I'd have some people doing that. Because the reality is we still need a place where people stand in the way of automation. A lot of that is still related to sentiment and things like that. AI is going to replace more and more probably sales operations would be where I'm guessing there's more replacement marketing operations functionally. I don't see that role ever really changing. I think the big thing is that they might need to get better at some of the CRM side and just like, you know, the more senior sales operators who are probably going to become GTM engineers need to be really good at the marketing side. You can't just know one side of the house is my guess in a few years because that switch from when it goes from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. That pain point there where it's happening and like being able to track things all the way through, you can't just understand one side of the house to be successful. But I think that that's something everybody knows at the senior levels of RevOps right now. So I think it'll just solidify more. I'm hopeful that more more sales and marketing leaders are gonna respect RevOps and give them a seat at the table. I'm hopeful.

47:04 Warren Kucker: a really good call. think people don't realize, most people don't realize that sales is much more process-based than people understand. They think it's fuzzy relationship and there's no kind of like step through as to like what happens in a buyer's journey to decide to buy a service or a product, right? It's completely untrue. It's process-based, right? It's not perfect. No one adheres to it. It's not like a manufacturing line that step one, step two, step three happens. But obviously there's a pretty... good through line through the fuzzy steps that someone takes that can give you a baseline variety. Yeah, agreed.

47:35 Chantel Hirschel: And hopefully your rev-ups process shows that, right?

47:38 Warren Kucker: And so like, there's, it's even more important than like product ops or something like that, because there really is a complex process from I heard about your company to now you're managing me as a customer. That end-to-end loop is fundamental and the steps through are really fantastic. Chantel, this is a really excellent conversation. If one of our listeners wanted to

47:55 Chantel Hirschel: Yes, thank you.

47:55 Warren Kucker: reach out to you or connect with you, where would they do it?

47:59 Chantel Hirschel: LinkedIn is probably the best way. You're more than welcome to come send me a message directly on there. I love responding to messages on LinkedIn. actually keep up on top of them, so that's probably the best place.

48:09 Warren Kucker: They do it. That's how we met and do an excellent job. Chantelle's a great follower. She has some funny LinkedIn posts as well that are professional but humorous all the time. So really appreciate

48:16 Chantel Hirschel: Thank you.

48:18 Warren Kucker: your take here and thank you for taking the time with us today.

48:21 Chantel Hirschel: Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you having me.

48:23 Warren Kucker: Take care.