Lessons from Leading a Unified RevOps Function - Julia Kim

Justin Norris: 00:00:14

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:17

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:22

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:27

reasons for the name of this show.

Justin Norris: 00:00:28

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:32

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:36

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:38

at how Rev Ops is done in practice.

Justin Norris: 00:00:41

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:44

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:49

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:54

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

Justin Norris: 00:00:59

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:03

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:05

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:08

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:14

where she leads a unified rev ops team.

Justin Norris: 00:01:17

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:20

adjunct professor at Columbia university.

Justin Norris: 00:01:23

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:26

Very excited to chat with you today, Julia.

Julia Kim: 00:01:28

I'm absolutely thrilled to be here because I absolutely

Julia Kim: 00:01:32

know what you're talking about.

Julia Kim: 00:01:33

It is a challenge.

Julia Kim: 00:01:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:01:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:01:44

if you think in sort of that silo.

Julia Kim: 00:01:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:01:48

that today.

Justin Norris: 00:01:50

Amazing.

Justin Norris: 00:01:50

So maybe let's start there with revenue operations.

Justin Norris: 00:01:54

How do you think of it?

Justin Norris: 00:01:55

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

Justin Norris: 00:01:57

what is the mandate of RevOps?

Julia Kim: 00:02:00

So here at electric, it really is very cross functional

Julia Kim: 00:02:03

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:17

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:27

whether it's through new business net new.

Julia Kim: 00:02:30

or retention through existing customers and then utilizing your relationship

Julia Kim: 00:02:35

with those customers to grow revenue.

Julia Kim: 00:02:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:41

in the context of all of those teams.

Julia Kim: 00:02:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:47

What data do we have?

Julia Kim: 00:02:49

How are we collecting that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:50

How are we storing that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:51

How are we reporting on that data?

Julia Kim: 00:02:53

The process.

Julia Kim: 00:02:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:02:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:13

because that is a multiplier for you.

Julia Kim: 00:03:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:28

in the form of resources or people.

Julia Kim: 00:03:30

And so what do you do?

Julia Kim: 00:03:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:03:36

would get from a unified RevOps team.

Justin Norris: 00:03:39

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

Justin Norris: 00:03:42

Is where does the responsibility of the function itself and,

Justin Norris: 00:03:47

where does rev ops begin?

Justin Norris: 00:03:48

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

Justin Norris: 00:03:51

it's usually quite unambiguous.

Justin Norris: 00:03:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:03:57

There's some push and pull.

Justin Norris: 00:03:59

how do you think about that?

Justin Norris: 00:04:00

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

Justin Norris: 00:04:02

this sort of problem in your

Julia Kim: 00:04:04

it really depends on where you are in the spectrum of

Julia Kim: 00:04:08

maturity for your organization.

Julia Kim: 00:04:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:20

operational tactical things and strategy.

Julia Kim: 00:04:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:27

to join two fixed rev ops there.

Julia Kim: 00:04:30

There was a lot that was going on.

Julia Kim: 00:04:32

were more on the immature side when it came to the

Julia Kim: 00:04:35

operations and tactical pieces.

Julia Kim: 00:04:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:04:53

up and right sizing things.

Julia Kim: 00:04:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:09

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:19

more recently to be much more strategic.

Julia Kim: 00:05:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:28

organization is your org design.

Julia Kim: 00:05:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:34

that are on your RevOps team.

Julia Kim: 00:05:36

In Electric, it's a stand alone team.

Julia Kim: 00:05:38

some organizations, RevOps as a function is embedded within the

Julia Kim: 00:05:42

different go to market teams.

Julia Kim: 00:05:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:49

And that's actually worked out really well.

Julia Kim: 00:05:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:05:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:05

systems and the processes that we have.

Julia Kim: 00:06:08

But as we became more mature.

Julia Kim: 00:06:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:20

RevOps called Revenue Programs.

Julia Kim: 00:06:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:28

They are thinking about piloting testing out those operational processes

Julia Kim: 00:06:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:48

but does it actually work right?

Julia Kim: 00:06:49

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:06:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:05

startup, you need to move quickly.

Julia Kim: 00:07:08

Things are shifting constantly.

Julia Kim: 00:07:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:13

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:17

So, we have a Sales Ops pod.

Julia Kim: 00:07:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:24

actually falls under the sales ops pod.

Julia Kim: 00:07:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:39

roll out this type of payment plan?

Julia Kim: 00:07:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:45

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:07:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:06

there's just too many things on

Julia Kim: 00:08:07

fire.

Justin Norris: 00:08:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:11

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:08:12

Absolutely.

Justin Norris: 00:08:14

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

Justin Norris: 00:08:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:21

Yes.

Julia Kim: 00:08:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:24

can't even get in your example, right?

Julia Kim: 00:08:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:32

through rates or things like that.

Julia Kim: 00:08:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:39

And once you hit those.

Julia Kim: 00:08:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:43

can I shift more of to that strategy?

Julia Kim: 00:08:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:49

of rev ops teams are very reactive.

Julia Kim: 00:08:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:08:57

It's also part of that maturity, right?

Julia Kim: 00:08:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:02

place to help you be more strategic.

Julia Kim: 00:09:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:07

sure your own house is in order.

Justin Norris: 00:09:09

I'm fascinated by the structure of your team.

Justin Norris: 00:09:11

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

Justin Norris: 00:09:15

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

Justin Norris: 00:09:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:09:21

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

Justin Norris: 00:09:25

Is that an accurate way of thinking about it?

Julia Kim: 00:09:27

Yes, absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:09:29

they are responsible for primarily for our CRM system.

Julia Kim: 00:09:32

We use Salesforce at electric.

Julia Kim: 00:09:34

And a lot of what they do is.

Julia Kim: 00:09:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:45

fields or different functions.

Julia Kim: 00:09:47

They're also responsible for things like tech debt.

Julia Kim: 00:09:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:09:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:02

systems in order to make it better?

Julia Kim: 00:10:04

So one great example is we use Salesforce primarily for

Julia Kim: 00:10:10

sales cloud and service cloud.

Julia Kim: 00:10:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:18

place good enough or supporting the partnerships and business

Julia Kim: 00:10:23

development we're trying to accomplish?

Julia Kim: 00:10:25

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:40

leverage salesforce or some other tool that maybe integrates with salesforce

Julia Kim: 00:10:45

to better enable both internal folks.

Julia Kim: 00:10:48

And also external partners, right?

Julia Kim: 00:10:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:10:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:04

start really being serious about this.

Julia Kim: 00:11:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:18

about what are their needs in the future,

Justin Norris: 00:11:20

And are they running all the technology that

Justin Norris: 00:11:23

the go to market teams use?

Justin Norris: 00:11:24

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

Justin Norris: 00:11:27

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

Justin Norris: 00:11:31

by some of the other pods directly?

Julia Kim: 00:11:33

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:46

into the tools that you have.

Julia Kim: 00:11:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:51

matter expert in that tool.

Julia Kim: 00:11:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:11:56

removing users or turning on features.

Julia Kim: 00:11:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:03

using that we could use better?

Julia Kim: 00:12:05

And so now the shift has actually been.

Julia Kim: 00:12:08

Exactly what you're saying.

Julia Kim: 00:12:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:29

They can build those relationships with our vendors.

Julia Kim: 00:12:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:42

the economy is not that great.

Julia Kim: 00:12:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:12:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:08

it's already included in our contract.

Julia Kim: 00:13:10

A great example is a chat feature.

Julia Kim: 00:13:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:17

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:27

using two other chat, you know, platforms.

Julia Kim: 00:13:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:34

not pay for these other two tools.

Julia Kim: 00:13:36

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:13:56

we're spending a lot on these tools.

Julia Kim: 00:13:58

What can we do?

Justin Norris: 00:13:59

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:03

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:07

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:10

a tool and marketing ops has a tool.

Justin Norris: 00:14:12

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:16

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:22

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

Justin Norris: 00:14:25

to make these sorts of decisions?

Julia Kim: 00:14:28

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:31

collaboration into our team.

Julia Kim: 00:14:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:49

many hours a day, that's a problem.

Julia Kim: 00:14:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:14:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:09

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:14

to what did I have as a personal win?

Julia Kim: 00:15:17

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:20

week that wasn't really that engaging.

Julia Kim: 00:15:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:30

competitive, we solve problems.

Julia Kim: 00:15:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:36

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:40

learn to solve problems together.

Julia Kim: 00:15:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:54

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

Julia Kim: 00:15:58

want to be creatures of habits.

Julia Kim: 00:16:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:08

We have dedicated, internal Slack channels for different things.

Julia Kim: 00:16:13

we use the Atlassian suite.

Julia Kim: 00:16:14

So we use Confluence for documentation.

Julia Kim: 00:16:17

That is so important to us.

Julia Kim: 00:16:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:21

created in the last six months.

Julia Kim: 00:16:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:31

but for the entire organization.

Julia Kim: 00:16:33

And then we use JIRA as another tool.

Julia Kim: 00:16:35

Again, to help with collaboration.

Julia Kim: 00:16:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:40

m.

Julia Kim: 00:16:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:43

through together as a team.

Julia Kim: 00:16:44

It's really quick.

Julia Kim: 00:16:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:49

15 minutes every morning.

Julia Kim: 00:16:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:53

incidents that come through.

Julia Kim: 00:16:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:16:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:13

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:19

all the way to, customer success.

Julia Kim: 00:17:22

The one thing that.

Julia Kim: 00:17:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:36

much more product led organization.

Julia Kim: 00:17:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:49

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

Julia Kim: 00:17:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:04

more product led organization.

Julia Kim: 00:18:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:09

in November and relaunched it.

Julia Kim: 00:18:11

And that's newer.

Julia Kim: 00:18:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:22

also feeding back within the team itself.

Julia Kim: 00:18:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:37

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

Justin Norris: 00:18:44

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

Justin Norris: 00:18:46

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

Justin Norris: 00:18:49

business and how you kind of need both.

Justin Norris: 00:18:51

Is that how you think about it as well?

Justin Norris: 00:18:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:18:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:18:58

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:18:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:04

actually buy Result software.

Julia Kim: 00:19:06

You can buy services from us.

Julia Kim: 00:19:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:12

monitor and all kinds of things.

Julia Kim: 00:19:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:21

experiment with a flexible payment plan.

Julia Kim: 00:19:24

Where does that live?

Julia Kim: 00:19:24

Does that live in product?

Julia Kim: 00:19:25

Does that live in engineering?

Julia Kim: 00:19:27

Does that live in finance?

Julia Kim: 00:19:28

Does that live?

Julia Kim: 00:19:28

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:39

or someone says, Hey, you know what?

Julia Kim: 00:19:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:44

They don't have the right resources.

Julia Kim: 00:19:46

They don't have the right access.

Julia Kim: 00:19:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:19:53

thought we were going to do, flexible payments.

Julia Kim: 00:19:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:06

in this example I'm sharing with you.

Julia Kim: 00:20:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:18

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:27

it mean from a legal perspective?

Julia Kim: 00:20:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:47

team that needs to own that.

Julia Kim: 00:20:48

Maybe it's finance.

Julia Kim: 00:20:49

Maybe it's.

Julia Kim: 00:20:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:20:56

the point where end owner is obvious.

Julia Kim: 00:20:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:06

hand and saying, I'm interested.

Julia Kim: 00:21:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:19

in order for us to be successful?

Julia Kim: 00:21:20

And that's not true.

Julia Kim: 00:21:22

You can.

Julia Kim: 00:21:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:21:28

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:35

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:37

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:41

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:46

keeping the trains running on time.

Justin Norris: 00:21:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:49

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:52

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

Justin Norris: 00:21:57

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:01

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:06

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:10

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:13

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:17

leader that doesn't understand marketing.

Justin Norris: 00:22:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:22:22

So have you seen those challenges?

Justin Norris: 00:22:24

I guess would be the first question.

Justin Norris: 00:22:26

And how did you address them if so?

Julia Kim: 00:22:28

Yes they exist, but I work really hard to

Julia Kim: 00:22:32

try to reduce those impacts.

Julia Kim: 00:22:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:22:40

Uh, Number 1.

Julia Kim: 00:22:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:22:48

And so having a similar structure between the different operational

Julia Kim: 00:22:53

pods is very important.

Julia Kim: 00:22:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:02

and there's an enablement person.

Julia Kim: 00:23:03

CX ops has ops manager, analyst enablement.

Julia Kim: 00:23:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:14

stronger on the service cloud side.

Julia Kim: 00:23:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:21

just a organizational harmony or equality in those teams.

Julia Kim: 00:23:28

But of course, you have teams like marketing, which

Julia Kim: 00:23:31

tends to be smaller, right?

Julia Kim: 00:23:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:38

And so that's the case here at electric.

Julia Kim: 00:23:41

The marketing pod is quite small.

Julia Kim: 00:23:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:23:48

leverage time and work and resources from.

Julia Kim: 00:23:53

Either the sales ops or CX ops pods.

Julia Kim: 00:23:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:17

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:23

within the different go to market teams.

Julia Kim: 00:24:25

It didn't work at all.

Julia Kim: 00:24:26

It failed miserably.

Julia Kim: 00:24:28

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:33

There is really nothing to lose.

Julia Kim: 00:24:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:46

I think traditionally, Marketing and Sales and Marketing Ops and

Julia Kim: 00:24:49

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:24:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:09

We work really well together.

Julia Kim: 00:25:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:35

problem or someone caused that problem.

Julia Kim: 00:25:38

There is a problem.

Julia Kim: 00:25:40

And so some wild investigation to figure out what happened.

Julia Kim: 00:25:45

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:25:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:06

Things are going to fail.

Julia Kim: 00:26:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:13

a solution and how do we move forward?

Julia Kim: 00:26:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:22

And last quick org structure question.

Julia Kim: 00:26:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:26

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:26:26

I currently report into our CRO.

Julia Kim: 00:26:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:32

into that senior VP of sales.

Julia Kim: 00:26:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:26:48

go to market teams to revenue teams.

Julia Kim: 00:26:51

Partnerships actually wasn't originally underneath revenue it

Julia Kim: 00:26:55

was actually underneath product.

Julia Kim: 00:26:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:03

from a revenue perspective, made us.

Julia Kim: 00:27:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:11

under revenue, it is generating revenue.

Julia Kim: 00:27:13

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:18

underneath the revenue teams and.

Julia Kim: 00:27:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:27

we can from a revenue perspective?

Julia Kim: 00:27:30

And not to lose sight of the customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:35

How do you generate revenue?

Julia Kim: 00:27:38

It's through your customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:43

it always ends up the customer.

Julia Kim: 00:27:45

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:49

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

Julia Kim: 00:27:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:28:01

we generate revenue through our customers?

Julia Kim: 00:28:04

And so not lose sight of our customers.

Justin Norris: 00:28:07

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:10

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:16

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:20

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:23

could handle besieged by requests.

Justin Norris: 00:28:26

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:31

good judgment about what you take on.

Justin Norris: 00:28:33

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

Justin Norris: 00:28:36

team can make the biggest impact?

Julia Kim: 00:28:39

it is a little easier because we use OKRs.

Julia Kim: 00:28:43

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

Julia Kim: 00:28:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:28:56

is basically most valuable partner.

Julia Kim: 00:28:59

So short of those things and.

Julia Kim: 00:29:02

allocating some time for important things like dealing with tech debt

Julia Kim: 00:29:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:25

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:34

So we are constantly looking at it from that lens.

Julia Kim: 00:29:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:45

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:29:54

wasn't really a ticket tracking system.

Julia Kim: 00:29:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:00

it really was a free for all.

Julia Kim: 00:30:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:08

And that's a terrible way to function.

Julia Kim: 00:30:10

And so you're absolutely right.

Julia Kim: 00:30:12

People get frustrated.

Julia Kim: 00:30:13

Like, why did you do this?

Julia Kim: 00:30:14

And why didn't you do this?

Julia Kim: 00:30:15

Or I need this.

Julia Kim: 00:30:16

And what do you mean?

Julia Kim: 00:30:17

It's going to take you three weeks.

Julia Kim: 00:30:18

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:33

as a framework for us to evolve from.

Julia Kim: 00:30:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:46

I think sprint 45 right now, which is fantastic.

Julia Kim: 00:30:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:30:57

get submitted every single day.

Julia Kim: 00:30:59

How many of them are high priority?

Julia Kim: 00:31:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:09

because there's a little too broad.

Julia Kim: 00:31:11

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:31:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:15

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:20

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:36

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:47

align with the things that we're doing.

Julia Kim: 00:31:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:53

being able to manage priorities.

Julia Kim: 00:31:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:31:58

going to start using JIRA.

Julia Kim: 00:32:00

and there was honestly some pushback.

Julia Kim: 00:32:01

There was.

Julia Kim: 00:32:02

Concern about how do we maintain something like this?

Julia Kim: 00:32:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:11

sprint planning meetings where we can actually fill out things.

Julia Kim: 00:32:15

We have regular meetings with different stakeholders saying, Hey,

Julia Kim: 00:32:19

what do you want in our next sprint?

Julia Kim: 00:32:21

Which gives people so much joy and excitement.

Julia Kim: 00:32:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:28

You know, yes, absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:32:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:36

So having that framework has been so important in being able

Julia Kim: 00:32:39

to balance those priorities.

Julia Kim: 00:32:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:32:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:33:03

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

Julia Kim: 00:33:07

sent it to me 30 minutes ago, right?

Julia Kim: 00:33:10

poor marketing ops manager.

Julia Kim: 00:33:11

Right.

Justin Norris: 00:33:12

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:17

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:20

proactively identifying opportunities to evolve strategy and make impact.

Justin Norris: 00:33:26

This is something that I think about a lot.

Justin Norris: 00:33:28

How do you think about.

Justin Norris: 00:33:30

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:35

to fulfill those requests.

Justin Norris: 00:33:37

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:41

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:45

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

Justin Norris: 00:33:48

They're both important.

Justin Norris: 00:33:49

How do you split your effort between them?

Julia Kim: 00:33:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:33:56

and 40 percent driving a lot of that.

Julia Kim: 00:34:00

Like, Hey, did you notice this?

Julia Kim: 00:34:03

What do you think about?

Julia Kim: 00:34:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:09

it's because of where we are but.

Julia Kim: 00:34:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:17

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:22

No, we do really think about.

Julia Kim: 00:34:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:31

How does it impact other systems?

Julia Kim: 00:34:33

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:38

We have a ton of integrations, not just to.

Julia Kim: 00:34:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:55

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

Julia Kim: 00:34:59

what is the true problem, right?

Julia Kim: 00:35:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:04

I'm trying to build a report.

Julia Kim: 00:35:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:08

Can you add this field?

Julia Kim: 00:35:09

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:13

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:27

about our CRM as a transactional system.

Julia Kim: 00:35:32

And our snowflake data warehouse as a reporting system.

Julia Kim: 00:35:36

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:35:57

What is the purpose behind that?

Julia Kim: 00:35:59

how is that going to serve us better?

Julia Kim: 00:36:01

And is that really the true purpose of Salesforce?

Julia Kim: 00:36:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:15

and we're reporting there, right?

Julia Kim: 00:36:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:22

even any, data management tools.

Julia Kim: 00:36:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:27

the data that you want than Salesforce.

Julia Kim: 00:36:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:37

maturity level is Salesforce needs to be a transactional database.

Julia Kim: 00:36:42

Anything that has to do with transactions lives there.

Julia Kim: 00:36:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:36:58

or Tableau or whatever the system is?

Julia Kim: 00:37:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:37:05

So you can get that information that you need.

Julia Kim: 00:37:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:37:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:37:15

terms of like, what is the true problem?

Julia Kim: 00:37:17

What are we trying to solve?

Justin Norris: 00:37:18

you've touched on data.

Justin Norris: 00:37:20

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:23

Because obviously there's a lot of codependency there.

Julia Kim: 00:37:27

Yeah.

Julia Kim: 00:37:27

So Salesforce related, Marketo related.

Julia Kim: 00:37:33

And then the data team is fully responsible for our

Julia Kim: 00:37:36

Snowflake data warehouse.

Justin Norris: 00:37:38

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:42

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:45

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:50

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:55

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

Justin Norris: 00:37:57

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

Justin Norris: 00:38:01

but it's, the path of least resistance.

Justin Norris: 00:38:03

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

Justin Norris: 00:38:06

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

Justin Norris: 00:38:09

you can push people towards that place?

Julia Kim: 00:38:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:14

We actually have a data council specifically for that purpose.

Julia Kim: 00:38:18

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:31

specifically to talk about.

Julia Kim: 00:38:33

Those questions and almost get ahead of those things.

Julia Kim: 00:38:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:38:57

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:46

And the data team is involved there.

Julia Kim: 00:39:48

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

Julia Kim: 00:39:53

discrepancies or issues and integrating data are caught early.

Julia Kim: 00:39:58

Because we are trying to integrate more of that.

Julia Kim: 00:40:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:40:07

of this project earlier in the process.

Justin Norris: 00:40:11

I

Justin Norris: 00:40:11

think that's really important.

Justin Norris: 00:40:12

And you touched on user acceptance testing.

Justin Norris: 00:40:14

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:19

the importance of change management.

Justin Norris: 00:40:21

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:25

emphasis as they should in all cases.

Justin Norris: 00:40:28

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:31

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:35

you have to change the behavior.

Justin Norris: 00:40:37

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:40

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:43

Like they want to hit their quota.

Justin Norris: 00:40:45

They're not necessarily care about the success or failure

Justin Norris: 00:40:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:51

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:54

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

Justin Norris: 00:40:56

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:00

I am really fortunate that at electric the messaging is consistent

Justin Norris: 00:41:06

from the very top levels down.

Justin Norris: 00:41:09

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:14

clear, like what we care about.

Justin Norris: 00:41:17

You know, Hey, we have a new partnership.

Justin Norris: 00:41:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:23

This is a process that we're excited about.

Justin Norris: 00:41:26

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:31

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:36

about that might motivate them.

Justin Norris: 00:41:38

And it could be a financial component, right?

Justin Norris: 00:41:40

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:42

plan is structured or whatever.

Justin Norris: 00:41:44

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:49

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

Justin Norris: 00:41:56

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:01

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:06

your true end users are internally.

Justin Norris: 00:42:10

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:14

I think people think of enablement as just training.

Justin Norris: 00:42:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:24

what I think of as enablement.

Justin Norris: 00:42:26

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:32

you, how proactive are you about things?

Justin Norris: 00:42:35

And that's a great area for enablement.

Justin Norris: 00:42:37

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:40

from an enablement perspective, like training or putting materials

Justin Norris: 00:42:44

together, that's great and everything.

Justin Norris: 00:42:46

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:51

to kind of get some of that done.

Justin Norris: 00:42:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:42:59

Because it's not just about learning.

Justin Norris: 00:43:01

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:06

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:10

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:16

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:21

like see or feel or engage with things.

Justin Norris: 00:43:25

And knowledge within the tool.

Justin Norris: 00:43:27

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:31

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:35

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:39

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:42

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:45

And so.

Justin Norris: 00:43:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:51

them about like a sales process.

Justin Norris: 00:43:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:43:56

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:01

what the sales process is.

Justin Norris: 00:44:03

How much time are they spending on emails?

Justin Norris: 00:44:04

How much time are they spending on calls?

Justin Norris: 00:44:06

And is that distribution look okay?

Justin Norris: 00:44:09

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:12

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:18

know, emails to calls being greater.

Justin Norris: 00:44:21

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:24

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:28

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:32

2 people or these 3 people are not.

Justin Norris: 00:44:35

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:39

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:43

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:46

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:50

the things that they need to do.

Justin Norris: 00:44:52

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

Justin Norris: 00:44:54

and get them knowledgeable.

Justin Norris: 00:44:55

It's a lifelong learning process.

Justin Norris: 00:44:57

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:03

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:08

It's not just eight years.

Justin Norris: 00:45:09

It's not just S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

D.

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

R.

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:10

It's not just C.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

M.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

Or A.

Justin Norris: 00:45:12

M.

Justin Norris: 00:45:13

S.

Justin Norris: 00:45:13

You could almost think about this from a project perspective.

Justin Norris: 00:45:16

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:22

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:24

it to the next level beyond just

Justin Norris: 00:45:26

training.

Justin Norris: 00:45:26

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:33

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:38

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:41

eyes, are we doing this in the best way?

Justin Norris: 00:45:44

Is this what great looks like?

Justin Norris: 00:45:46

How can we move this forward?

Justin Norris: 00:45:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:50

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:53

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

Justin Norris: 00:45:56

I think it's just so important

Julia Kim: 00:45:58

Absolutely.

Julia Kim: 00:45:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:18

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:24

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:25

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:29

So gong is like high usage, right?

Julia Kim: 00:46:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:45

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:46:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:02

enablement as just that training function.

Julia Kim: 00:47:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:19

those stages to that next stage, right?

Julia Kim: 00:47:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:47:34

Using a team like RevOps.

Justin Norris: 00:47:36

when we think about technology and go to market, obviously

Justin Norris: 00:47:41

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

Justin Norris: 00:47:44

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

Justin Norris: 00:47:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:47:51

have been doing some work there.

Justin Norris: 00:47:52

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

Justin Norris: 00:47:56

to drive real value with AI and rev ops?

Julia Kim: 00:48:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:10

it doesn't have to be homegrown.

Julia Kim: 00:48:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:21

of the days of the conference.

Julia Kim: 00:48:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:28

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:35

your job to someone who is using ai.

Julia Kim: 00:48:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:48

your company isn't competing with AI.

Julia Kim: 00:48:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:48:55

like Microsoft or Google or whatnot, meta.

Julia Kim: 00:48:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:05

Because you can do all the operational.

Julia Kim: 00:49:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:37

Oftentimes these things are already included in your contract.

Julia Kim: 00:49:40

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:49:52

pilot it out to see what the ROI might be.

Julia Kim: 00:49:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:02

And really understand what are your true needs around AI.

Julia Kim: 00:50:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:09

can work with your data team.

Julia Kim: 00:50:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:30

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:35

Rev ops is one around predictive ai.

Julia Kim: 00:50:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:42

have to think about forecasting.

Julia Kim: 00:50:44

What are sales gonna look like?

Julia Kim: 00:50:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:50:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:00

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:18

really around productivity, right?

Julia Kim: 00:51:20

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:25

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:34

that you have in your tech stack.

Julia Kim: 00:51:36

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:45

don't have to worry about it anymore.

Julia Kim: 00:51:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:50

great is conversational AI.

Julia Kim: 00:51:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:51:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:06

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:14

talk to an AE when they're ready.

Julia Kim: 00:52:16

That saves time and energy, right?

Julia Kim: 00:52:18

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:21

you the right question.

Julia Kim: 00:52:21

So you can identify the pain points that they truly have

Julia Kim: 00:52:25

that your product can solve for.

Julia Kim: 00:52:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:29

they call descriptive AI.

Julia Kim: 00:52:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:35

finding visibility or insights through that unstructured data.

Julia Kim: 00:52:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:44

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:48

things within a call at scale, right?

Julia Kim: 00:52:51

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

Julia Kim: 00:52:56

are mentioning our new product?

Julia Kim: 00:52:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:01

it's actually being discussed.

Julia Kim: 00:53:03

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:14

is like, what are you doing for me today?

Julia Kim: 00:53:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:17

That is such an easy thing to start with now.

Julia Kim: 00:53:20

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:24

A.

Julia Kim: 00:53:25

There is a lot of hype.

Julia Kim: 00:53:26

There is a hype cycle around A.

Julia Kim: 00:53:28

I.

Julia Kim: 00:53:28

But it's not going away.

Julia Kim: 00:53:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:35

going to change many different industries.

Julia Kim: 00:53:37

And.

Julia Kim: 00:53:38

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:54

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

Julia Kim: 00:53:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:02

here's some, you know, suggestions.

Julia Kim: 00:54:03

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:07

executive review recently, schedule one.

Julia Kim: 00:54:10

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:14

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:19

But this is something where.

Julia Kim: 00:54:21

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:25

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

Julia Kim: 00:54:29

business works using this tool.

Julia Kim: 00:54:33

so amazing.

Julia Kim: 00:54:34

So I'm, very much excited about AI.

Julia Kim: 00:54:36

If you cannot tell,

Justin Norris: 00:54:38

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

Justin Norris: 00:54:42

a lot of learning, that needs to be done.

Justin Norris: 00:54:44

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

Justin Norris: 00:54:47

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

Justin Norris: 00:54:51

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

Justin Norris: 00:54:56

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

Justin Norris: 00:54:59

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:03

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:06

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:10

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:14

You have a very mature team.

Justin Norris: 00:55:16

It seems very high performing.

Justin Norris: 00:55:17

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:19

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:23

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

Justin Norris: 00:55:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:55:31

working in a startup environment, things shift so

Julia Kim: 00:55:36

quickly and I guess a really big thing.

Julia Kim: 00:55:40

And then a sort of small, big thing.

Julia Kim: 00:55:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:55:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:55:57

your team feeling motivated and driven?

Julia Kim: 00:56:02

Because sometimes.

Julia Kim: 00:56:04

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:08

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:31

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:39

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:44

Because when you think about operations, or you think about

Julia Kim: 00:56:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:51

constantly changing every second.

Julia Kim: 00:56:52

Right.

Julia Kim: 00:56:53

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

Julia Kim: 00:56:55

process, you need some stability.

Julia Kim: 00:56:58

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:03

when you're in a startup environment.

Julia Kim: 00:57:05

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:11

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:16

You know, it's troubleshooting.

Julia Kim: 00:57:18

Why is Marketo not syncing with

Julia Kim: 00:57:20

Salesforce

Julia Kim: 00:57:20

and I think as humans, as people.

Julia Kim: 00:57:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:26

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:30

to have pride in what we're doing.

Julia Kim: 00:57:32

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:38

where people feel like they're growing?

Julia Kim: 00:57:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:46

percent is for the business, right?

Julia Kim: 00:57:47

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:50

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:54

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

Julia Kim: 00:57:57

doing well, some people aren't right.

Julia Kim: 00:57:59

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:02

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:06

Make my team better.

Julia Kim: 00:58:07

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:12

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:19

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:23

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:29

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:34

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:36

Cause it's always a nightmare.

Julia Kim: 00:58:37

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:41

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:44

people to submit juror tickets with us.

Julia Kim: 00:58:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:49

now it's a little confusing.

Julia Kim: 00:58:51

Amazing.

Julia Kim: 00:58:52

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

Julia Kim: 00:58:55

we gave her space for growth.

Julia Kim: 00:58:56

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:01

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:06

perspective, from a skillset perspective.

Julia Kim: 00:59:10

We have a monthly certification accountability group that we do.

Julia Kim: 00:59:14

It's just 30 minutes.

Julia Kim: 00:59:16

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:20

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:22

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:27

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:35

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:40

back because it does come back tenfold.

Julia Kim: 00:59:42

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:46

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:49

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:52

investing in her career growth.

Julia Kim: 00:59:54

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

Julia Kim: 00:59:58

tools that she's never used before.

Julia Kim: 01:00:01

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

Julia Kim: 01:00:07

you also have to feed yourself, right?

Julia Kim: 01:00:09

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

Julia Kim: 01:00:14

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

Julia Kim: 01:00:20

wise so that they can be very effective.

Julia Kim: 01:00:22

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

Julia Kim: 01:00:26

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

Justin Norris: 01:00:33

I love it.

Justin Norris: 01:00:33

So important.

Justin Norris: 01:00:35

Julia, really glad you could join us today.

Justin Norris: 01:00:37

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

Justin Norris: 01:00:40

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

Justin Norris: 01:00:42

So thank you so much for sharing with us.

Julia Kim: 01:00:45

Well, thank you so much for having me.