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- [00:03]
Trevor
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto. All right, Trevor, Mark, how's it going?
- [00:15]
Mark
Good.
- [00:15]
Carolyn
Nice to be here. Thank you.
- [00:16]
Mark
Cool. Yeah.
- [00:17]
Trevor
Great to have you on the show today. For everybody listening, we've brought in Mark Turner as a guest on GTM Live this week. He's the VP of Revenue Operations at Demand Base. It's a company that a lot of our clients or a software that a lot of our clients are using. So I think that's particularly interesting. But I know Mark has a really good backstory as well, just in terms of his success and the growth at this particular company and other ones that he's been at too. So I want to kick it over to Mark. Thanks for joining us today. I'd love if you can give our audience a bit of a background on where you came from and of interest to me, I think, is just the fact that you've got more of a financial specific background. So why don't you tell us about yourself?
- [00:57]
Carolyn
Yeah. So my career really started out in the financial world of FP&A had a background in operations out of college, found a role in capacity planning for a consulting company, was there for a number of years, moved into the FPA team there and then found some roles in sales operations side more around sales planning and realized I can use my financial modeling skills, my operational skills, my tech curiosity and really kind of expand within the sales ops. You know, this was 2016, so RevOps was not quite yet a term that was in the industry, but we did cover the sales operations, marketing analytics. We had a very small team at the time, CS team at the time. So we did a little bit of CS operations as well. Thinking through how do we retain and grow our customers, not just analyze kind of the new. The new logo funnel and the inbound funnel, pivoted there to a traditional B2C company at Canva and you had and built out their first B2B motion. So we kind of took on a PLG play, saw pockets of usage within large enterprises, got them warmed up, then sent our sales teams to go prospect into those and kind of expand the footprint within large enterprises and then moved over to was there for about two years and then moved over to built in for a year again covering all of revenue operations from marketing through CX and then have been a demand base for two years now. Started off in pure sales ops through some restructuring, took on marketing ops, formed revenue operations and partnered very closely with our CX partners on how do we retain and expand and continue to get our customers to value faster.
- [02:33]
Trevor
What has been specifically a demand basic like the last few years? What does that look like in terms of company growth overall? What type of success or even challenges have you seen in that timeframe?
- [02:43]
Carolyn
Yeah, growth has been steady. I think like most of the market, it's not as explosive as it has been in the early 2010s, late 2010s, but we are continuing to grow our ARR. We're continuing to make improvements in our renewal rates and our retention rates. We've really resegmented our business to focus on a more upmarket, more enterprise play. We found that our product fits better within that buying group rather than a corporate smaller marketing team. And then we have also focused on the product suite that our customers have and we've identified that some of our customers are not the best fits for some of our products. And so we've gone through some repackaging exercises and ensuring that we are getting the right product mix to our, to our customers to continue to push that retention.
- [03:28]
Trevor
Very cool. So when you stepped into the role or if, you know, hypothetically if you were to step into a new role today, different company in a revenue operations capacity, what were or what would be the first systems or like data flows that you would audit or potentially even rebuild? I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
- [03:47]
Carolyn
Yeah, I think the low hanging fruit is always looking at the seller's process. That's always going to be an easy win as well. With the sales team on how do you win them over is look at their process, understanding, understanding some of their inefficiencies and how do you continue to make strides to remove some of their inefficiencies so they can continue to do what they do best, which is go build those relationships, identify those buying opportunities and make sales not enter data into CRM or you know, you know, we want to serve them up with the best accounts and the right folks that are engaged and point them in the right direction so that they have an easier path to hit their quota.
- [04:21]
Trevor
How are you thinking about creating like a unified, if at all a unified. We talk a lot about a unified data layer. So you're sort of like connecting the dots between everything marketing's doing, everything sales is doing, your BDR SDR team and then of course like post sales. How do you think about that? How do you think about creating like a unified data layer or a single source of truth, I guess where everything is tracked across the entire process?
- [04:43]
Carolyn
Yeah, great question. It's one of the ones we are currently focusing on right now. We have the theory and I've always had the theory that Salesforce is the source of truth or CRM is the source of truth. And everything should pipe data into and pull data out of CRM or if you have a, we don't have today, a data lake data warehouse. Salesforce is our data data hub. And so every tool should be utilizing that and you know, it should have standardized nomenclature around engagement stats, account stage stats, deal stage stats so that everybody is using the same language, the same reporting, the same metrics throughout both kind of the marketing side, the SDRs, the AES where everybody has a unit, has an understanding of what an MQL is. There's not a, there's not seven definitions of mql. There's one definition of mql. There's one definition of pipeline opportunities, there's one definition of retention, getting customers to value. So that all does start though with building out the process. And so we've spent the last year closer to 18 months working through our whole land and expand motion. We call it the DB way, but it is. We've partnered with Winning by Design to launch kind of their bow tie under the spiced sales methodology. And so we're looking at kind of the awareness, the engagement and then the value and growth stages.
- [05:56]
Mark
That sounds great. I'm curious. You start to bring everything together and of course CRM is a huge piece of it, so. Totally agree. System of record for so many things. Do you see Salesforce as system of record for things like financial numbers too or are you pulling that in separately?
- [06:14]
Carolyn
We push all of that into Salesforce. So again, everybody has the same information in terms of firmographic, technographic, geographic data. Demand based part of our platform is account data. So we pull our own data into Salesforce. Our reps are in our own platform looking at accounts with specific technographic or firmographic information. But that goes into our account scoring model. And so Salesforce does become the source of truth. We do have a data waterfall model where we are, you know, using our own data plus other data sources to fill in any gaps or triple confirm that what we have is accurate. So we try to triangulate to ensure that we have the most accurate data within CRM because that then allows our marketing teams and our SDR teams and our AES to ensure that they all are growing after the best accounts within their books.
- [07:03]
Mark
Great. More centralized, you can get everything the better of course. Absolutely. Within reason, obviously. Do you think about expenses, spend in all the stuff that you're Measuring. How do you think about that?
- [07:15]
Carolyn
We think about expenses on the platform and tech stack side. Obviously we have budgets. It's not a free for all. Everybody can't travel first class all around the world to meet their customers. But with the world that we are living in and kind of how our teams are set up, they are geographically dispersed, we travel strategically, but our customers are varied in size from the top of the top of the Fortune 50 to I wouldn't say the low of the low, but someone who's up and coming somewhere around $100 million. And so we treat those customers differently and we'll either do virtual or on sites depending on those customers. But from a tech stack perspective, we have our budgets, we have to work within those budgets and we are always looking for how do we improve the performance of a tool who's up and coming with AI features that we can adopt and kind of again take work off of both refs or rev ops. Right. We only have a certain number of analysts and so how do we provide the best data to our sales and marketing leadership? What trends are we seeing and how do we do that kind of on an automated basis or a deeper basis without having to go higher more and more?
- [08:17]
Mark
Gotcha. Do you use any kind of BI tool or are you using Salesforce built in?
- [08:22]
Carolyn
Today we are using Tableau CRM or crma. We are in the process of bringing on or evaluating a more comprehensive BI tool kind of at that point where we're hitting the limits of CRMA and having all of our data in Salesforce where we're limited with what we can do. And so we're looking at how do we bring in multiple data sources into a data, a data lake or a data warehouse and then having BI on top of that.
- [08:46]
Trevor
What would you say are some of those limitations that you're up against?
- [08:49]
Carolyn
A lot of the go to market tools these days have their own data outreach. You know, so we have outreach, we have gong. They all have their own unique data points that you can pull into a snowflake or a databricks and then bring in more Salesforce data. You can match up your Outlook outreach data with your GONG data and look for patterns. And because we are just limited within the Salesforce environment, we are not able to do that today.
- [09:12]
Trevor
Understood. How do you think about KPIs in terms of like how your team is measured? Can you walk us through some of like the core KPIs that you measure that you're reporting up to the C suite? Tell us about that.
- [09:24]
Carolyn
From a RevOps perspective or from a field and marketing perspective, just revops or.
- [09:30]
Trevor
Even just go to market overall.
- [09:32]
Carolyn
Yeah. So revops, we really focus on data accuracy. We're trying to measure kind of the number of help desk tickets that we get, our response times there. With everything kind of now being in Slack, it's getting a little bit more difficult to really respond and report on, hey, we answered a thousand questions, A thousand questions and you know we had a 10 minute SLA. So we really kind of focus on deal closing and how quickly are we able to kind of get deals through the system. We also look at data and so how many accounts are we adding to the system within our icp, within our tam, within our TAO every month, how is that growing? How many contacts within those accounts are we adding? How many of those are reachable? How many of those have been contacted? So to show that we are continuing to add value to the sellers, not just helping them with their process, bringing out a new tool and becoming kind of their support desk, but we want to help them achieve quota and by continuing to add data that is accurate and actionable, we can do that.
- [10:29]
Mark
Okay, how about measuring the go to market function itself? What are you doing there?
- [10:34]
Carolyn
Yeah, so we really try to follow our bow tie. So we start with engagement, right? That's where demand based helps us measure engagement within our towel. And so are we, are the marketing plays that we are running, the SDR plays that we're running, are they causing our target account list to engage with us and kind of take an action with us? Then we move into your more traditional mql. We also have marketing qualified accounts so it might not be one person that has triggered a threshold, but a number of people have done a number of things and that is showing a very high intent signal. That means that that account is now ready to move from an awareness stage in marketing and into an action stage with an SDR or an ae. We then kind of take that actually into our products. So within our customers they are also in an awareness stage for an upsell opportunity or a cross sell opportunity and then it's time for our post sales team to go take action. At a certain moment those are the triggers that we are looking at are more, I think they are lagging indicators but they are definitely forward thinking action indicators. And so when we look at some of our reporting we have our targets set around number of accounts that are engaged with us, the number of MQLs from those accounts, number of MQAs from those accounts down three pipeline opportunities and then down to kind of close one and we're looking at conversion stages through each one. We break it out by segment, we break it out by geo. We, we really try to dive into marketing campaigns, what are working, what's not working so we can provide that information back to our marketing counterparts and say, okay, continue to invest in this program or these types of programs. It seems to be working because we are getting more bookings from the, the interest that is generated from those programs versus other programs. @ the end of the day it's all about bookings. It doesn't matter if you go generate $200 million pipeline if you can't close it. More of a van. It's a vanity metric, not a, not a business metric. And so we really try to tie it down to bookings.
- [12:22]
Mark
Absolutely. All right, I have some other questions here. Thank you for the great summary there. Lots to unpack I think because you know, this is where rubber meets the road. Always with revops and just go to market in general. Like is it working? So I'm just going to sort of go down my list of things that stuck out to me as you were talking there. First off, engagement, sort of a hard thing to define or I guess could be vague, let's put it that way. How do you guys think about that?
- [12:52]
Carolyn
We think about it in terms of responses to campaigns. So whether they took the click through action or the call to action. Did they open something over here and we're that, you know, we're talking about people or an account. Did a, did an account receive a message or a notification and landed at a site over here? You know, so are we able to map up some messaging to actions on our website or to form fills or to registrations? We call that a response. They responded to something we sent to them or generic search, things like that. Have they come to our site? Then we kind of narrow it down to a qualified response. So it's not just any response, but is it the right person from the right company that is showing us intent? And so those are higher value. They might not have become your traditional mql. They might not have filled out a demo request, but they're looking at our product pages, they're kind of doing our on demand demo or self serve demos. They're poking around. The nice part is when we get into a sales cycle and we start to see visits to our security page, we go, okay, they're taking it serious. They're looking at our security pages, they're looking at our legal terms. Additionally too competition is a good thing. When we see competitive intent and again all powered by the demand based platform, when we see competitive intent, we know that they are, they're evaluating a number of vendors. It isn't just us, which is usually when it's just us, probably not a real deal. They're just kind of doable of service to do. They have budget. But when they do start to visit others, we know that there's, they're putting some work in.
- [14:17]
Mark
Right. So to summarize here, it is things that people are doing. It's engagement, it's interaction. And then you're taking that one step further and saying this is, this is an interaction we care about. We want to know everything, but we want to know certain things more. And that is what drives your idea of engagement. Does that feed into a scoring model? Are you using any kind of scoring or is that maybe driven by your product as well?
- [14:40]
Carolyn
Yeah, it's driven by our product. So we have a pipeline predict score as well as a qualification score. So is the account a good fit given your past wins? And then is the account performing actions that says, okay, this is actually showing some movement and some intent. So it's not just an account within your target account or total adjustable market, it's an account within your total address market that is showing buyer intent. So now is your time to take action.
- [15:06]
Mark
Got it. Okay, that, that makes sense.
- [15:08]
Carolyn
Yeah. And then we use tools, we use our own tool. We have an orchestration product that is built in so that when those signals are shown, they can be added to different campaigns, different nurture campaigns. It's not so much an introduction to demand based but it's a. Oh hey, you went and visited our orchestration page. Let's go now serve you an orchestration case study email. Let's go invite you to an orchestration webinar. Let's go talk about if you're an orchestration, you're more likely in the marketing ops side than a marketer side. So let's go invite you to marketing ops event. And those are again all powered by, you know, orchestration. If we're really trying to do take a lot of the manual work off of marketers now getting these, these accounts through the funnel and then we build in plays on top of that from a sales side. And so we'll use an outreach automation to trigger an outreach campaign. We'll use Momentum. Momentum's an AI tool that sits across call recordings and emails. You can also trigger it with salesforce actions and have it kind of internally notify folks of actions and intent. You can kind of schedule executives to. You can really do anything with it, which is great. But you can kind of kick off an executive to executive meeting and say, hey, you know, our CEO should meet up with this CEO because this is now an account that is further down in the funnel and is continuing to show buyer intent.
- [16:26]
Mark
Right. I think one question that always comes up and sort of came to mind as you were talking there is at what point are you executing these campaigns sort of automations on behalf of a salesperson versus sort of from the company? The more traditional marketing message is there, is there a line there for you guys on when you decide to, to say send some stuff from the salesperson?
- [16:51]
Carolyn
Yeah, really when the person becomes an MQL or the account becomes an mqa, that's really the transition from a, I would say not really a one to many. Right. We do try to personalize it and narrow down our marketing campaigns so they are to the right role within the right industry. So it's relevant to a one to one message.
- [17:12]
Mark
Right. Okay. I'd say that's probably a pretty common version of this. It makes sense. You're introducing the salesperson to your prospect at that point and sort of the relationship changes at that moment. There.
- [17:26]
Carolyn
Yeah. There are plays that we run within our customer base where we are introducing our reps to peripheral buying groups. And so if you're a large multinational organization and we have a relationship with you and you have a buying hub in California, we will try to find other, other buying hubs around the country that have unique budgets that we could go sell another platform to and run those plays on behalf of both marketing and a sales rep.
- [17:53]
Mark
Right. And that actually sort of transitions well to the next question I was going to ask and that's around separating your pipelines from sort of thinking about new logo to expansion, upsell, whatever you want to call it. How do you think about that? Do you measure those separately? How does that work for you guys?
- [18:11]
Carolyn
Yeah, we do have a new logo pipeline. That is where we feel like we have the most robust data. Just because it is your more traditional funnel. Right. It's moving from an account in our, in our sphere to an account that's aware of us to an account that is showing intent to. Oh great, let's go run a sales play. Get them in the door. As a new logo on the customer side. We are starting to measure, hey, they've shown intent for a product or there's an upsell opportunity. How do we measure kind of those things through the funnel. But a customer will visit our site a number of times or they'll join webinars, or they're trying to learn more about the product and how to use it. And so some of those signals are a little more false, I would say, than on the new logo side. And so it's less around the MQL motion and more around kind of a relationship. And so with our systems, they are highly engaged with our customers. And then we have what we call them growth account directors, but kind of expansion sales reps. They are across a book business. They own the business relationship. And so they again are have, you know, their account plans. Where do they want the account to go next? You know, what are they hearing through calls and emails with CSMs? Again, this is where a tool like Momentum comes in, takes the transcript of a call or an email and says, okay, we heard intent around a peripheral product. Okay, Mr. And Ms. Sales Rep, now is your opportunity to introduce, you know, take that product conversation further. So it's less again around the CSM who was on the call entering notes and slacking the sales rep and saying, hey, I just had this conversation. It's all being done in the background for the teams. And they are again able to focus on the relationship and the conversation and asking the right questions and less around remembering to write down action items, taking those actions afterwards, and kind of make sure the right folks are involved.
- [20:04]
Mark
Okay, that makes sense. Which leads me to my. My sort of next question around tracking sort of pre opportunity for that expansion kind of scenario. Do you have something in place where you're able to say sort of here's sort of an MQL equivalent for that existing customer, or does that go straight to a sort of an opportunity record?
- [20:26]
Carolyn
It kind of goes straight to an opportunity. You know, we do have engagement, we do have qrs, so qualified responses. We think that the account is ready for a peripheral product. We can track that campaign. We can track that product motion and say, yep, these QRS came from this campaign showing some intent. Go run a sales play. But we're not so reliant on like an MQL motion to go trigger something. It is more around kind of the lower engagement signals.
- [20:56]
Mark
Okay, yeah. I ask because, you know, you think about the bow tie and it's really, really detailed on that new logo side. And then sort of the detail starts to fall off a little bit when you start to think about expansion and renewal and so on. It's something we think a lot about and certainly have perspectives on. I won't go off on my, my whole thing is about you and what you guys are doing. But yeah, it's a thing. I'm always curious about you. What are people doing? How are they thinking about it? How do you overlay the bowtie idea into that sort of part of the ecosystem. And so thanks for giving me your background there.
- [21:32]
Carolyn
You know, and a lot of what we're doing with our customers is kind of white space analysis. And not only do they have the product, yes or no, because not everybody's a good fit for every product that we have. But you know, do they have the product? Do they look like a customer that is other, you know, do they look like other customers that have bought this product and have the similar tech stack? Do they have the similar footprint across the globe and is it the right product to go sell to them?
- [21:54]
Mark
Excellent. Well, I've been talking a lot, so I'm going to, I'm going to let Carolyn do some talking. I know she's got a lot of questions.
- [22:01]
Trevor
I know, I love that. Yeah, I love those questions. And you had, I was thinking them, you had articulated them a lot better than I would have. I want to just go back to sort of the concept of RevOps overall. I would love to understand, Mark, your, what your definition is in terms of like the purpose of RevOps. I think we see sort of like a lot of different versions of that in the industry. And how has that definition of revops evolved over time in your opinion?
- [22:30]
Carolyn
So my definition of RevOps is it is the centralized team across the go to marketing motion that ensures we have an aligned data source, tech stack plays and the source of truth and that everybody knows what the sales motion looks like and who does what through the motion in the field. Right. We know that our marketers do X, we know that our customer success reps do Y and that there's not overlap and that everybody has a role and a responsibility and that it is communicated and tracked throughout an account's journey with us. My personal level of hell as a buyer is when the SDR asked me a question, I answer it. The AE asked me the same question and then we signed a contract and then I get to like the csm. They go, okay, so what do you want to do here? And it's like you guys have not been talking for the last six months. I can tell internally because I've now answered that question three or four times. And so RevOps, you know, to me one of RevOps goal is to ensure that doesn't happen and that there is a Free flowing and smooth flow of information across teams and a handoff so that it does feel like a very well run and oiled machine. That to me is the operations part of it. Right. Then there's the analytics part of it. And so how do you analyze each transaction? How do you analyze each sales rep so that you can work with your enablement team and say, okay, we feel like rep A is might have an issue here getting out of demo. Let's go see if we can recommend an enablement program for this rep or this cohort of reps. Because we are seeing a downward trend in our demo conversion rates across our mid market segment. So what messaging do we need to refresh? And then there's the tech stack ownership. Ensuring that all the systems and the data are flowing across each to again have that centralized source of truth. And then being a great partner with finance and ensuring that our teams are spending appropriately within budget, that Revops itself is spending appropriately within budget, that we are getting the great ROI for the tools we're bringing in. You know, Revops is not just your Salesforce admins, it's not just your Salesforce support desk. It is, it should be a value add to a company, not a, not a cost center.
- [24:37]
Mark
Do you own the tech stack? I know in some organizations it has a hand in some of it.
- [24:42]
Carolyn
Yeah. Is that all you guys at Demandbase? That is all us and we actually partner with other organizations to help them own their tech stack as well. So we kind of own the legal tech stack or at least help administer the legal tech stack. We help administer the support tech stack. We do have an IT function at the Manbase that I would say it's more of a internal IT than it is a tool tech stack. At Acquia we had an IT function and they own Salesforce. You know, Salesforce is a central business tool even at demand base. And so we actually call our sales, I've called them sales systems in the past. We actually call them business systems because they, they do own. We own netsuite, we own Salesforce. Right. It. It is more than just the sales tech.
- [25:26]
Mark
Exactly. Before we called it Revops, one of my previous roles, we called global Business systems. Yeah, like we just sort of thought about systems as both technology and process, you know, behind it. So really the point you just made, and I think that's the, the natural evolution of this thing when it's evolved correctly.
- [25:43]
Carolyn
Yeah. And I think what's changing now, what's getting more and more fun, at least from my perspective, is this role of Revops as an engineer. And so it's not so just making sure that the tools are connected properly and the data's flowing. It's what can we do with these tools to really build value for our sellers and for our companies? What can we automate? What signals can we just go run? You know, it's not so much as bringing in like an AI SDR to go make awkward phone calls to your prospects, but it's how do you serve up the right information and how do you kind of take some stuff and help augment your people, not replace.
- [26:18]
Trevor
Yeah. How do you think that Your background in FP&A has helped shape you in your role today? Like one thing, just from our vantage point, we see some of the best performing organizations have somebody with financial acumen, really own that function. I think it gives you a real unique advantage. But I'd love to know your perspective on that.
- [26:43]
Carolyn
I think the advantage it gives you is there's a level of curiosity and you have the data acumen to kind of analyze, explain, understand what's happening behind the scenes. And so when you're trying to add value to your sales leaders, you can say, okay, here's your team, here's your reps, here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Your reps, again, your reps seem to be stalling here or your win rates are dropping. Within this customer type, you can apply that to your campaign analysis for your marketing folks and say, stop doing this, it's not working. No matter how many MQLs come in from that campaign, they're not converting. So. So let's just stop wasting our money. And I think finance within, you know, there's always the sales and marketing, not battle, but friction.
- [27:26]
Mark
We all know what you mean. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [27:28]
Carolyn
And I think, you know, at Demandbase, we do try to push sales and marketing together. We have our sales teams and our marketing teams in the same platform, our customer sales teams and marketing teams in the same platform. Within Demandbase, that has always been my mantra as well, is regardless of who I reported to, whether it was a CRO or I report to the cfo, demand base Revops is here to push the business forward, not make the sales team look good or make the marketing team look good. It's to act as a neutral party. And finance traditionally has always been, you know, it's usually a neutral party between those organizations and can kind of speak at a level that both sides can understand. And so I think that's where the FPA side Helps is the curiosity, the analysis, and the level of neutrality between the organization.
- [28:16]
Mark
I think that makes a ton of sense. Where I'm curious about your journey here is, you know what. What I've seen in my. My version of this journey is you had sort of people coming from the financial or sales ops side, you had people coming from the marketing side, or you have people coming from the tech side. And, you know, I. I'm a little biased. I'm sort of from the tech side. And I think, you know, Revops, when done well, is also heavily technical. You know, it's not just a salesperson process organization. Right. And so you're coming from a slightly different angle than me. You've probably had to build up the technical resources and skill set. Can you explain a little bit about how you did that?
- [28:56]
Carolyn
Yeah, I think I've always been a pretty technical person. Right. You think about the. The curve of adopters. I think I'm usually on that early side of adopters in terms of new tech or new things to market. I think it's that curiosity. What else can we do? How can we do it better? So, you know, I kind of taught myself. My business systems leader absolutely hates when I try to get into Salesforce and go fix things, because I will, you know, I'll go right into production and start fixing things. And, you know, I'm breaking the process that he's built, which I should know better. But sometimes it's late at night and you get anxious and you want to see something work. And so I think I've always been able to kind of dig into the back end of a system and say, okay, this doesn't seem to be working properly. How can I play around with it? How can I tweak it to make it better? I think, again, spending that time to really understand what do you want the tool to do and how do you get there. Now, with the proliferation of GPTs and kind of these LLM or AI tools, you can ask it to create your Salesforce formula for you, and it does it. And you don't have to spend the hours tweaking the Salesforce formula or the flow or the process. And it's a layer of democratization, um, for folks like me that kind of know what I want but don't quite know the, you know, Salesforce certified admin way to get there. Sure.
- [30:19]
Mark
That's a good use case. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that what you've just said sort of aligns with. Confirms sort of how I see the world on the RevOps side as well. Like you, you have to be well rounded. You cannot really specialize in one piece of the puzzle. Otherwise, what's the point of like, it's not RevOps.
- [30:37]
Carolyn
Yeah. You know, everybody's got their comfort zone, right? My comfort zone is pulling up an Excel spreadsheet and getting back into the analyst mode. You know, when things get hairy, it's like, all right, I just, I will go deep in that and then. But I can work with the right folks to go wide on the marketing piece, the marketing operations, you know, campaign operations, or the business systems or the customer journey process.
- [31:00]
Trevor
I have a question for you. And we ask this all the time, something we're talking about. I'd love to hear your perspective on this, Mark. But one thing that we see a lot is this oversimplified view of go to market measurement. What did marketing source, what did sales source, blah, blah, blah. What is your perspective on that and how are you measuring departmental performance or go to market performance at demand base? Is it using the four funnel model? Is it entirely different?
- [31:30]
Carolyn
So again, because we tout sales and marketing together, we planned for sales and marketing to work together. And so traditionally marketing touches 95% of our pipeline. And so rather than try to say, well, this was a sales source opportunity or a marketing source opportunity, everybody had their piece in creating this pipeline opportunity. That's really kind of where we start to measure the business and measure the future success. Right. It's great if you have a number of MQLs, but if none of them convert, who cares?
- [32:00]
Trevor
Exactly.
- [32:00]
Carolyn
And so we got to say, okay, all right, marketing, we know that you ran, you know what, you know, did you run a generation campaign or a, you know, move through the funnel campaign? You're going to touch. You most likely have touched an opportunity at some point or touched a person on the opportunity at some point in the opportunity life cycle. Sales, you have also, you know, you've SDRs, you've done your outreach, right. You've, you've automated your outreach campaigns. And so very rarely at demand base is something purely marketing or purely sales generated. Last year we did introduce and we did launch a partner motion. And that's where we kind of had to bifurcate a bit from the everybody together story into all right, we have a partner team. They have a unique goal. How do we measure partners and partner managers on partner sourced opportunities? Now we do have a partner marketing team that is creating awareness, but we don't really start to measure like partner mql. We measure partner opportunities and our and our is our partner or ecosystem bringing us kind of a pipeline validated opportunity. And then over the past year we've made a push on a E sourced pipeline like what are they doing to feed themselves? But we do know that because an SDR could be prospecting into that account and the person that they touch reaches out to somebody else over here and the AE just happens to talk to that person. We do give dual credit. And so we say, okay, sdr, you have the pipeline generation quota. It's an account within your book. You have worked that account. The AE just happened to get the right person at the right time to create the opportunity. Doesn't mean you haven't done anything wrong. Let's give you your, you know, your dollars and then the AE go close a deal, get paid. But you know, you can't just sit there and wait for the SDR to bring you an opportunity. You do have to kind of feed yourself and we'll bring forward data. The way we kind of got our teams to buy into this is we bring forward data of our best performing reps and we say, okay, this is what our best performing reps are doing. They are bringing in their own pipeline, they are sourcing and they are, you know, doing their own prospecting and anything the SDR brings in is gravy on top. Right. That's how they get to 150% because the SDR is bringing them their opportunities, but they are getting to 80%, 90% on their own efforts.
- [34:21]
Trevor
Okay, yeah, that's interesting. I was going to actually ask about how you structure variable compensation around that because I think a lot of times, you know, people we speak with are so used to measuring based on department source because that's how their reps get paid. So I think that's interesting how you have like a split, a commission split as a way to like mitigate that. How is marketing compensated on deal influence and things like that?
- [34:46]
Carolyn
Not so much like a commission plan. They are compensated general employees of business. So success of the business funds the bonus pool. And so while we can measure the marketer's performance and say the campaigns you are running are converting at X and they're bringing in this amount of dollars or they've touched because we also have the multi touch attribution. You know, they've pushed this amount of pipeline throughout the stages. Great job. Our individual marketers are not paid differently based on their own performance.
- [35:16]
Trevor
Right. Okay. I think though the fact though that you're looking at other KPIs for marketing, one that I really like is just, you know, percentage of pipeline and revenue that has been impacted by marketing, I think is really important versus marketing went out and sourced this lead and you know, it became X in revenue. So that's a unique way of looking at it. I love that not everybody looks at it from that vantage point though. Right?
- [35:40]
Carolyn
Yeah. And in theory, marketing has touched every account before it becomes an opportunity. Right. Because they are running awareness, they're running brand very rarely. The way, you know, the way we go to market and the way we kind of align our advise our customers to go to market is through the the account funnel. Using demand base and demand basis intent and our ads platform. You're really warming up those accounts before a sales rep goes in there because you're going to have a higher conversion rate when someone's aware of you versus just 100 dials a day and call anybody you want and see who bites.
- [36:13]
Mark
Absolutely.
- [36:14]
Trevor
I have a hypothetical question. Say you're to go into a newer organization as, you know, VP of RevOps, you're working with leadership that is accustomed to measuring by department source and they are like dead set on the way that they want to measure teams. Like, what would you say to those executives in that scenario? How would you convince them to really shift their thinking and how they're measuring performance?
- [36:43]
Carolyn
Yeah, I think getting companies to an account buying motion is a big lift for our revenue operations team. Right. That does require both your cmo, your CRO or chief sales officer to buy in that it is not just a marketing versus a sales effort, that it is a marketing with sales effort. And so that's kind of the conversation is, are we willing as a company to think about the way we go to market and not just, you know, we'd have to look at compensation plans. Right. Are reps compensated on sales generated deals? Are they compensated differently on sales generated deals versus marketing generated deals? You know, at the end of the day, a deal is a deal, whether it comes from marketing or sales, it's still a $50,000, $75,000 deal. What we find is those deals that have been sourced or influenced by marketing before the SDR or the seller gets to it, usually has a higher sp, usually has a higher conversion rate, usually has a shorter sales cycle. All those things lead to what we call it sales velocity. It's a metric that exists out there. It's your number of deals times your win rate times your ASP divided by your sales cycle. And you always want to see it improving. And so we measure our reps against each other Using that metric, it's hard to measure cross functional teams differently because you have your enterprise team that has huge ASPs, longer sales cycles. You have your transactional team that has smaller ASPs, smaller sales cycles, but higher deals. But within the team you should have a range and you can measure our reps against that and we can measure that team over time. And so those marketing sourced or touched ops usually have a higher velocity overall because one of those metrics is better than a pure sales generated. And we use that same conversation for partners as partner deals are usually higher win rate, higher ASP and better for the business than a pure cold outbound buyer seller.
- [38:35]
Trevor
Yeah, I think we certainly share the same perspective and we want to help companies see that for themselves. But how do you know when you can't measure it? Right. I think that's the key to all of this is being able to actually measure and track that data and be able to scrutinize, optimize and continuously improve over time. I have another question. It's shifting more towards like the tactics land. One thing that we're hearing about a lot is all of this stuff that we were doing as a go to market organization historically, like Cold Outbound, you know, running paid ads, things like the events, everything, it's not working the way it used to. Right. Are you feeling that in your own organization and what are you seeing to be most effective for your company and what's maybe not working the way that it used to?
- [39:21]
Carolyn
Yeah, I would say Cold Outbound is definitely not working for us, but Warm Outbound is working again, running the awareness plays. I would say online advertising or display ads for us is working and it's working for our customers as well. We have a number of use cases where they've joined demand base and their pipeline has increased, their win rates have gone up because we are getting them in front of the right buyer at the right moment at the right time. So I think our prior CMO, I think had the stat that at any point 5% of your prospects are really in your buying group. And so buying window, how do we find that 5% when they are in the buying window? And that's where that intent, that intent model comes in and says, okay, yep, this account is in our tam. You know, they are now having some signals that says they are interested in a product like ours or for our customers. Right, like theirs. Now go run your, your sales Play. Okay. Okay, Ms. Sales Rep. Now is the time to send that email campaign or pick up that phone. So it feels like cold outbound because you're. You're dialing to a person you've never talked to before. But it is. I would say it's warm and that, you know, I think that still is working. The power of a phone call is still pretty powerful because it's a person on the other end of the line, as opposed to a series of automated emails that everybody gets.
- [40:45]
Trevor
Yeah. I think now more than ever, that level of personalization or, like, humanization, I think really, really matters. With the proliferation of AI, I feel like I just had another conversation with somebody else. We were talking about SEO and content and all of that, and I think, yeah, we're now shifting into that age where AI is changing everything at lightning speed, and so the way we do things really matters.
- [41:09]
Carolyn
Agree.
- [41:10]
Trevor
I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we had a lot of questions that we really did want to get into, but I think we went deep on the stuff that we really care about. So thank you, Mark. We'll have to potentially do this again another time, but I want to thank you for your time for coming on. Trevor, any other final thoughts before we wrap?
- [41:26]
Mark
Just. Thank you, Mark. This was really great. A lot of good insights there. I think we see eye to eye on all this stuff, and I always like to hear other people's perspectives and test out how. I think. So this is super useful and hopefully for the audience as well. I'm sure it will be. So thank you for your time today.
- [41:44]
Carolyn
Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.
- [41:46]
Mark
All right, cheers.
- [41:47]
Trevor
Thanks, y'.
- [41:47]
Carolyn
All. Sam.