In this episode of the Distributed Truth Podcast, Evan Dunn is joined by Sebastien van Heyningen, a seller turned RevOps expert and the founder of Central Metric. Central Metric helps B2B SaaS companies increase revenue efficiently through building scalable systems.

Sebastien van Heyningen discusses the importance of focusing on the buyer journey in a holistic manner and the challenges companies face in achieving this. He emphasizes the need for a consensus on the buyer journey and the importance of understanding the steps that buyers actually take. Sebastien also highlights the limitations of the concept of a single source of truth and the need for each team to have its own truth-filled operating system. He suggests tracing the best buyer journey that has been delivered and combining it with the existing true north to create an automated and easy-to-follow version. Sebastien also advises companies to ask their clients and gather insights from various sources to understand the steps buyers need to take.
 

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

The buyer journey is more important than the offering.

 “We're all kind of doing the same stuff and the folks that actually do it in a holistic way and consider every step, what experience the people that you're trying to engage with are having, those are the ones that win. I put an article up recently that was like, the buyer journey is more important than the offering. And I think as the market becomes more and more crowded, that becomes more and more true.” - Sebastien van Heyningen

The importance of collecting insights from buyers. 

“We're all kind of doing the same stuff and the folks that actually do it in a holistic way and consider every step, what experience the people that you're trying to engage with are having, those are the ones that win.” - Sebastien van Heyningen

Connect with Sebastien van Heyningen and learn more about his work:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienvanheyningen/

Central Metric: https://www.centralmetric.tech/services/
 

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Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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The importance of revenue maturity towards customer care, customer success, and growth. "And I'm really hoping that revenue maturity goes toward the light of like when a CRO deeply cares about customer care, customer success, and growth that way, from my experience, a lot of CROs have the title, but still have that like love language of like net new deal."

Data teams trying to reckon with the needs of the business and the need for executive sponsorship. "One thing I observed watching a lot of data team conversations in communities and around Reddit and that kind of stuff is. They, they are trying to reckon with the needs of the business all the time. Mm-hmm. They're not super clear. Yeah. Right. What, how to bring value. And 10 years into data teams, they're still not super clear."

Connect with Jacki and learn more about her work:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackileahy/

Activate the Magic: https://www.activatethemagic.com/

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Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Rebecca gets practical about how founders can reimagine their tech stack to optimize for revenue-driving activities. Rebecca brings her own experience as a founder, as well as background working with Fortune 500 companies, to deliver timely recommendations for managing their tech and data investments. In order to eliminate silos and reduce bloat in the tech stack, leaders need to reverse engineer how their customers interact with their teams and technology, and prioritize the investments that most directly attach to revenue.

Rebecca Clyde is the co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai. The company’s genAI Chat Cloud enables conversations between businesses and their customers that are engaging, personalized and insightful.

Ms. Clyde is an accomplished business leader with unique expertise in marketing automation and company building. Prior to Botco.ai, Clyde founded Ideas Collide, an Inc. 5000 digital agency now in its 15th year serving Fortune 500 companies. She was previously a digital strategist at Intel and holds an MBA from Arizona State University.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

REBECCA: REMOVE DUPLICATES TO SOLVE ISSUES FOR THE ADMINISTRATION AND FOR CLIENTS

“It's such a hard decision to make for folks to decide to go get care for their mental health, or for a potential addiction problem that they might be having. It's a huge step for them. And we should remove any barrier, and certainly not make the data be the problem along the way if anything.”

REBECCA: CUSTOMERS JUST WANT A GOOD EXPERIENCE, THEY DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT YOUR CRM

“I like to take a very customer-centric orientation as well because honestly, I know everybody uses Salesforce or some type of CRM, we believe it's imperative. But your customer doesn't interface with it, they don't actually use it. And in fact, they may not care if you use Salesforce or a CRM or not, that's not what they're going to be experiencing.”

Connect with Rebecca and learn more about his work:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaclyde/

botco.ai: https://botco.ai/

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Jeff has built a high-performing CS operations team at GitLab supporting hundreds of customer success and support managers. Jeff gets very detailed about how GitLab developed its customer 360 program, how they developed product usage data insights for CS, as well as how vital it is for this information to be distributed across sales and CS together.

Jeff Beaumont leads customer success operations and programs at GitLab. Jeff has worked in SaaS for over ten years, before which he was a CPA.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

JEFF: PEELING BACK AND DISCOVERING THE DATA ISSUES

“They're not aligned on 'this needs to be a company initiative' so you have teams just doing skunkworks projects by saying 'this is what I have to do, this project over here that unrelated to this, but I'm still passionate about this usage data project because I see the vision. I believe in it' but they can really only devote a couple of hours. That just does not get it done.”

JEFF: COLLABORATION ACROSS CSMS AND SALES

“So from a sales rep perspective, they're incentivized to make sure that their CSM and their solution architect or sales engineer are both well-equipped, have the data that they need, and can execute. Because it's going to come back for them in the future. You need to sow and then you can reap.”

Connect with Jeff and learn more about his work:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbeaumont/
• Github: https://about.gitlab.com/

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

• Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Cat joins The Distributed Truth to discuss one of the most overlooked-yet-important parts of Revenue Operations: documenting the flow of customer data across GTM tools. According to Cat, the ability to track leads to customers to renewals is “very rare” in B2B orgs of any size. We talk diagrams, nightmare scenario “spiderwebs of insanity” and Cat’s unflagging appetite for simplifying and optimizing the tech stack. And if you want to know how to sell to a Revenue Ops leader like Cat, make sure your CS team prioritizes their needs and feedback. 

Caterina Torres is a Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Weights & Biases, previously at Supermove and Zoom. With a background spanning from sales data management to marketing systems, Cat brings a level-headed view of the importance of customer data strategy to Go-To-Market efficiency.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

CAT: HOW OFTEN DOES ONE END UP IN A SPIDERWEB SCENARIO

“When a company is starting up, they actually do a pretty good job of connecting or finding a single source of truth area. But I'd say the larger the company is, that's where it becomes a spiderweb of insanity.”

CAT ON WHICH TEAMS NEED TO SEE THE FULL CUSTOMER JOURNEY

“Being able to see the full journey is extremely important for all the teams whether they know it or not. Maybe the engineering team would be least likely to benefit from it because they're building the product so they don't really need to see.”

Connect with Caterina and learn more about her work:
 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caterina-torres-%F0%9F%A7%A9-2331b628/

Weights & Biases: https://wandb.ai/site

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Connor discusses the biggest problems facing GTM - and they all have to do with data across GTM systems. In fact, according to Aptitude8’s research, the #1 implementation challenge for CRMs is data migration and data management. Listen to Connor’s expert insights about the history of the Lead Object, the importance of data models to your business model, and the need for centralized data management owned by RevOps teams.

Connor Jeffers is the founder and CEO of Aptitude8 and Hapily and is basically a Jedi of making HubSpot work for companies of all stages and sizes. Connor has spent his career in marketing and revenue operations leadership, as well as startup incubation.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

CONNOR: THE NUMBER ONE CONCERN WITH MOVING DATA SYSTEMS

“I think the core of data migration is, 'migrating data is hard.' Sure, that's true but also not, you export it and import it. The problem is, normalizing it, transforming it, making it useful in the new system, and usually where it's coming from is it's dirty and unstructured. And that's the root cause of all these issues.”

EVAN ON FIRST UNDERSTANDING YOUR COMPANY APPROACH

“Business model matters for your data model. In other words, if you're B2B then you need to know companies and if you're B2C you don't necessarily. Though, you can argue, there's a concept of a household that B2C companies are now trying to aggregate to particularly for media, entertainment, and even CPG. They do this with tons of data in the back end and CRMs struggle to keep up with these needs.”

Connect with Connor and learn more about his work:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-jeffers/

Aptitude 8: https://aptitude8.com/

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Jomar joins us to explore the intriguing intersection of revenue operations and cybersecurity, specifically as it relates to data. A seasoned expert in both fields, Jomar sheds light on how cybersecurity principles can be leveraged when unifying data from the myriad systems in the modern stack to optimize RevOps. We also discuss real-world applications of the bowtie funnel, double diamond model, and multi-dimensional swim lanes in solving complex operational problems.

Jomar Ebalida is a seasoned digital transformation practitioner with over a decade of experience in scaling unicorn companies and transforming enterprise revenue technology stacks.  As the head of revenue technology for a global law firm, Jomar leads digital transformation efforts while also serving as a RevOps coach, conducting revenue technology audits, and advising on marketing and revenue strategy. Jomar is the author of “Rethinking RevOps”.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

JOMAR: YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND WHERE DATA COMES FROM

“Even pixels matter. Data matters and making sure you're controlling that even from a start-up organization, it's going to help you scale your company because you're going to know how to connect those pieces together. No matter how big, no matter what industry you're at, it's always going to be the same, where do you centralize your data?”

JOMAR ON THE CURRENT CONNECTION BETWEEN AI AND DATA

“When you unify the data in certain stages, you're then able to figure out, Okay this stakeholder works in this tool and this is the data that gets collected for this.' Because generative AI, those are powered through data. Right now, I think we're reaching a cap where we're peaking in it but haven't been fully immersed in it”

Connect with Jomar and learn more about his work:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jomarebalida/
• Rethinking RevOps: https://revtechconnect.com/rethinking-revops/
   

Connect with Aaron to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

• Aaron Landgraf | Syncari | Syncari.com

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Scott joins us to discuss the problem of human input in B2B sales, how to encourage adoption of CRM and keep organizations aligned on the value of meaningful shared data about their pipeline and growth. Scott is acutely aware of the relationship between systems and people, and how few people really feel the need to maintain accurate systems, particularly at the leadership level.

Scott Marker is a seasoned sales and marketing strategist. He has worked for 30 years with startups at various stages, such as Simplex, helping them adopt CRM and sales tech to improve how they leverage data to scale their business relationships. Scott is also a professor at Boise State, and author of Broken: How to Fix B2B Sales, Drive Profitable Growth & Win.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

SCOTT: DON'T DO "SALESFORCE TAKES OVER THE WORLD" TYPE SYSTEMS

“Salesforce was doing everything for them and it was massive. But it was the most clunky because they're trying to make Salesforce be all the things it shouldn't be. Versus having Salesforce as the hub for sales and marketing but then having other systems that are better at doing what they do than trying to have Salesforce be forced to do everything. ”

SCOTT: CRM SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED AS A HELPFUL TOOL RIGHT FROM TRAINING

“I've said for years that I'm one of the biggest critics of CRMs but for me and people like me that use them the right way, they're one of the biggest keys to my success in gaining more customers and keeping more customers if you use them correctly.”

Connect with Scott and learn more about his work:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmarker1/
• MCA²: https://www.mca-2.com/

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:

• Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com

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