Scott Sutton on this episode
Scott Sutton, CEO of Later and former VP of RevOps at ZoomInfo, brings a rare blend of operational rigor and executive leadership to this conversation about career progression and go-to-market excellence. His path from supply chain intern at Daimler Trucks to leading a $100M+ PE-backed company illuminates how RevOps skills translate directly into C-suite impact.
The core insight Scott shares is that RevOps professionals who master instrumentation, accountability, and systemic thinking are uniquely positioned to scale into executive roles because they understand how to build predictable revenue engines. Rather than viewing RevOps as a narrow technical discipline, Scott frames it as a universal factory-building skill set applicable to any operational challenge.
What sets Scott apart is his willingness to cut deeply against conventional wisdom. At ZoomInfo, he cut 25% of all leads twice over, which initially seemed career-limiting but actually increased revenue by improving lead quality and rep conversion rates. At Later, he recognized that customers were spending $40M on influencer marketing but only licensing $30K of software, so he pivoted the entire go-to-market motion to a media execution model, moving from $15-50K deals to $250-5M deals. Both moves required rigorous instrumentation to justify and measure.
The conversation explores the non-negotiables Scott enforces: strict but not punitive policies around pipeline hygiene, hiring operations-obsessed counterparts (he references AJ Jennings at Later as his detail-oriented foil), and balancing PE pressure with the discipline to nail basics before adding complexity. Scott emphasizes that his strength lies in creating operational systems, not in domain expertise, and that RevOps professionals can amplify their impact by learning to articulate business outcomes rather than just technical capabilities.
What we cover in this episode
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2:02
Career Journey From Supply Chain To CEO Scott's path from Daimler Trucks supply chain work through Discover Org, ZoomInfo, and interim CMO roles to CEO of Later.
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5:08
Translating RevOps Into Executive Impact How RevOps professionals can demonstrate measurable value to CEOs and CFOs by staying focused on revenue efficiency and shared business outcomes.
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10:01
Cutting Leads While Increasing Revenue The systemic thinking approach Scott used to cut 25% of leads at ZoomInfo twice, improving conversion rates and ASP instead of chasing volume.
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11:05
Data Infrastructure As Foundation Why instrumentation and consistent measurement come before advanced attribution models or complex automation.
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15:16
Non-Negotiable Process Accountability Strict but fair policies Scott uses like opportunity creation requirements and demo access restrictions to ensure reps follow process.
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17:00
Hiring Your Opposite For Balance The Moneyball approach of pairing deal-oriented CROs with detail-obsessed RevOps leaders like AJ Jennings for comprehensive go-to-market coverage.
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24:52
Consistency In Definitions Across Teams Why consistent metrics matter more than perfect definitions when managing multiple sales managers and preventing process drift.
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30:20
Re-Engineering Go-To-Market For Enterprise How Later pivoted from $30-50K SaaS licenses to $250-5M media execution deals by recognizing customer spend patterns in the data.
The lines worth sharing
The beauty of RevOps is it's very measurable. If you go in with a plan, you model it out almost like a financial analyst, and then are able to see it through execution, you can start to see those early indicators and success.
Scott Sutton · 0:45
I cut off those leads, I can watch the dip go down, the meeting quality go up, the ASP go up. I can see the overall yield per rep go up and I can be confident that I made a good change.
Scott Sutton · 10:01
If you don't create an opportunity after you've completed a meeting successfully, if you don't create the opportunity, I will not give you another demo for a week. That's the minimum expectation of your job that you have to go do.
Scott Sutton · 15:16
I'm really great at making factories, but whatever the factory is making, I'm probably lousy at making whatever that is. My strength is how do I get people, process, data, technology to build a factory to drive outcomes.
Scott Sutton · 27:03
Common questions from this episode
How can RevOps professionals advance to the C-suite?
By mastering instrumentation and demonstrating measurable impact on revenue efficiency. RevOps skills like process design, data analysis, and systemic thinking are universal and apply across any operational function. The key is translating technical work into business outcomes and learning to manage and inspire teams around data-driven culture.
Why would cutting leads increase revenue at ZoomInfo?
Scott cut 25% of low-quality leads, which freed BDR capacity for higher-quality prospects. Even though volume decreased, conversion rates and average deal size increased due to better lead-to-rep fit. The key was understanding the cascading impacts: fewer leads with better quality led to higher rep yield and better customer outcomes.
What is systemic thinking in go-to-market operations?
Recognizing that changes in one part of the funnel create cascading effects throughout the entire process. For example, loosening lead filtering increases volume but decreases quality, which reduces conversion rates and may lower ASP. Systemic thinking helps operators model these trade-offs and make informed decisions about where to optimize.
Should we build a perfect attribution model before measuring leads and revenue?
No. Start with basic metrics like lead volume, conversion rates, and closed deals. Advanced attribution is only useful after you can reliably measure the fundamentals. Trying to build complex multi-touch attribution when you can't even define what a lead is will waste resources and hide signal under noise.
How do CROs and RevOps leaders work together effectively?
Hire for opposite strengths. A CRO focused on deals needs a detail-oriented operations partner who obsesses over Salesforce logic and process discipline. Both must appreciate data and measurement. The CEO should reinforce this by asking for data to support resource decisions rather than accepting gut calls alone.
When does a sales team need formal process instead of individual hustle?
Around 10-15 salespeople or when you hire the first set of sales managers. At that scale, consistency becomes critical. Without documented process, each manager develops their own approach, making metrics incomparable and preventing the CEO from seeing what's actually working versus what just looks good to one manager.
SEO meta description
Scott Sutton, CEO of Later, shares how RevOps leaders can advance to the C-suite by mastering instrumentation, measurement, and systemic thinking in go-to-market operations.
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Scott Sutton Later CEO
go-to-market instrumentation
sales process accountability
lead quality versus lead volume
systemic thinking revenue operations
CRO and RevOps collaboration
Moneyball hiring approach
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Read the full transcript · 55 KB · Scott Sutton
SCOTT SUTTONThe beauty of RevOps is it's very measurable. If you go in with a plan, you model it out, almost like a financial analyst, and then are able to see it through execution, you can start to see those early indicators and success. And ultimately, the end yield
SCOTT SUTTONof the outcome of that process change is very measurable. But it doesn't happen if you don't have the instrumentation. Welcome to Go-To-Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo-to-market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build go-to-market engines. All right. Today, I'm here with Scott Sutton, the CEO of Later, a plus $100 million PE-backed B2B SaaS company and the number one influencer marketing and social media management company. Our topic today is from RevOps to CEO, what RevOps can learn to grow into the C-suite and what CEOs and CROs can learn from RevOps.
SPEAKER_08Thank you so much for joining me today, Scott. Awesome, Eddie. Thanks for having me. Always great to connect and talk shop and yeah, good to be back.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I'm excited to have you back. We had a podcast with you and Tim Strickland where you guys talked about the work you guys did at Zoom Info, which is really fun. But I wanted to do one just with you on your career journey for a couple of reasons. One, if I'm a manager, director, VP of RevOps, and I want to get into the C-suite, I want to hear stories like the ones that you have. And also, if I'm a CEO, CRO, and I'm trying to figure out how to improve go-to-market in my own business, I can't imagine a better person to be able to toggle both sides and say like, this is what I learned from RevOps, but this is also what I learned from being an executive. This is what I learned working in a very large company with billions of dollars in revenue. This is what I learned working in a company that is a little bit smaller than that. And there's so many questions I have for you today that I think will be valuable for our
EDDIE REYNOLDSaudience. And I'm just excited to dive into it. Awesome. Yeah, let's get to it. Well, let's start with your career journey. So I looked at your resume. You started with
EDDIE REYNOLDSDaimler Trucks and supply chain, made a couple steps, made it to VP of RevOps. You're an interim CMO for a while. You were chief business officer at Zoom Info. And now you're the CEO in a pretty sizable company. Tell me a little bit about that journey and how you took that path.
SCOTT SUTTONYeah. So I actually came straight out of college. I was in a supply chain-based program and dove right in with Daimler, got an internship there. And it was funny, I had a printout stack of papers on my desk every day with all of the part shipments. And for a scale, I think we were making like 200,000 semi-trucks a year in our North America division. So a lot of parts being shipped throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. And it was a super inefficient process of just calling everyone based on the printout reports. So just from there started to say, how could I make this better? And we learned this. We had green screens, mainframes, all this old tech, and ended up writing a little application that would just rank, sort, and create a workflow to a lot of that. Yeah. And I was like, this is really cool. We just saved hours and hours of time. And so that got me kind of hooked on how can we solve problems with data, with technology, all the way from the very first stop in my career. I was given an opportunity to go to Mexico to do lean consulting in the factories. We had just opened a new facility, learned a lot about how to manufacture, how to set up really efficient processes, and then critically analyze. So a lot of the tools I use today, process mapping and line balancing and thinking about first-class quality and yield rates from processes, come back to supply chain. And when I talk with folks, I'm often using factory analogies. I literally had a C-suite off-site. And the entire time I was talking about a main production line and then stall building and when you would use different tactics. But yeah, I got a lot of opportunity at Daimler, very professionally run, 300,000-person company. But after that, I was kind of like, I want to get more into data and tech. I went back to school and I found this company actually through an Instagram post, ironically, Discover Org prior to acquiring ZoomInfo. And my CrossFit buddy was working there and he said, I think that this company lines up really well. I happened to meet with some folks over six months. They were acquiring ZoomInfo and they said, hey, you're not in this space, but you know how to run projects, run change initiatives, how about you jump on board. So I dove in with them, did that for about eight weeks. And then they said, hey, you seem smart. Do you want to run sales operations and the BDR team? And all of this, I just kind of dove headlong into this next, you know, piece and try to figure out how to rally people, data, process, technology to drive a good outcome. And then, you know, that developed. I took more internal systems teams. We did acquire ZoomInfo. We did another kind of 10 M&A through the business and then took the CMO job for a bit and then this chief business officer role. But it kind of the core theme was just diving in and trying to solve
SCOTT SUTTONproblems wherever the business needed to be. So let's start and break that down, right? So you come
EDDIE REYNOLDSfrom, I don't know if the right word is a technical background, but like you're deep in the weeds in supply chain. And then you get into RevOps and, you know, we won't get into like how good you are at flows in Salesforce and stuff like that. But like a lot of folks master that stuff and then they really struggle with how do I explain what I'm doing to the CRO, to the CEO? How do I show impact? How do I understand the so what? How did you do that? You know, I was lucky in the fact that when I was at Discover Oregon ZoomInfo, my mentor there,
SCOTT SUTTONChris Hayes, was actually the director of Ops and then became the VP of Ops. He became CRO, COO, and then eventually president. And so he was the one actually training me in a lot of the
SCOTT SUTTONtechnical detail. There was a really funny moment. We were going through an entire Salesforce rebuild. And, you know, he was frustrated with the progress that we were making on a particular thing. He's
SCOTT SUTTONlike, I wrote the flow overnight, check my work, you know? And I think the good thing about that was we all could hang in the detail and we truly were experts from the bottom up in how to build the tech, build the process. And so especially at Discover Oregon ZoomInfo, they really valued that detailed
SCOTT SUTTONlevel process knowledge. And I think a lot of our success came from being in the detail. And I'm probably more in the detail than most CEOs at companies our size. And I think that's actually a
SPEAKER_16strength. Yeah. I align with that a lot, too. I think you only have so much time as leader to get
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto the detail. But we have some people out right now and I'm onboarding two new sales reps and I was literally like in Excel hell for the last two days trying to build out territory plans. And I was just watching an interview with Bill Gates where he talked about him doing that in the early stages and how difficult it was for him to let go of control of even the actual lines of code they were writing. But I guess the question that I've always had for folks listening to this, especially rev ops professionals is like, what advice would you have for them to do a better job of aligning
EDDIE REYNOLDSwith their executive stakeholders and showing the value in what they're doing? And then I have another question behind that about what you would, you know, I'll say that question, but a question for the CROs and the CEOs of the world. As a rev ops practitioner, I'm always thinking about
SCOTT SUTTONultimately my stakeholders often, you know, the CRO or the CEO, CFO, and their number one priority is to drive revenue and drive revenue efficiently. And so I think coming back to that kind of shared mission is how do I create value? And the beauty of rev ops is that it's very measurable. And I think
SCOTT SUTTONif I can go in and pinpoint a particular area of the process of the go to market motion that's not performing where we want it and go and make improvements, it's actually very easy to demonstrate.
SCOTT SUTTONSo an example would be, we had the hunch that if we routed leads more effectively, there was going to be a much higher yield. And I came to coin this kind of concept of like systemic
SCOTT SUTTONthinking, which is in life, there are these connected processes. And let's take the basic go to market funnel. If I increase the lead amount, often I do that by loosening the reins on my filtering. So then my overall lead quality goes down. I have a fixed amount of BDRs, they now have more leads to work. Because of the relative fewer amount of minutes they can spend on each lead, and then the reduced lead quality, your overall conversion rate is going to dip. That being said, your total output of your lead is going to be a combination of how many more leads versus reduced conversion rate. And then that flows through to your meetings of saying, I now have more meetings, I have the same amount of reps. If I was under utilizing those reps, perhaps I get more yield from them taking more meetings. But my good fit rate on meetings will go down because my filtering was opened up a little bit more. And that cascades all throughout. If I'm opening to lower quality leads, my ASP goes down. It may increase my cycle time because those smaller accounts are easier to close, but if they're worse for the accounts, that might increase. And so I think it's all these cascading impacts by being able to navigate that kind of chain of consequences of decisions where, so one example that I was mentioning was on Leadflow. We cut out 25% of all leads at ZoomInfo. It was something, I think at the time we were doing 6,000 leads a month. And we just said, we're not going to call 4,000 leads back a month. And that was kind of a wild decision because it would seem like that could be a career suicide if those didn't manifest. But we were really able through analysis to determine, okay, we don't win those very often. And then if we create a recapture mechanism, the increased yield on all these other leads and opportunities that we have will be
SCOTT SUTTONmuch higher yield and offset the negative time and consequences of cutting off those leads. And it paid off. We actually ended up cutting 25% of our leads two different times over.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd I think that's where if you go in with a plan, you model it out almost like a financial analyst, and then are able to see it through execution, you can start to see those early indicators and success. And ultimately the end yield of the outcome of that process change is very measurable,
SCOTT SUTTONbut it doesn't happen if you don't have the instrumentation. And so in Redbox, I think the first
SCOTT SUTTONthing is like truly instrument the process, understand all the flows. So leads to meetings, to meeting completion or outcome, opportunity creation, to op outcome and all the intermediate metrics. Then you can set baselines, build like kind of a functional model around it. And then as you tweak and tune the model, you're very easily able to show what you did and how it changed. And so I think that at the end of the day was, I'm a very numbers driven person. So if I said, I cut off those leads, I can watch the dip go down, the meeting quality go up, the ASP go up. I can see the overall
SCOTT SUTTONyield per rep go up and I can be confident that I made a good change. I love that, but there's so
EDDIE REYNOLDSmany challenges that I see inside of what you just shared. And I'll give some concrete examples. So like, I don't know what the situation was with Discover, or it sounds like you came into an environment where people were very data driven and appreciated these kinds of things. I don't know the situation you walked into it later or any other places you've worked, but a lot of times what we'll see is like, they don't have that infrastructure in place. Like they can't objectively measure the lead conversion rate because they've changed the definition of a lead four times in the last year. The tools aren't set up right, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, nobody really has a confident answer on what our lead conversion rate looks like. You're now in the situation as a CEO,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhere I assume you have no lack of pressure from the private equity firm to produce results and to grow revenue. So I'll flip this and I'll ask like, as a CEO or as any CXO, how do you balance that pressure you have to just hustle and grow revenue with this desire to build all this stuff out, which takes really serious, like time, effort, and resources and money. If you're starting from a place where you can't even objectively measure your lead conversion rate or your close rate, because like the process of the data underneath it is not reliable. I think for me, it's totally mandatory to have, you know, good tracking. It's interesting because
SCOTT SUTTONpeople often will say it's incredibly complicated to do some of these things. And I kind of partially agree and I partially disagree. I think it comes down to on the Salesforce side or whatever system in the CRM that you're using. I think at a point you do have to just manage the team tightly. It's a non-negotiable. If you're not, so here's an example of some policies that may seem strict, but if you don't create an opportunity after you've completed a meeting successfully and said it's a good fit, if you don't create the opportunity, I will not give you another demo for a week. If you violate it two times, you get no demos for a month. And if you're not putting opportunities in the system, you're not going to get compensated for them. And so I think there's some very easy behavioral patterns you can build with the reps. And I don't view it as highly punitive. I do it as like, this is the minimum expectation of your job that you have to go do to give our team line of sight. And so yeah, there's some like attribution things or channel attribution and things that are more complicated, but creating an op, watching it go through the stages, and then seeing it to closure are pretty easy to go set up in Salesforce. And a lot of time that's, you know, that's all that you would need to understand the basics of the funnel. If you want to get in more nuance, sure, you can get in more depth. But I think it comes down ultimately to managing rigorously and setting up some very basic things and stuff. I think maybe there's this perception that you have to have the most complicated attribution logic. I think that actually hurts you. Because like you said, when I try to poke on an advanced attribution, then they're like, oh, well, the tags didn't fire and these actions didn't fire and they're missing channel tags and blah, blah, blah. And it's really, really hard to figure something out. Whereas if I just look at, do we close the deal or not? It's pretty black and white if we didn't close the deal. And so I think starting with the most basic but definite of items and then working into the more esoteric kind of channel attribution, multi-touch attribution, any of those
SCOTT SUTTONthings, you should not be endeavoring to go do those things unless you're really, really confident in the basics. Totally agree with that. Like that's the foundation of our go-to-market
EDDIE REYNOLDSefficiency pyramid that you should just have like those basic processes in place before you try to geek out on like an advanced attribution model. But I think you and I are saying the same thing. I think the difference is you're saying this is easy and I'm saying this is sometimes this is really hard. So let's say that a CRO is listening to this right now or a rev ops leader that reports to said CRO and they're looking at this and they're saying, yeah, okay, but like in order for me to do those things that you mentioned, which by the way is how I manage my team here at Union Square, it's what I experienced as a rep at Salesforce. I'm completely in line with you, but it requires management to step in and actually manage people and hold them accountable to doing the things that you mentioned. And I find that not every CRO is excited about that. Like, what would you say to that CRO? Why is it important to him or her versus just saying, let's make more calls, let's hire more
SPEAKER_25reps, let's spend more on marketing? I think people dance around this topic. But as the CEO, if I have
SCOTT SUTTONa CRO that doesn't care to manage their team, they're not the right CRO. And then that's kind of the tough reality of it. So like for me, for instance, like I let our sales team directly when I joined, we now have a CRO and we have a good, you know, how to rev ops, but there's some non-negotiables for me. I need to have a weekly funnel performance review meeting. And so I think maybe if a CRO doesn't love the operational side, hire someone who does. And this is part of like the diversity of teams piece. And I think if they just outright don't care about managing their team, that's a personnel topic probably, or, you know, trying to understand, but assuming a CRO has good intent and they just don't. Well, let me, forgive me for interrupting. I don't want to imply they don't want to manage
EDDIE REYNOLDStheir team, but maybe what they want to do is they want to get into deals. They want to help close deals. They want to do ride alongs. They want to do that kind of stuff as opposed to like, I want to micromanage how you're like managing your pipeline in Salesforce, or you need to do XYZ, like the things you mentioned. That's the gap that I see. Like, I'm not saying any CRO doesn't want to manage their team, but maybe they're like, let's focus on this big deal. We're trying to close rather than worrying about like, when you entered the opportunity in Salesforce. Yeah. And I think that's where, to me,
SCOTT SUTTONsome self-awareness. It's funny. We talk a lot about this on our team. There are things that we're all naturally have affinity for and we're good at, and there are things that we're not good at. It's interesting. Our CRO, he's a very like deal oriented CRO. He comes from the media space. He knows everyone. And yeah, like nailing all the little attribution details, he can do it. It's not his joy in life. And so I think it's about hiring someone and giving them enough latitude to go and empowered to make those decisions so that they can roll information back up. So I guess for a CRO who doesn't love that, I would say, don't just hire someone like you who's obsessed on deals and going to reinforce that. Go hire kind of the opposite person of you who agonizes over those details in Salesforce, how the stages are set up, all the different data flows. And that's actually what we have here. A guy named AJ Jennings, he actually came over from Zoom Info, most detail oriented, systems oriented person, nails every little tiny piece of detail while our CRO is more, let me land a multimillion dollar deal and finesse relationships with the biggest retailers and CPG brands in the world. And they offset each other really well in that regard. I think the core though, is that they both appreciate measurement. They both appreciate numbers and the interplay. And I think too, as a CEO, I'm reinforcing kind of that orientation because I'm not going to, if he goes, just give me more heads, give me more budget. I'll say, what's the burden of proof? You know, show me the model, show me the data, show me why this is working. And so I think it comes down to one, constructing the team in a way that you can measure things. You have people who are aligned to those different tasks. And then as you make decisions of the business, have some bar for rigor around measurement and modeling to make decisions versus just kind of winging it. And there may be certain businesses or certain times of life where you have to make a gut call, more and more, I'm trying to make sure that I really have data to support that gut instinct,
SCOTT SUTTONrather than just kind of make off the cuff decisions. Yeah. I mean, obviously I completely align with that, but it's interesting hearing it from you,
EDDIE REYNOLDSsitting in your seat, having, you know, the opportunity for a CRO listening to this to think like, okay, like how seriously should I take this? To clarify, AJ runs RevOps over there? Yeah. He's leading operations. He's got enablement, the core system side,
SCOTT SUTTONand then is running the operational flow. He also is leading our kind of PMO organization, responsible for project management and M&A integration. Love it. So you and I, and Tim talked about like this money ball analogy the last time you were on
EDDIE REYNOLDShere. Anybody that hasn't seen the movie, you've got Brad Pitt as the general manager of the Oakland A's. You've got Jonah Hill as this kind of like data geek, showing him all these ways that he can money ball his way to wins. And I love that analogy, especially the way that you describe it, Scott, because if you talk about like hiring somebody very different from yourself, you've got like the Brad Pitt character, you know, trying to build the team and trying to figure out how they can win and having the Jonah Hill character saying like, what is the data telling us? And I have no problem with the CRO saying, I don't want to spend my entire day in Salesforce. Like, let me find somebody else that can help our team follow the process we want them to follow. It sounds like that's what you're saying.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think that's definitely the way I see it. From a leadership team, we're constantly
SCOTT SUTTONlooking at where are we strong? Where are we weak? Where do we need to supplement? You know,
SCOTT SUTTONjust some of my own career development, like I'm good at some things. I'm actively pretty poor at other things. And I hire to offset and make sure. And I think what's interesting is there's a point where we can all improve personally at a variety of different things. But then there are things that it's not as
SCOTT SUTTONgood a use of my time to try and get good at or to try to overcome what is a natural weakness. And as an individual, it's hard to maybe be world's greatest at detail, world's greatest at strategy and high level thinking or some balance of that. And so I think creating in two different individuals that kind of interplay that allows you to be successful overall is the way I think about it. And then that cascades down to, you know, sellers and marketers and the whole team construct, making sure that we have a balance of skills and perspectives throughout the team,
SPEAKER_34you know, to make us well rounded.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel so spread thin in my role. My company is obviously a lot smaller than yours and trying to juggle everything is incredibly difficult. And as we continue to grow, like I'm constantly thinking, like, how can I get this one thing off my plate? I might even be good at that thing. I might even enjoy doing that thing. But one less thing for me to think about, I can focus my energy more. But anyway, I'll transition this to my next question. I think you've already partially answered this, but I want to like double click on this. Like, how do you think about being process driven and go to market? What does that mean? And where do you
EDDIE REYNOLDSplace the level of importance on that? Yeah, I think it's incredibly important because you have to have a baseline of trying to understand
SCOTT SUTTONwhat's working and what's not working. And if you have no kind of process or no instrumentation, it's going to be very, very hard to tell what's working and not. And I think early days when you, you know, very early startup, kind of just getting into revenue. I think calling a lot of different things and just having more of a field based approach is probably fine because you're, you know, the CEO is selling, you know, and it's not, what are you going to instrument? You know, I went to a trade show, I had a talk with the guy and I got our first opportunity. We're selling at a cost and we're going to figure it out. Like that's not really an instrumented process. Let's say when you get to, you know, four or five salespeople, you should have a fairly consistent cadence to make decisions. And then as that scales, you know, you're tweaking and tuning. And so I think there's also a point where at five salespeople to 20, you can kind of go higher off the shelf plug and play people and kind of let them do their, I call it Leonardo da Vinci thing, where they're all kind of, I'm a master. I'm just painting my own thing. At a point, we need to become a production line and we need to train people. We need to bring them into a system because there's so many things flowing through. There are people coming in and out, assignments are shifting. I think once you get to that 10-ish, 15 people in sales, you for sure need to have a pretty dialed in process so that you can manage it well and continue forward. But, you know, we rely very heavily on process. And I think that where you're rewarded most is through that scale up and the phase from maybe 10 million to 200 million where like you have to dial it in. Beyond that, it's like even more, okay, now I need org structures and regions and I need to divide and conquer in different ways. And then it becomes kind of a different challenge where one person can't possibly see it and you divide and chop up the org. Like when I left CI, I want to say there were 300
SCOTT SUTTONsalespeople and 200 plus PDRs. That's a different organizational challenge than I've got 25 sales people because you can still know all those people's names. You can generally have those in like two or three groups. When you get to the size and scale, it becomes much more complicated and you need a different muscle at that scale. I think that's a really key lesson. I mean, we've shifted our focus to companies
SPEAKER_15of your size, plus 100 million, sometimes plus 50 million. I think one of the challenges we've run
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto is we've met so many CROs and sales and revenue leaders in companies with let's say 10 to 50 million in revenue. And I don't know, maybe they only have 12 salespeople. It's slightly too many people for one person to manage, but it's still possible for that CRO to like dive into each major deal. And they've got one or two managers and they're kind of, they still have like their fingers on the pulse of things. And so if they don't have this repeatable process, they're kind of sort of still able to like kind of get their hands dirty and get into stuff and kind of micromanage their way through that. And I'm still trying to figure out like, where's that breaking point where you get to 20 reps and now you've got maybe three managers. And like, if you don't have like a documented repeatable process, stuff just starts to break and you start to lose deals that you should be winning and chase deals that you shouldn't be chasing and routing marketing leads that you shouldn't be routing to sales and all the problems with CS, because it's just too much for one person to like manage manually. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah, I think that's right. I think even when you go
SCOTT SUTTONand you hire your first kind of set of managers, and you said that kind of three managers-ish, I think when you start to go from the everyone reports into one person or maybe two people, you really got to get consistent in the process because then it's harder for a manager, each manager is kind of managing their own system, then you get like the processes become not really comparable. If I'm doing my thing, you're doing your thing, unless it's a completely different sales motion. But let's say it's fairly consistent, you're like, you're East, I'm West. At that point, it becomes very important to start installing process at that point, because otherwise, you lose all thread of comparison. And it just becomes, oh, if my manager was Jake, I'd be doing great because Jake crushes or Jake's qualification for opening an opportunity is different. So then our win rates are no longer comparable. And our pipelines inflated, the need for coverage is different in the East and the West. So I think as soon as you get to having a manager or two, you really got to start to dial in some of those consistency factors and in process and in metrics. I think it actually matters less
SCOTT SUTTONwhat the definition is. It's just that you have one.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, I love that. And I kind of agree with it because like the definitions can continue to evolve, but like the challenge that I have with this, or maybe not the challenge, the reason I believe in
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis so much is because like, I just want to know as a CEO myself, like what's working, like I'm putting my own money into this business. And as it grows, it becomes more and more money. It's really important to me. And I'm like, am I just burning cash or am I making a good investment here? Right. And I'm trying to think like, well, how do I measure whether or not this works? And from a process perspective, like I need to know that we're doing A, B and C in order to objectively measure this. So let's take marketing leads and I'll give you maybe an opportunity to talk a little bit about what you guys see with your own clients as well. But a marketing lead gets generated, it gets passed off to sales and then marketing says, Hey, like sales isn't following up and sales says the marketing leads terrible. And then like, we're both pointing fingers at each other, such a common example. And the solution to that in my mind is we have to like really determine like, what is that process? What's the definition of an MQL or whatever it is we use to define when a lead gets routed to sales? And what is that step-by-step process sales needs to do to follow up? And are they doing that? Where's the report that shows me all the leads that were routed to sales and whether or not they followed up? Let's say our process is as simple as an MQL is every time that somebody fills out a form on our website and our process is that we're going to reach out five times before we give up. If we have done that, we can now objectively say whether or not those leads are converting or not converting. If we have a little bit more data, we can slice and dice that data and we can say, well, these leads converted and those leads did not
SPEAKER_08convert. But if everybody's just doing their own thing, then we can't objectively say that.
SCOTT SUTTONI couldn't agree more with kind of that look. And so again, that's where it's funny because when I joined, one of the first things I went out and did was just say, Hey, let's get consistent across all measurement, whatever the definition is, let's just make sure we're consistent. And then I think culturally, we're very, very big on whatever's best for later is best for everyone. And so I think we have to get out of this mindset of my marketing MQL metric. If it's not generating revenue, who cares what your MQL definition is? And I think that's where equity and some other things and bonus structures can help align us to kind of a North Star overall metric. But yeah, I think diving in and then again, if we can prove those leads aren't turning into anything or they're like LTV to CAC on those is awful, then it should be a straightforward decision of anyone who has later's best interests in mind would say, yeah, let's not count those in the lead number. And then that cascades. And that actually happened at later when I joined, it was actually Maverick and they were focused on kind of mid-market to SMB and, you know, lowered all ASP. We went through and we saw, hey, this performance driven kind of enterprise market is actually what's really firing off. And so we completely rewracked our motion to suppress a lot of the lead gen, go to a more up market at motion. Our win rate was much higher, deal cycle time was slower, but then our retention and kind of LTV side of things from clients, it was basically like a 200% implied net retention on a distant client. So we're like, we're putting
SCOTT SUTTONall of our eggs in that basket, but we had to completely change the go to market motion and how we structured and measured things. And so I think that's where, again, I keep coming back to instrumentation being so vital is those signals were there. But if we weren't measuring and we
SCOTT SUTTONdidn't know, it would be just honest to say gut feel, okay, this seems to be working. And maybe that would have been accurate, but how many of your resources do you move? How many of your marketing
SCOTT SUTTONdollars do you move? We're not going to completely abandon another process, but I think those, it can help inform kind of the size of the change, the scale of the dollars, how many heads to have on
SPEAKER_34different processes. Yeah. And I kind of, I have a love hate relationship with the term gut feel,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause I think a lot of gut feel is just somebody taking data that they have seen firsthand and that's in their head and then analyzing the data in their head. And they're like, well, that's what my gut tells me. And they're like, yeah, because that's what you've seen. But is that an accurate reflection of reality? Or is that just what you've seen because those are the calls you've been pulled into or this, that or the other? But I'd be curious to like hear a little bit more about that story.
SPEAKER_25So what you're talking about is like moving to enterprise and re-engineering your go-to-market motion for that. Yeah. So what was interesting in influencer marketing, there's a few different
SCOTT SUTTONapproaches to going to market and how you kind of align yourself as a business. There's pure play, SaaS kind of, we just offer you a license. You can get into our software, you can run influencer marketing campaigns. There's a hybridized approach where I sell you a software license, but then I also support you with services on an ongoing basis. And then there's this different paradigm, which is just give me ad dollars and I'll turn them into outcomes in kind of a campaign
SCOTT SUTTONby campaign basis or in an annual kind of spend level. And when I started, we were just selling the
SCOTT SUTTONsoftware piece out. The irony is that millions of dollars of ad dollars were flowing through the ecosystem. And when we looked around, all of our customers were saying we want to deploy our ad dollars in a more and more efficient way. And so we took an account that was something like 30k a year software only. And we said, how much are you spending on influencer? And they said like $40 million.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd we currently pay our agency, you know, 25% of that for marginal outcomes. We're like, okay, what's 25% of whatever millions? And you're like, that's a better deal seemingly than what we're currently doing. And so we actually ended up re-racking all of our tech to be kind of an AI powered influence marketing engine, moved all of our eggs into this kind of spend and media based sale. So it's kind of funny you introduced the B2B SaaS, but I actually sell media execution more than anything at the moment, because that's actually what works in the space. And so that piece of our
SCOTT SUTTONbusiness is growing exponentially. And our customers are seeing outstanding results. But it's gone from let me give you a feature demo of a piece of software to let me understand your go to market strategy as a fortune 100 brand and how I can deploy media spend through our AI and tech to deliver marketing
SCOTT SUTTONoutcomes, completely kind of different morphing of solving the problem. But it's one that resonates. And that started to win north of 50% versus winning at kind of a nominal B2B SaaS rate. Those deals are like $250 to $5 million. Those other deals are like 15 to 50k. It's very straightforward for me to aim our resources at where the market's going. But that was a huge amount of effort. But without that instrumentation, that understanding of what's happening in the market, what's happening in our go to market, we wouldn't have been able to make that change.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's cool. And you wouldn't be the only B2B SaaS company right now thinking about like, is this like seed based license model the thing that we want to do? Should we be focused on outcomes? I mean, this was a heavy topic. I went to the CRO summit with Pavilion a few months ago, and that was a heavy topic of conversation there. But I'd love to hear a little bit more like, how did you think about re-architecting your go to market, right? So you're talking about going from selling a 30 or $50,000 license to multi-million dollar deals. How did you think about redesigning the way that you market and sell?
SCOTT SUTTONYou know, it's a really interesting change that caused me to reflect quite a bit because I came in and I basically grabbed everything I knew from ZoomInfo, which was a very quick sales cycle, a lower ASP, more of a lead demo close kind of sale process to what became a very consultative enterprise sales pitch with, you know, a dozen stakeholders and just a very different motion.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd we ended up having to hire some folks with real industry expertise and kind of that media side, some coming out of agencies, some coming out of pure play. And then we ended up hiring a new CRO who is very, very deep, you know, two decades in the space and understands how these types of transactions happen. And so we went from basically zero, you know, a year and a half to that being our primary revenue source a year and a half later. It's our number one line item for revenue. Which is crazy, you know, pivoting hard, but we had to go hire all new types of people. We made a
SCOTT SUTTONcreative strategy team from zero that's now I want to say nine or 10 people. We also have a service
SCOTT SUTTONdelivery team. That team's over 100 people now helping to liaison with our clients and execute on their behalf. And so we've had to completely re-architect it. But it's, I think it was leaning on those folks with experience who really understand how to execute that motion paired with kind of kind of our expertise in the data and technology side to make that a reality. And it's funny because that's where, again, I don't think I'm actually the best at just about anything, but I know how to go and how to go and build a lot of people who are world-class at their given discipline and know where we need help. And so zero shame in saying, I went out and hired people I could learn from who had done it before. And then we just gave them a lot of runway to go and build new motions and go pave new roads.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that. What about from an ops perspective? If you were to come to me and say, hey, how do you help me solve this problem? Beyond hiring the right people, I start to think about things like, well, let's redefine the ICP for this enterprise segment, the buyer personas. Let's redefine our sales methodology and sales process. Let's figure out how we need to re-architect the tech stack to follow that sales process. Same thing for marketing. How do we define what's a marketing qualified lead or whatever we want to do? I hate using the term MQL because it's so contested, but whatever it is, what is inbound doing now? And when do we route stuff? What are we doing from an outbound perspective, et cetera? Is that kind of the way that you thought about that? And did you leverage a lot of your experience or did the folks that you hired already have their own perspective on that?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo what was really cool was we actually said, we're going to clearly codify our entire go-to-market. And we had this moment. So when Later was founded, there was actually Latergram, Maverick, and Mavely as three independent companies. Mavely was acquired by NuSkin. Later and Maverick came together. We call that the 2.0 era. And then we came together through acquisition in the beginning of this year. We call that the Later 3.0s.
SCOTT SUTTONWe're all shedding our PaaS, our Latergram, Maverick, our Mavely, and we're unifying. And so we said, with that, we're going to unify and codify our entire go-to-market. And we said, this is our GTM operating plan 3.0. And then we said, let's iterate on 3.1, 3.11, 3.12, 3.2. And then each kind of phase we're dosing in change. So when we started to see this enterprise motion, we said, we need to go build out our enterprise instrumentation. So we said, okay, in Rev 3.2, we're going to break apart our accounts, clearly draw a line in the sand, and this is enterprise motion, this is down-market motion. And then we started to say, there are different funnel assumptions and different ways that we're going after these. These are named accounts where we divvy all the accounts. And then this is more a lead-based, meetings-based flow. And so we then kind of, we started carving the motions up and iterating on each one, trying to find work. And what happened was they clearly separated at that point into two distinct motions. And the new folks who came in, they were not as rigorous on the go-to-market kind of instrumentation side. But when they said, okay, instead of these types of lead sources, I want these. And we need to insert, you know, because we're now doing proposal flows instead of doing the traditional just meeting. So we needed to alter some of our meeting stage definitions and starting to augment our kind of pipeline coverage for this type of motion versus the other. And I think it was just this iterative process where, you know, as we discovered, as we tried new things, we just kept iterating. So go-to-market 3.0 became 3.1, 3.2, 3.3. And we've evolved since then. But I think every time we made a change, we updated all the documentation, we rolled it out and we said, okay, here's 3.4. It includes all these new changes. And then eventually now, we actually rolled our down-market motion, kind of folded back in on the enterprise motion. So we started with this down-market motion, split it in two, found this work so much better. We actually just lifted and shifted this into the enterprise motion, but just for down-market accounts. And it's been a really positive change. Continue to focus on hiring people who are really kind of ingrained in that media and influencers space.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that. And I mean, let me see if I understood this right, because I want to make sure I'm not just hearing what I want to hear. I'm hearing that you took all your experience in RevOps, at ZoomInfo, et cetera. You hired these people that had deeper experience in the go-to-market motion that you wanted to do and selling enterprise and selling into this industry. And you asked them, what should the lead sources be? What should the sales process be? How should we sell to these customers? But you are the one, alongside other folks on your team, saying, this is how we're going to codify that. This is how we're going to develop the instrumentation to that, to create a repeatable data-driven process. Whereas my guess is, if you weren't there, if AJ wasn't there, if other people weren't there, you might have hired some really great people, and they probably would have done some great things.
SPEAKER_25But it would have had less repeatability, measurability, and predictability in the go-to-market motion.
SCOTT SUTTONYeah. And the way I kind of frame it is, I'm really great at making factories, but whatever the factory is making, I'm probably lousy at making whatever that is.
SCOTT SUTTONSo, like, the factory I happen to run drives outcomes for customers with influencer marketing and the creator economy. If I were to try to run a campaign on my own, it'd actually probably struggle quite a bit. If I were to try and go and finesse all that stuff, hands on keyboard, I would struggle. But I know how to orient people and find the right kind of operational way of doing things. And so, I'd like to say, whether I'm doing influencer marketing, making handbags, cars, or selling go-to-market success through data at ZoomInfo, my strength is kind of this universal, how do I get people process data technology to build a factory to drive outcomes? I don't need domain expertise as much as I know how to run a factory. So, we could be making anything. And that's the gift of RevOps. RevOps, I think, actually, RevOps skill set extends far beyond RevOps if you're actually good at it. Because what you're doing is you're creating a revenue factory. You could just as soon take all those RevOps skills and apply them to running a services department, an agency. You could be running, you know, implementations. You could be running just about anything. You need to break down a process into steps, instrument and measure it. You need to tweak and iterate. You need to maximize yield and all those same type of supply chain and revenue operations principles apply. And, like, that's what I think of my career is I'm not the best at anything I've done. I led procurement. I led finance. I'm awful at finance. But I ran it like a supply chain. And people were like, this is the weirdest way of running controlling. And I was like, but I see the entire process mapped out. I'm, like, optimizing yield. And I had to do all the controlling planning for, like, a billion-dollar fixed overhead for a thousand engineers. And it was like, okay, I'm going to go this department by department. Then I'm going to roll up into this plan. And then we're going to cross-reference all of these. And then we'll have this intermediate plan that's reconciled. And they were like, this is, like, a supply chain for finance. I was like, yeah, that's the only way I know how to do it. But I think that broad skill set translates to solving any problem.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd so rather than be really good at anything, I think being good at process and dealing with people and data tech is probably a great life skill to have.
SPEAKER_31I completely agree.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMy wife gives me a hard time about the kind of things that I do at home with, like, our kid and stuff like that. Like, even just, like, getting the formula and stuff ready. And, like, you know, we're ready to walk out the house. And I'm like, yeah, no, we already got, like, the six bottles, like, packed and ready to go. We can just grab it and go. And it's just, like, you're so, like, process-driven. I'm like, yeah, because it's Saturday morning. And I don't want to waste my morning. I'm, like, getting everything together and going and trying to find this thing. I want to get out and go live my life. And I think, like, as an entrepreneur, I'm a member of an entrepreneur's organization, which is largely a lot of, like, low seven-figure businesses. And they're adamant about this same concept. They don't talk about rev ops. A lot of these are, like, founder-led sales organizations. But the thing that they all follow is the entrepreneur's operating system, which is exactly what you describe. It's break every single process down, have it documented, have some kind of a measuring stick, train people on how to do it, figure out how to get the right people into the seat, train them on the process, make sure that they're doing the process the right way, and then enable them to go and, like, take it and make it bigger and better. But if you're just constantly running around, whether you're the CEO, founder of a small organization or a CRO, CEO of a large organization, if you're running around constantly putting out fires with no repeatable process, it makes your life really stressful and difficult, not to mention, like, the outcomes that are inhibited from that.
SPEAKER_03A hundred percent.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd, yeah, shout out to Geno and Traction and that whole thing. Maybelley was using EOS when we acquired them. And a lot of the core tenets around how that's run is very similar. We have kind of core leadership meetings where we're diving through problem solving. We have everything instrumented and we have metrics and then we have, like, very clear action item tracking and management and managing the process. And I think EOS is excellent for, I think it needs some adaptation, perhaps. Like, once you hit scale, there's some new challenges. Like, it's not tenable to have an all-team all the time. And it's funny, we kind of took the EOS framework and said, okay, how do we turn this into the scale-up operating system and, like, adapt and tweak? And so, we're actually running a version of what I would call is, like, EOS on steroids for scale-ups. But a lot of the core tenets of what was mentioned in that book and kind of the EOS framework were actually using in practice.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's cool. I know we're almost up for time. I want to ask one other question. Have you ever, maybe it was you, somebody that reported to you at Zoom Info, have you ever run into somebody in RevOps that takes this too far? And they want to measure too many things, too much process, they're building too much stuff in Salesforce, and it's not really helping drive the outcomes that are necessary. Have you run into that, and if you have, do you have any advice for somebody on how to even know if they're doing that and how not to do that?
SCOTT SUTTONA hundred percent, I have. And it was funny, because I've been guilty of that. There was a funny moment where one of the pieces of the Zoom Info process was we had, you know, our kind of final contracts process. And then there was this handoff to NetSuite where we needed to validate all the dimensions of contracts. And we had CPQ, but, like, all the different edge cases that were possible could cause havoc throughout the financial system. And it was funny, because we were like, we, Chris Hayes, my mentor, adds the eye at the time, we were like, we wanted to automate everything, because we were like, that was the thing. And, you know, that timeframe was like automation everything and Salesforce supply everything. We sat back and we're like, we can train a human to do this in 20 minutes. And trying to code every edge case and create the logic is, like, literally untenable. And I equated, you know, Elon's a polarizing figure, but he had this vision at Tesla of, I want to make robotic manufacturing for every single step, not a human in sight. And then there were these funny cases where, like, there'd be a string dangling down a variable length and any kind of weird rotation and twist. And a human needed to, like, put a hook on it. And the robot could not figure it out. But a human who's, like, three years old could just go, you know, and nail it. And I think there's that realization of, like, there is a breakeven point or a threshold by which automation makes no sense. So I think there are two ways I think about that. For the size and scale you have, is there insufficient volume to offset the effort to automate or the effort to instrument? And then when I think about kind of attribution and some of these other things and measurement, can you actually and accurately measure the high-level metric to then break down into subcomponents? And it's like, someone with a broken funnel at a very high level is then like, I need 18 levels and multi-touch attribution.
SCOTT SUTTONLike, you can't even figure out how many leads you had yesterday. You know, like, let's not try to attribute them all over the place.
SCOTT SUTTONI think, to me, it's maybe there's, like, a sports analogy. It's like, you know, if you can't do, like, a double Lutz, don't try a quad Salkow or something. You know, it's just like, it doesn't make any sense. You didn't expect figure-stating analogies. But it's like, you don't need to work on the polishing of the last bit of your technique when you can't make a free throw or something.
SCOTT SUTTONYou know, there's all these kind of, well, I'll crawl, walk, run. And I'm like, let's first learn to, like, walk and run and then dribble and maybe take a standstill shot before you're doing, like, hook shots, spin, move, reverse, and half core or something. Well, and I've been ice skating for 30 years and I have no idea what you just said.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I don't know. So, no, it's okay.
SCOTT SUTTONBut I think the principle is, nail the basics and then earn your way into what is the next level of complexity.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd I ask myself the question with every ounce of automation or complexity is, like, what is the point of this?
SCOTT SUTTONWhy are we doing it? And how will it actually help us? And I think there are very few things that actually cross the burden of that question with the amount of resources. So, we actually run what is a pretty simple go-to-market attribution and kind of tracking, where I just, I need some basic sacks to make sure things are working.
SCOTT SUTTONAnd I think you can get lured into a false sense of efficiency and of understanding. But realistically, I don't know how impactful some of those extra cuts are.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, and I was actually trying to run with your analogy and saying that, like, I've been playing hockey for 30 years and I can skate pretty well for a hockey player. I have no idea how to do a double Lutz and I'm really not sure how that would help me score a goal in a hockey game. And, like, that's, like, skating is obviously really important in hockey, but, like, there's a limit, right? And so, same thing in go-to-market. I think the lens I try to think through is, like, what are we trying to improve about our go-to-market? If we want to improve, like, the conversion rate of our leads into pipeline and close one deals, let's focus on the things that are going to help us do that. Versus saying, like, let's geek out on, like, perfecting the attribution model when we can't even get our reps to follow up with good leads or we can't even identify what a good lead is. But anyway, we're at time. And I want to be respectful of your time here. Thank you so much for doing this. If people want to learn more about what you guys are doing with influencer marketing, social media management, or anything else, like, how can they find you?
SCOTT SUTTONYep. Head to later.com. All of our solutions are there. A lot of resources for folks. And then we also host a podcast called Beyond Influence. It's pretty fun. We talk with influencers and creators in the space and get to hear their story. That is the interesting thing about the creator economy is it's all influencers. It's all creators. Work with some amazing people. But often, you know, they get lost in the marketing of it all. And so we try to make sure that creators are cared for and that their stories are heard. But, yeah, I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk about later and give maybe some inspiration to RevOps folks out there, you know, and what they can accomplish in their career.
SPEAKER_15I love it. And I hope this is inspiration for CMOs and CROs and CEOs as well and being more process-driven and data-driven.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut, yeah, this is great. I wish I could have listened to this, like, 10 years ago. So thanks, Scott.
SPEAKER_59Awesome. Thanks, Eddie. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_08Thanks for listening to the show. If this resonated and or you'd like help with anything we talked about in the show, please reach out to us. You can find us at unionsquareconsulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
