Toni Hohlbein on this episode
Toni Hohlbein, CEO and Co-Founder of Growblocks, brings deep experience in revenue operations, having served as a CRO at multiple SaaS companies before building his own ventures in the RevOps space. He previously spent three years at Growblocks, shut down that operation, and is now building Adif, an AI-powered analytics company. Hohlbein's credibility stems from his hands-on leadership of revenue teams at scale, from managing individual contributors through building out entire go-to-market operations.
The core insight of this episode is that traditional RevOps roles are struggling to achieve strategic impact because many practitioners remain trapped in CRM administration rather than focusing on revenue generation itself. Hohlbein argues that RevOps still battles a perception problem within organizations, often conflated with sales operations, where the primary ask from leadership is simply to "fix the CRM" rather than to serve as a true force multiplier for revenue.
This reframe opens the door to what Hohlbein calls "go-to-market engineering"—a title and role that clearly ties output to revenue impact. Instead of supporting tools and processes, a go-to-market engineer owns specific revenue outcomes like meetings booked or pipeline created, using technical skill and automation. The distinction matters because it fundamentally changes how the organization perceives value: a sales operations person is a cost center, while a go-to-market engineer is seen as directly generating cash.
The conversation covers how RevOps professionals must develop empathy for how revenue is actually made, the gap between CROs who only understand sales versus those who grasp the full funnel, the role of data and realistic planning in scaling, and why title alone does not solve the underlying problem of hiring people who truly understand go-to-market strategy.
What we cover in this episode
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3:00
RevOps Strategic Struggle RevOps roles often stuck in CRM administration, failing to become the strategic nervous system organizations intended.
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8:30
Go-to-Market Engineering Defined A title and role where practitioners own revenue outcomes directly through technical automation and tooling, not just support functions.
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15:45
Data-Driven Revenue Planning The importance of understanding funnels, conversion rates, pipeline targets, and how each metric connects to revenue goals.
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22:15
CRO Perception Gap Many CROs focus only on sales pipeline and forecasting, missing visibility into marketing, customer success, and the full customer lifecycle.
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28:00
From Hustle to Systems Organizations typically scale through hustle until hitting a wall around 10-20 million revenue, then forced to adopt repeatable processes and discipline.
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34:20
Skills Gap in Hiring RevOps and GTM leaders often lack foundational go-to-market knowledge, unable to answer basic questions about funnels, forecasting, and revenue math.
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40:10
Clay and Automation Clay enables non-technical operators to build targeted lists and automate outbound motion, representing the toolkit for modern go-to-market engineering.
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47:30
Building Strong Couplets Successful revenue operations requires aligned partnerships between CRO and RevOps, where both understand data, strategy, and the full funnel.
The lines worth sharing
Just with a title change, you're not going to achieve anything. It's sales ops, rev ops, go-to-market ops. If you only look through a title lens, that's BS.
Toni Hohlbein · 5:15
RevOps struggles to become the strategic team it wants to be. In many cases it's really just sales operations focused on CRM, pipeline, and forecasting.
Toni Hohlbein · 3:45
You need to realize you're a force multiplier. That's how you think about this. The CRM is not the only way. There are many other things at your disposal.
Toni Hohlbein · 10:20
For me, the person doing admin stuff is a cost center. But the person generating meetings through automation, that person is actually generating cash for me.
Toni Hohlbein · 36:00
Common questions from this episode
What is the difference between RevOps and go-to-market engineering?
RevOps often focuses on support functions like CRM administration and pipeline management, seen as a cost center. Go-to-market engineering owns revenue outcomes directly through automation and technical skill, generating meetings and pipeline—perceived as revenue generating. The skill sets overlap, but the purpose and organizational perception differ fundamentally.
Why do RevOps leaders struggle to become strategic?
Many RevOps practitioners lack foundational go-to-market knowledge. They've never carried a quota, don't understand full-funnel dynamics, and focus narrowly on CRM instead of asking how to multiply revenue. Without empathy for how sales actually works, they can't translate business problems into operational solutions.
How do companies move from hustle to systematic revenue growth?
Most SaaS companies hit a wall around 10-20 million in revenue where pure hustle and luck no longer work. At this inflection, leaders realize they need repeatable processes, accurate forecasting, realistic pipeline targets, and data-driven decision making. Organizations that recognize this transition succeed; those that don't often stall.
What should a RevOps person do to gain credibility with sales leaders?
Develop empathy for how deals actually close. Understand quota, pipeline requirements, and conversion math. Ask hard questions about revenue goals and work backwards to define what metrics and behaviors must change. Position yourself as a force multiplier, not a cost center maintaining systems.
Why is it hard to hire VP-level RevOps talent?
There are very few VP RevOps roles globally, and even fewer candidates who truly understand go-to-market strategy and revenue mathematics. Most candidates excel at Salesforce administration but lack the commercial acumen to drive strategy or lead large teams.
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Read the full transcript · 63 KB · Toni Hohlbein
EDDIE REYNOLDSBy going with go-to-market engineering, is this going to change the fundamental problem that like, we're not hiring people that understand go-to-market?
TONI HOHLBEINSo I mean, number one, just with a title change, you're not going to achieve anything, right? Kind of is it sales ops, rev ops, go-to-market ops, go-to-market engineering? If you only look at it through a title lens, then all of this is obviously, you know, BS.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to go-to-market science. There's an art and there's a science to go-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, welcome to another episode of the podcast today. I am here with Tony Obine to talk about the extinction of rev ops and the rise of go-to-market engineering. And we might wax philosophically about rev ops and go-to-market in other ways as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut thanks for joining me today, Tony. Thanks for having me. I think it's the second time now.
TONI HOHLBEINHopefully, I'm one of the rare return customers here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou are. We've had some others, but you are one of the few. And dude, I'd do a podcast with you every week if you wanted to. I always get so much value out of these conversations. I think I was on your podcast as well, which was really fun because you've not just been in the rev ops world, but you've also been a CRO and ran revenue teams, which is a perfect segue for me to ask you for anybody that doesn't know who you are already to introduce yourself
EDDIE REYNOLDSand tell us a little bit about what you've been doing in life. Yeah, absolutely.
TONI HOHLBEINSo I think I just kind of why am I talking about rev ops kind of let me go a little bit further back in time. So I actually started my career in SaaS and revenue operations. Then over time became the CRO of the company. It was like around 15, 20 million. Scaled that company, sold it, became the CRO of another company, sold this as well. Decided to build my own business, was in the rev ops space. Roblox for some of the folks that maybe kind of know this, did this for three years, realized it doesn't work, shut it down, and now building a new company called Adif. It's not fully out yet what we're doing, but basically we're doing AI in the analytics space. Pretty cool stuff. Stay tuned. Going to save you a lot of time and headache. But that's a quick intro to myself, Eddie.
EDDIE REYNOLDSVery cool. That makes a lot of sense. Or, well, obviously makes sense because I know you pretty well, but for the context of our audience. So I think what sparked me wanting to reach out and do another podcast with you beyond the fact they're like, I really do enjoy our talks. I learn a lot every time. I think our audience does as well. You had posted something about the extinction of rev ops. And I think this is also coming off of some of the challenges that you're facing or seeing in the market at Roblox and the rise of go-to-market engineering, which is this term that everybody's talking about. And I will say that I, for one, I don't get it. And I'll say I don't get it because I feel like rev ops was a perfectly fine title. And then it just kind of got like taken by a lot of people and organizations that don't do what I think of as rev ops. But I'd be curious, like maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on this post and the thoughts that came behind that post about like, why do you think rev ops is going extinct? And why might go-to-market engineering replace it?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I think, you know, it's a very nice, hooky, catchy line to say like rev ops is going extinct.
TONI HOHLBEINI don't think I would kind of choose those exact words. I think what I talked about a lot is that rev ops still struggles to become the strategic team that it wants to be in those organizations, right? And in many cases, this is also where the term is being taken a little bit out of context. In many cases that I've seen, it's not actually revenue operations, actually sales operations. And those folks should just be sales operations, but there's still shame in that, right? It's very much a focus on the sales team, on the forecast, pipeline management. And very, very, very often the main point is, hey, come in, fix the CRM, you know, clean up the CRM, kind of that's really what we need. And I think this is to a degree, kind of a wonderful new world that could grow into being the strategic role at the center of the nervous system of the GTM. I think this is the trajectory that, you know, we're almost always trying to build towards in the community. But what is sometimes a bit problematic is that, you know, many folks are stuck in this CRM and many folks are trying to just fix that and also then being seen as that. And once you're stuck in this phase and kind of in this role, I think the organization is starting to question like, hey, you know, people were telling us that rev ops is so great and revolutionary. And I just don't see it kind of what's the value of revenue operations, right? Kind of in those organizations and sometimes even from the CRO. And I think when I say rev ops is going extinct. So first of all, I'm not sure if this is exactly the quote that I kind of mentioned. But what I'm really saying is that the push towards becoming strategic, I'm not sure it's working out that well. I think it's kind of either stagnating or going in the other direction. Now, what's happening with go-to-market engineering? Yes. Whole new title, lots of buzz around. You have like Clay being a billion dollar company, basically inventing the role or building around this role. The allure of this thing of go-to-market engineering. And I say this from my perspective, having in Growbox actually kind of, I think we hired one of the first go-to-market engineers ever, I think. And the allure is from a CRO and CEO perspective, hey, you have someone with a very similar skill set, maybe a previous revenue operations person, or maybe it is a rev ops person that understands the go-to-market, that understands the tools, can do a little bit of technical stuff, stitching things together. But suddenly the output of that person, you know, is meetings booked or, you know, leads acquired or, you know, whatever it might be, and not just helping and supporting something, but actually owning part of the revenue generation piece, right? Through all the tooling and technical things that they're so good at, by the way. And I think this value is so much more cleaner and clearer to understand for everyone around, both in the industry at large, but also kind of in organizations. So I think the go-to-market engineering thing is kind of really well positioned to be better understood by the organization than in many cases revenue operations is right now. So kind of there's a little bit of a long monologue. I hope I put the pieces in a way that people can follow. But that's really kind of my thinking around the role itself in terms of revenue operation and go-to-market engineering.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think you broke it down really well. I'm skeptical. I'm not sure I buy it, but I understand what you're saying. So I'm going to ask you to define all these terms, rev ops, sales ops, go-to-market engineering, etc. But before I do, like, when I saw your post, one of the things that really struck me about it
EDDIE REYNOLDSwas trying to put it in context of the size of the organization. So could you tell me a little bit more about the size of companies you were working with, grow blocks, and or the size of companies that influenced this post and what you just said? Like, what size of organizations are we talking about here where you see rev ops not being
EDDIE REYNOLDSstrategic and struggling with these things mostly?
SPEAKER_22I think you can almost break it down by the titles that are being assigned in revenue operations.
TONI HOHLBEINSo you know what? If you have an organization that can afford a VP revenue operations, that person and that team around that title, around that person, they're going to do more than just managing the industry, like totally granted, like absolutely. How many people is, you know, and how many cases is there a VP of revenue operations in an organization and maybe sometimes a director as well? I don't know. Right. So I think I recently looked it up. Something around 40, 50,000 people with a rev ops title, like globally right now, at least when you kind of according to LinkedIn and probably in terms of VP revenue operations, very, very few people. I think we're talking a couple of hundred or something like this. Right. And those are the folks. I don't know. Maybe you have better numbers on this, but no, it sounds.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI didn't look at the numbers, but like we've only I don't want to interrupt you, but we have basically only hired VP of rev ops and then you say these numbers and I'm like, oh,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat's why it's been so, so hard to hire people. It just feels like we're fishing in the smallest pond ever. And then I guess since I have interrupted you, I'll keep going here. Even within the VPs of rev ops. So we've interviewed a few directors, but more than a few, but a lot of the folks that we've interviewed have been VPs of rev ops multiple times. And even within that, our interview process has been as basic as explain to me the go to market strategy in sales, in marketing, in CS, explain to me how you drive revenue and the amount of people that can't answer basic questions like that. How do you build an annual plan? How would you improve your inbound lead engine? How would you improve your ability to close deals and forecast accurately? And the amount of people that you can see that are just making it up because they have spent their whole career managing systems and graduated to a director or VP title without really understanding go to market. That's not to say everybody. Like the last thing I want to do is have this podcast and just shit all over the entire profession of rev ops. But I do think like, I see how difficult that transition is, especially if you're somebody that's like, man, I love building stuff in Salesforce. And you do that for a long period of time. And then all of a sudden, somebody's like, go build an annual plan and help us figure out how we're going to get to $200 million in revenue. It's like, that's a very different ask.
TONI HOHLBEINYeah. No, exactly. And I think there are many different ways to kind of why is that, right? I think a very simplistic, easy way would be like, well, they never carried a quota. I kind of, I think that's what many VP of sales and then CEOs might say is like, well, that's why you don't know because you never were in, you know, really kind of had that responsibility. I think there's a little bit of truth to that kind of giving you that quota makes, you know, forces you to think very clearly about the end goal. But I don't think it's a requirement. I think you can get to that way of thinking without necessarily carrying it back yourself, right? But what is disturbing sometimes is how few folks really dig deep also for themselves and try like, hey, what is my role in this organization? And how can I further help facilitate that purpose, right? And the purpose is never, in reality, the purpose is never that someone just needs to kind of do a supportive role for the CRM. That's what it's being boiled down to. But the purpose is actually being, you know, in military terms, you get US guys are good at this to be a force multiplier, right? Kind of that's the whole idea about this thing. And then, hey, kind of how can I multiply the output of the sales team? That's how you need to think about this. And yes, tweaking the CRM, making sure the data is all right, that might be part of that in order to get there.
TONI HOHLBEINBut first of all, you need to realize that that's why you're doing it. You're doing it in order to generate more, you know, sales or whatever.
TONI HOHLBEINAnd then, you know, the CRM is not the only way to do it. There are many other kind of things at your disposal where you can try and kind of, you know, facilitate that. For example, annual planning, your QBRs, you know, analyzing, doing insights, figuring out what's working, what's not, you know, going through ICPs, doing the lead qualification. I mean, there's like so many things and all of these need to actually map back to revenue. And I think for very few folks out there, that's the way of thinking about it. But once you reach that, I think all of these things on, you know, Jaco's Winning by Design and Revenue Architecture and all of these frameworks and formats come extremely easily to us, right? Because we are re-analytical, we only see this as a system. And now we find a way to like, oh, wow, kind of I can take my system thinking and can I actually kind of, you know, apply it to generating more revenue. That is kind of like for some people, I feel that's an unlock. And once you have that, you can apply it extremely broadly, but you can even, I think, then also grow up in the organization. And I believe you can become a CRO. You can own the whole thing. You can kind of grow up in that direction. And then the VP of RevOps is not the, you know, then that is really a strategic role in my perspective.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I've definitely seen it. I've seen people running RevOps that have gone on to be CROs and even CEOs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd we're talking substantial organizations. I mean, I did a podcast with Tim over at Summit Partners. He used to be the CRO at Zoom Info when I think they were at $2 billion in revenue. And he had two different RevOps teams. I'm trying to remember the exact details. One was more strategic and the other was more, I shouldn't say strategic. I think one was like, how do we go tackle a new market? And the other was like, how do we optimize what we're already doing? So it wasn't that they weren't strategic. And I believe I remember the person I interviewed was the one that ran that second team. So they weren't not strategic. They just weren't like trying to figure out Greenfield stuff. And he went on to become the CEO of one of Summit's portfolio companies that's doing, I don't know if I'm allowed to say how much revenue, but a substantial amount. Like we're not talking a startup. And when I interviewed him on the podcast, you could tell like he not only understands go to market, but also has this like executive presence and gravitas, which I think are two things that a lot of folks in revenue operations lack. Because if you're managing a Salesforce admin and a Marketo admin and a junior analyst, it's like working through spreadsheets all day. Like that is not the same thing as managing a global revenue team. And so I don't think the purpose of this podcast was to talk about how RevOps could become a CRO. But I also saw a post the other day about this. And I kind of like, I was like somebody posted, you know, all these RevOps leaders are going to become CROs. I'm just like, there's no way there's such a gap in understanding. Like, I'm not saying you can't do it, but there's a lot of skills that need to be learned that you don't learn by managing a Salesforce admin. You know, you not only have to understand the go-to-market, you have to understand how to manage an entire revenue team. And that's not a small thing.
TONI HOHLBEINAnd I think this is practically speaking kind of, let's just say you're the CEO and you now have a choice. Either you don't have CRO to begin with, or the CRO is out the door and you need to fill this role. Whom are you going to put in there, right? Someone from the outside or maybe someone from the inside. If someone from the inside, is it going to be the VP of revenue operations? And one major obstacle in your mind will be like, oh, wait a minute. Yes, he or she has the VP title, but the team is five people. And we're talking about 150 people here. Can I make this bet? Can I make the bet that this person will be able to run 150 people team? And that's a very kind of large gamble here, right? So I think this is a natural obstacle RevOps kind of runs into because it doesn't have this large team scale kind of experience, right? So how do you solve that? You know, in my case, the way, you know, it's not like I was working towards becoming a CRO, but like the way I saw this, like I consumed a couple of teams on the way there, kind of at the SDRs at some point, at the marketing team at some point. And then suddenly it's like, hey, Tony, I don't know. I mean, he manages 30, 40 people, so you can do 150. And that's kind of that, that jump is sometimes easier to make. So it's to a degree unfair to point to leadership skills, but I think it is an obstacle for people to be promoted into that role. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I think there's also sort of like, I like how you talk about like taking on these different teams because I'll take it back for a moment.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou mentioned, oh, like these RevOps people, they don't understand go to market because they didn't carry it back. Well, I carried a bag. I still carry a bag. I mean, I run my own company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo it's like, not only do I not get my commission if I don't close a deal, sometimes I have to pay money out of pocket to like fund the business as we're losing money because we didn't hit our number, which is pretty painful situation. It's like sales comp plan on steroids.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I'm 20 years into this, right? Like I've carried a bag for a long time, but I have massive imposter syndrome when it comes to like talking as if I'm a VP of RevOps. Now I will say like eight, nine years into this game, I feel a lot more confident, especially having hired a lot of VPs of RevOps.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut there's definitely some stuff that they know how to do, like where I don't exactly understand how the sausage is made. I understand at a high level, right? But I think like, even in getting to where I am right now, there was a huge gap between like closing deals and trying to understand like how you build an annual plan to take a company from a hundred million in revenue to 130 million in revenue. And a big piece of that was the fact that I was an AE at Salesforce, where I was not only working inside of one of the best run SaaS companies on earth and seeing how they operated, but I was also working with some of the best companies that were VC backed and growing like weeds, B2B SaaS companies. And then I also was selling sales, marketing, and CS tools. So I'm going in and talking to them about how they use these tools to grow sales, marketing, and CS revenue. And even with that, coming off of that, there's a huge gap. So if you take me on day one at Salesforce, where I was like the first AE in a SaaS company, and then I had worked in finance prior to that, like, did I understand it? Like, I didn't understand any of this stuff, right? There's a huge gap. And I see this with CROs too, right? I see CROs that, especially in smaller companies, let's say sub 10 million, even 20, 30, $40 million in revenue. And this is where we have sort of like gravitated towards like the 50 or even 100 million plus customers, where I see CROs with this huge skills gap. They know how to close deals. They know how to chase people down and hustle, but they can't do the math in their head to figure out how do we get to our target? I mean, there's one particular person I have in mind that I'm thinking about where we're debating with him, like, you don't have a pipeline target. Like, oh, we need 3X pipeline covers. Like, first of all, where'd you get 3X from? Do you guys have 33% close rate? No, like we're actually not even sure what our close rate is because we don't have a solid sales process in place. And then, you know, I don't want to pipe gen target. Like, we just need to have 3X pipe. I'm like, okay, I understand that you know how to close deals because you've been doing this forever, but that's not going to get you to your number. Like, there is math that goes into this. And there are systems that go into this where, you know, you're not going to have accurate pipeline and the ability to run an efficient, repeatable, scalable model if you don't have like an actual pipeline report in Salesforce that you can trust. Like, I don't know how you run a sales team in any level of scale if you don't have that. I really don't.
SPEAKER_04I think that's true, but I can also see if, let's just say a mid-level or junior rev ops
TONI HOHLBEINperson walks up to that CRO and brings that argument, how he or she is being laughed out of the room, right? It's like, you know, what do you know, right? So I think, and this is, by the way, what I, one of the biggest difference between US and EMEA revenue operations from my perspective is many rev ops folks in the US come from a previous commercial role, like have either worked in sales or CS or marketing and then went into operations versus in EMEA, at least from my very anecdotal low data, like I didn't check the numbers specifically, but what feels like more people from kind of either straight of uni or a consulting background or finance background or something like that, stepping into this role, right? There are many reasons why there's a good idea, kind of the analysis piece and all of those wonderful items. But when then comes to taking some of those more abstract concepts, like the margin targets and pipeline targets and, you know, how the conversion rates work together. And hey, if we just get this conversion rate ticked up by one or 2%, we're going to all make millions and that abstract level, and then kind of trying to translate that to a sales leader that is kind of a no BS kind of guy that just like, Hey, we just need to kind of get those actual deals in. I can see how there's a gap sometimes and kind of trying to kind of bring this point across. So what you really need to do in this case, you need to have a little bit more empathy and understanding of how the sausage is actually made to use your point, you know, your words on closing those deals and then bringing that expertise in, right? So, and I think it's, you know, you could even go so far and say, you know what, people should be T-shaped to a degree, right? They should have a broad and thin understanding of everything across and go really deep in one area. You know, let's just kind of have this title conversation around the CRO away, but, you know, that person should probably go really deep in sales and leadership. You know, that person should be really, really good at that and have like a rough understanding of some of the other pieces. You as revenue operations have actually a great opportunity to have your deep expertise in how do we stitch this funnel together? How do we make this a machine? How can we build the system around this? How do we plan this in the right way? That could actually be your expertise, right? And making this connect with your CRO and with the other VPs that are sitting around the table, that, you know, becomes so much easier once you understand and be a bit more empathetic on how revenue is actually made, how customers are being closed. And I believe if you have done that yourself at least once, I think you will have a much easier way of communicating that successfully.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat I do agree with. I mean, like I'll have arguments with my team and it's like, well, we need to do XYZ.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I'm just like, do you understand how painful that is for a sales rep to like fill in all these fields in Salesforce before they're able to like move the deal to like the next stage. And at the same time, like my empathy has limits where like, we have validation rules and all this stuff in place. And I'll say the same thing to the rep. I'm like, I get that it's more work, but if you don't have control of your deal, if you don't understand the risk factors, let's use MedPick as an example. If you just aren't thinking about this thing and you're going to close less business, like that's why it's there. Right. So it's a balance. And so I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think like my advice, if anybody is a CRO or a VP of RevOps or aspiring to be either is you got to learn both. Right. I love the money ball analogy where if anybody is listening to this and hasn't seen the movie, Brad Pitt plays the general manager of the Oakland A's and they have no money. And so they're losing all these games because they can't buy amazing players. And Jonah Hill is this analyst guy that comes with this new idea of like, here's how we can get really like, here's how we can win games by buying baseball players on the cheap with our limited budgets and compete with teams like the Yankees. And what they're doing is they're doing all this like spreadsheet analysis. I'm like, how do we win? How do we get to our ultimate goal? What are the little things in place? And like, one of the things that they focus on is on base percentage for baseball players. I'm like, okay, this guy has a weird throw or he swings weird or whatever, but he has a high on base percentage. Well, if we get on base, then we are going to get runs and we're going to win games and we might be able to closer to winning a championship. And so you'll see Jonah Hill in this room, like basically sitting in front of a spreadsheet or in front of a chalkboard and explaining this stuff to Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt, who was also a former baseball player, which my understanding, I'm not a, not a baseball fan. My understanding is that that's rare for a GM, but he's got that like CRO kind of like experience. And he's sitting there thinking like, how do I build a winning team? And how do I leverage my analyst to do that? And the analyst is thinking, how do I leverage the data to inform the general manager on how to build a winning team? And they're constantly learning from each other. And I think that that is a really amazing visual to think about the CRO and the RevOps relationship where RevOps should be asking hard questions of CROs of like, how are we going to get to our number? And the CRO should be asking those same questions. They should both be looking at the data. RevOps has a lot more time, hopefully, to do that. But I think they're both responsible for asking the question of how do we get to our number? And then it boils down to the CRO is like, I get to my number by hiring the right people and coaching them to the right behaviors. And RevOps has, I get to my number by building the right strategy processes and systems alongside
SPEAKER_04my CRO.
TONI HOHLBEINYeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that I really loved around that movie, especially, you know, the Jonah Hill side of things is, sure, we need to score points. Everyone wants to score points. But, you know, the inside of saying like... In baseball, it's called runs, Tony. Yeah, I mean, I, you know...
TONI HOHLBEINI know you're European, so... I played baseball myself for a year, by the way, so I shouldn't know these things. But it's like, you know, very long time ago, very long time ago. You know, you need to score, I don't know, runs or whatever in those innings. And, you know, I forgot all the other words. But in order to get that, in order to kind of score those runs, you need to get on the basis first, right? That's, you know, if you think about a funnel, that's what you need to do first. And then before that, you need to kind of hit the ball first. And then, you know, basically kind of break this thing apart into its actual pieces. And then you realize, okay, in order for us to close more business, I think we need to have more meetings with people. And in order to have more meetings with people, we need to have more of whatever, right? And, you know, once you make that connection, I think this is then when you start to believe it also works the other way around. Like, okay, so if I do get us 100 more meetings, we get 10 more customers? Is that how this thing actually works, right? And I think that is the big click that sometimes needs to go off. And this is then, by the way, also for RevOps folks, where it goes from the theoretical, oh, we have a funnel. And the funnel kind of obviously works together to the, oh, I can change things now. I can, you know, increase this thing over here. And then this other thing over there will also go up, right? And I also do want to talk a little bit about go-to-market engineering, by the way. Yeah, that was my second question and we're half an hour in.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOh, no, I was just going to say that was like my second question I wanted to ask you and
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe're half an hour in and I've gotten to it yet.
SPEAKER_04But yeah, what's go-to-market engineering? So let me kind of preface this with, you know, I'm not one of those clay, I don't want to
TONI HOHLBEINsay minions, but clay folks that love this thing so much, right? So by the way, what's the clay thing?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSorry to interrupt, but like we actually just got clay. I haven't used it myself. Like my team is using it, but what's the tie-in between clay and go-to-market engineering?
TONI HOHLBEINYeah. So let me tell you a story because I don't know the facts and people will be like, no, Tony was wrong. So I think one piece here is what is clay? And clay is a list building tool. That's what clay is. Like can probably do a couple of other cool things on the side, but the cause it's a list building tool. It's a list building tool and, you know, in an Excel spreadsheet kind of format, right? It's really great to figure out, you know, which accounts should be called. And I think what made them extremely successful is that instead of only filtering your list by industry and by, I don't know, amount of employees there, something like this, you could do a couple of more interesting things with it. For example, you could say, okay, scrape all of their websites and, you know, check out if they have a pricing page, because maybe then this is an SMB company or there's an SMB motion or something like that, right? Or go on their website and find some of the customers that they're working with and pull the logo, like fairly complicated, edgy stuff that, you know, wasn't really possible before, at least not for the folks that are using, which is people like, you know, you and I 10 years ago, but like folks that work in revenue operations that actually don't have any coding skills. You couldn't just kind of whip up like a web scraper and kind of do this yourself. You couldn't, right? So what Clay is doing is really enabling all of those folks to do fairly technical stuff, but in a non-technical required kind of environment, right? And really the purpose that they're then able to achieve is to create those lists. And ideally it's like micro lists, micro segments. And then I think the big war cry is the list is the message. So you build a list that is very targeted and then have a very targeted message around that. But then obviously that should lift like conversion rate, open rates and so forth, right? That's the idea. That's what Clay does. And there might be other plenty of other use cases and maybe I didn't get it right, but that's what they're achieving. So this is to your question in terms of what Clay is. My bigger thing around this is that Clay is a company. I mean, they've been at it for a while, right? So this is not an overnight success. They've been kind of figuring this thing out and kind of all the power to them. But I think either them on purpose or by coincidence or something, this go-to-market engineering title started to emerge more and more. And I think they're here out of Europe, Cargo team out of France, I think team called Cargo also kind of going into this go-to-market engineering space. And I think what the allure is for people themselves is like, oh, wow, this kind of engineering title. I don't have any engineering skills, but I can do stuff here, which is really interesting and automate stuff. And I think then the other side is, which I believe is the really interesting piece here is you're not just tinkering around and doing things in the corner. You are actually doing stuff that might directly contribute to getting revenue. You're not just creating a validation rule so we can pull the reports, so we have kind of better performance management in place. You're doing things through the automation, through using AI, through using all of those wonderful things that actually directly impact how many meetings we book or how much revenue we kind of close, et cetera, et cetera, which moves the skillset of this, and I think you and I have both this nerdy element of a large percentage of people in the workforce that isn't great in sales. Maybe you don't have that problem. Isn't great of sales and moves that closer actually to generating revenue. And I think that's super interesting for many folks out there. Just like directly speaking, I think that's what hypes a lot of these folks up.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's interesting. And like, I will say, like, I'm a big fan of Clay. I've never actually logged into it. So I don't know how it works. And I actually try really hard not to like learn anything about tools because it's just,
EDDIE REYNOLDSfirst of all, I've got people on my team that are way better at that than me. And, uh, I just also just don't care that much about tools that are just like, I, how do we get to our number? Like, that's all I'm thinking about. But I think you mentioned a number of things that are core to this. And the reason why we bought Clay ourselves is because I think that there's just no easier way to make money and go to market than like better defining our ICP and better targeting accounts. Like I was listening to Dave Gerhardt's podcast the other day, and he shared an idea that I just thought was brilliant. He's like, marketing should have like a named account list as well. And I was like, holy shit, we need to do that last year is when our marketing really took off in terms of sort of the number of leads, but then we weren't closing any of them. And I was so frustrated. I'm like, why are we generating all these leads? And none of them are closing. When I say leads, I'm talking hand raisers. I'm talking to people that are like, we want to work with you. Like, how much is it going to cost? Like, what does this look like? And then I looked at the leads and I was like, none of these are who our ICP should be. And then we kind of re-engineered that. And then all of a sudden we started closing all these inbound leads. And I was like, wow, like that was amazing. But I think the challenge I have around this concept of go-to-market engineering is like, are we just kicking the can down the road? Are you going to have people that are Salesforce admins that have taken on the sales ops title, which by the way, I don't understand what sales ops is. Then they took on the rev ops title and now they're going to take on the go-to-market engineering title, but they still just spend all day updating Salesforce. I mean, like I saw from one of our competitors the other day that posted a senior rev ops consultant job. And I looked at the job description and it was like, you must know how to build flows in Salesforce. You must be a certified Salesforce admin. And I'm like, nothing here about understanding go-to-market, which is fine. Like those are valuable people. We have a whole team of those people and they're incredibly valuable and they make up a substantial amount of the work that we do for our clients. I don't know what we would do in strategy without those people. Cause you've got to be able to actually like build stuff in the tools. But to me, that's not the end all be all of what rev ops should be. And if we just rename it, go-to-market engineering, I guess the thing that I'm missing is like by, by going with go-to-market engineering, is this going to change the fundamental problem that like, we're not hiring people that understand go-to-market.
TONI HOHLBEINSo I mean, number one, just with a title change, you're not going to achieve anything, right? Kind of is it sales ops, rev ops, go-to-market ops, go-to-market engineering? If you only look at it through a title lens, then all of this is obviously, you know, BS, right? I think the difference there is, look at this as a CEO, right? Kind of you have a person that's running commissions, running the reports, running the CRM, validation rules, you know, that's the whole life. And then you have another person that you maybe even, you know, have a meeting book target assigned to. But it's not doing it through calls, it's doing kind of through these skills that largely overlap with the previous person I just mentioned, right? Kind of, I think the skill sets are similar, but the purpose in the organization is different. So for me as a CRO, I'm looking at this like, okay, wait a minute, this, the person that's doing the admin stuff, kind of a little bit of a cost center for me. It's like, it's, we need to have it. It's a cost of doing business, kind of it's a requirement. We have to, right? But this other person is actually generating cash for me. So let's talk more to that person and figure out how we can, you know, get that person to do even more because he or she isn't calling or emailing anyone, you know, physically kind of there's some magic to this thing. And how can we expand that magic, right? And that's why for me, those are two different, from a CRO's perspective, from a CEO's perspective, those are two different roles. And that's why for me, it's more than just a title difference. The skills are the same. It might be the same person, the same person might be called sales ops yesterday and be GTM engineering today. But with it also come different expectations, at least currently from what I'm seeing. And those expectations are super simple and easy to understand for everyone in the organization. It's like, okay, it makes, you know, books meetings is similar, like the marketing folks, similar like the SCR folks, similar like whatever. Books meetings gets us more revenue. Okay, you deserve now a seat at the table. I think it makes it so much clearer what the impact of that is. And, you know, whatever is it, go to market engineering, call it whatever. But it's basically the reason why I'm excited about it and why I think it's inspiring. It's like, you take some of the skills that are more in the tooling realm, but you now found a way to apply them to generate cash for you. And I think that's exciting.
SPEAKER_20I completely agree with this. And this is the way that we've built our team.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe have one team that's strategy. And when I say strategy, I hate that term as well, because it's people like, oh, you're
EDDIE REYNOLDSgoing to become McKinsey and you're going to give me a bunch of SWOT analysis and like PowerPoint presentations. Like, no, that's not what we do. Nobody wants to pay for strategy. It's defining the process. It's figuring out like, what's the number? Is that realistic? How do we get there? Where does that come from? Inbound, outbound? What pipeline do we need to close? Retention, expansion, et cetera. And then like, what processes do we need to improve? Because the annual plan is usually going to have some assumption that we're going to have better metrics than we had last year. We'll have a higher close rate, we'll generate more pipeline, et cetera. So what are all the processes we need to improve to do that? And then that gets handed over to the tech team that then builds that in Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, et cetera. Now, obviously, like none of us were born understanding B2B SaaS go to market. Anybody can learn this stuff, right? I think it's just really time consuming. It takes a long time to understand how all these sort of like dots connect. But if somebody is like, hey, I'm a Salesforce ninja and I want to understand how inbound leads make it into pipeline and then make it to a closed one deal and then make it to a renewal and then expansion, then like, great, that's amazing. But then I think that person now has a lot of work to do that doesn't involve updating Salesforce and needs to stop spending all day updating Salesforce. Because I think that it's just too hard to do both.
SPEAKER_04Yes. So 1000%.
TONI HOHLBEINAnd to a degree, right? If you, again, look at this from a CEO, CEO perspective, and you kind of need to manage your resources. And it's always also about ROI, right? It's kind of, you know, where could I invest more money? Where can I get more, you know, squeeze more money out? Let's just say you have like a mixed role. You're like the GTM engineer, but you also do some of the commission calculation and so forth. As soon as you're starting to book more meetings than, you know, two or three SDRs combined, do you think your CRO is going to be like, oh, you know what? Actually, let's pile on some more CRM tasks for you and let's pile on some more commission stuff for you. No, he or she is going to be like, you know what? Actually, why don't we hand this over to, you know, Jack? Maybe Jack does that stuff now and you only do this area here now. And maybe we get you to 30, 40, 50 meetings a month or whatever, right? And when we were running Roblox, we were starting to sell stuff. We kind of hired one or two outbound reps. But I was like, very quickly was like, hey, you know, we have this whole AI thing, all this automation stuff. I don't know how to stitch all of that stuff together. But there can be money made in a motion to automate some of these things using AI and so forth. So we hired someone in previous RevOps, but also had a, you know, had a sales role before super nerdy about all the different tools that are coming out and stitching them together and hooking them to LinkedIn and what have you. Clay was obviously one of them and he built this whole web of stuff. And I can go into detail what that was specifically.
TONI HOHLBEINAnd, you know, was like super highly automated. We used AI for that and it started to generate meetings for us. And that was just fantastic.
TONI HOHLBEINThis is where I totally, you know, first of all, got at that point, go-to-market engineering wasn't a term yet. But at this point, I got like, okay, this can work out. And especially in bigger organizations, like this can legitimately become a role, right? And this is starting to maybe even sound like an alternative to a large STR team. Like there are so many different ways of how to, you know, use so much headcount, by the way. But here's one that does that through technical means and some understanding of, you know, how to sell in general. And that seems like a way smarter and way more scalable way of generating outbound in this case, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, you don't have to sell me, but I do think that there are CROs out there that won't be sold on this. I think about like the challenges that we face with our customers and we have a wide spectrum of CROs and other revenue leaders that we work with or have worked with them, including people that have churned. And, you know, the most difficult ones, it's like you bring these ideas to them and they're just not receptive. If we take the money ball analogy, right? Jonah Hill is sort of like pitching this idea of like a data driven strategic way of building a baseball team. And the team that he was working for prior to being poached by Brad Pitt's character, they didn't really necessarily listen to any of that. And then even when he came to the Oakland A's, like all the scouts and everybody were like, no, no, no, this guy throws weird. This guy has an ugly girlfriend, which I understand is an offensive thing to not really work appropriate, but like, it's an example of just like really limited thinking of like, well, since this guy doesn't have like an attractive girlfriend, he can't like win baseball games. Like what in the world are you talking about? And Brad Pitt was the equivalent of the CRO that was able to sort of like lay down the hammer and say, look, guys, I don't care what you think. This is what we're doing. And the problem is, is if that other guy that's like, oh, this guy throws weird, so we can't have him on our team. If he's the one making the decision, then you're just like talking to a wall. And, you know, like, I'll give you the concrete example. We'll say, okay, we need to have a pipeline target. And the CRO is like, no, like I've got other things to focus on. And so I'll say, okay, let me give it to you. Your close rate is 33%. So you need three X and your sales cycle is 60 days. So we need to generate this much pipeline by November 1st of the year. Okay, cool. Now, like, what are we going to do in order to achieve that? At a certain point, there are folks out there that are like, I don't know, like I just need to hire my next enterprise rep or whatever. Like, I don't have time to think about that. And this is one area where I've become really disenfranchised with organizations that are smaller than a certain revenue range, because I've seen that even in just in the low, like eight figures, 10, 20, $30 million in revenue, a lot of these organizations, they have not yet like hit the brick wall hard enough to understand why they can't do that. And I'll keep going back to this money ball analogy. The whole reason they did this is because they couldn't win baseball games because they didn't have enough money to buy the players they wanted. So they were like at this wall and they're like, we're desperate. We have to come up with something. And I see these organizations that raise a bunch of capital and grow to 10, 20, $30 million in revenue by basically just pouring money into sales and marketing and hustling for the next deal. And they haven't yet hit the wall to say, we got to take a step back and think about repeatable, scalable motion. And that for us is really difficult because it's like, we can bring all the ideas in the world, but we're dependent upon the CRO to go to execute. If we say, Hey, like your team is not closing deals because they don't follow the sales process because they don't update the CRM because they're chasing deals that they will never close. Like, okay, cool. If the CRO doesn't go and do something about that, then nothing changes. And then we can't drive revenue. And I don't mean to make excuses, but it's like, I personally experienced this at Salesforce where I saw management on top of these things. And like, you couldn't be a sales rep at Salesforce without following the process. Like you would just get fired immediately. And then I see other organizations where they make excuses for not doing this.
TONI HOHLBEINI mean, I don't think this will be solved through a RevOps lens. I think this is being solved by someone like Jaco and Winning by Design, right? Kind of that's what that educational machine is kind of achieving, at least from what I think.
TONI HOHLBEINSo the epiphany for me on, you know, how revenue works did come when the organization I was working for was about to hit the brick wall, by the way. That was that moment. It's like, ah, okay, you know, probably need to fire half of the workforce and we need to figure this out really fast. VP was already fired.
TONI HOHLBEINTony and your team, you know, we weren't the only ones. Let's just be clear about this. But Tony and your team, hey, you guys bring forward some idea. And we did, right? And kind of this is where this growth model or revenue model kind of came from our side and kind of, you know, put this together and it worked out. And it was basically a back against the wall kind of scenario for the CEO for, well, there was no VP of sales, right? So kind of that's the thing that you're kind of describing there. I think the way organizations get to the point of the 20, 30 million and not having had that is like, yes, maybe it's too much money in the bank account, but it could also be a more simpler and mild explanation. I think there's a threshold where the hustling and the magic and let's burn the midnight all and just get lucky with this one deal and we reach our target. There's a time where this works. And usually you say it works until 10 million or something like this, right?
TONI HOHLBEINBut then there's the year where it breaks, like where it doesn't work out anymore that
TONI HOHLBEINyou just need this one enterprise deal and you're good at home and everything is fine. No, actually in the last month, you would need to do 10 of those enterprise deals. And we all know that's not going to happen, right? I think for many people, it's the switch from, hey, but last year worked. Why do we need to do it differently this year, right? And the why do we need to differently this year is really the, oh shit, we need a system. And the truth is also the people that thrive in the, hey, you know, we just need to figure this out and let's just hustle and just kind of, you know, order pizza and we kind of, you know, push through this. Those folks will get you to the 10 million or 20 million, whatever. Those won't be the folks that get you to a hundred, right? And I think in some cases, when you have those conversations with organizations that should
TONI HOHLBEINhave had that systemization reality, you know, check-in around 20, 30 million, I would say, you know, the hustlers maybe survived like one year longer than they should have, right? It's like, it's difficult as a consultant from the outside to say like, sorry, you're paying my check, but I think you should get fired. But I think in reality, that's probably part of the conversation there, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think it's just like the flip side is we'll have a $250 million company come to us and they're like, it's not even though we don't have to convince them of this stuff. It's like, we need all this stuff done yesterday. Like how fast can you get this done? This is broken and this is broken and this is broken because it's like, they have this problem that we described in SMB and also in mid-market and also in enterprise and also in international. And it's just like, part of it is like, and I don't think it's necessarily about money because I've seen these companies at 20, 30 million that like, are like, we don't have any money. Like we need to cut costs. So we're going to cut rev ops so we can hire like the next sales rep. And you're like, but your reps aren't producing anything because they have no process and they don't know, like it's just so broken, but you don't want to fix the machine. You just want to pour more gasoline into it. And I think part of this is the maturity of management. I think there's a difference between running an organization at $10 million and running an organization at $200 million, obviously. And I think that we have gotten to a point where when we talk to an organization at $200 million, a billion, whatever, and like, we just don't have to convince them that these are things worth doing. Then it's like, okay, great. Like now the hard work is actually doing it. So let's just go do that. Instead of trying to like, I use the expression, change people's religion. And I've been using this, like, since I worked at Salesforce and like, I mean, I was there, like I started in 2013 and there were still people I would talk to that like had to be convinced to stop like managing their sales team in Excel and to adopt a CRM. And I'm just like, you know, I give up, like go use your whiteboard, go like run the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross days. As long as you can, I'll focus on someone else that gets it. Cause I just don't have time to waste here. And I think I'm partially saying this because if I was a RevOps leader working in an organization that just doesn't get it. And I'm like begging and pleading for like, give me the opportunity to drive revenue and never getting it. I would just go find a job elsewhere.
TONI HOHLBEINYeah. I think that's, I mean, ultimately that's the only thing you can do. Right. But I also want to say, I don't think those, there are not plenty of VP of RevOps roles out there.
SPEAKER_04It's, you know, we talked about this previously. Maybe not, but I'll tell you this, the ones that are open, they're hard to fill.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Everyone I talked to this trying to hire a VP of RevOps is like struggling.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, I can see that too.
TONI HOHLBEINI mean, so we were kind of a little bit story time. So when I was selling Roblox, I had a conversation with a company like 120 million or something like this. RevOps guy totally got it. Like, yeah, we need this thing. And then I talked to the CRO and, you know, I tried to explain what we're doing and maybe I didn't do a good enough job, but I was like, hey, kind of, we're doing the full process, like everything from traffic to churn and everything between and kind of how everything hangs together. And, you know, I can slice and dice it and all of that good stuff. And he was like, okay, traffic to churn, what does that mean? So just explain to me, I'm focusing on pipeline and forecasting, but what happens before pipeline? And I looked at him and I was like, well, you know, all of those MQLs and those leads and these, ah, okay, got it, got it. And what do you mean after the deal is closed?
TONI HOHLBEINWhat do you mean? And I was like, well, your customers and they churn and they're upsellers. Okay, got it. And I was like, dude, you're like a CRO of $120 million company. And the only thing you're seeing is sales. It's the only thing you're seeing. And I would wager that, you know, of many, many large organizations with CROs that are leaders, they're like really good leaders, by the way, and kind of know their sales stuff. They grew up in Oracle when Oracle was young and they only know sales. That's the only thing they're knowing, right? And everything else, you know, before and after, all of that is just like, you know, support
TONI HOHLBEINfor sales sometimes. And maybe I'm simplifying these things, but for some of those folks in large organizations that have in leadership roles, I think they have figured out how to be successful in their roles. And since then, they just didn't have the need to kind of add all of these other pieces together, right? And I think this is where some of this, I'm not sure what it is, if it's analytical or
TONI HOHLBEINeducational gap is kind of coming from. And also maybe, maybe you and I just being stupid, you know, maybe you and I are the ones that are like over analyzing and being super detailed around stuff. But at the end of the day, it's, dude, it's about, you know, closing deals. It's like this, there's part of that curve meme, you know what it's like in the beginning is like, it's about closing deals in the middle is like, oh, we need to do all of those things. And then the masters again, it's about closing deals, man.
SPEAKER_22Maybe, maybe you and I just getting this wrong.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, I mean, there's part of that, right? Like I'll have arguments with my team internally and I'm guilty of this too, right? Like there's a reason I run a rev ops consultancy. I love this shit, but it's like, even I have my limit and we'll have these arguments internally like, well, we should be doing it this way and this way. And I'm like, we're a seven figure company. Like we just need to fucking close like three more deals and we'll be at our target. Like I understand that this is what like a $200 million company should be doing, but we're never going to get even remotely close to that if we have to like build the million dollar brick. Like sometimes you just got to make more phone calls, but I think it's a balancing act at the same time. Like we had over a hundred percent net revenue retention in a services business last year. That's insane. Amazing. Like, and that didn't happen by chance. Like we engineered the shit out of this and, um, we're walked away from a bunch of people, which is also like kind of a crazy concept. I'm always talking to ICP and I'm like, I don't ever remember being in a sales role where I said no to a customer because they weren't in the right industry or right revenue range. Like I understand the theory, but I don't remember ever doing it until I started my own company. And so I'm like trying to coach our clients and like, oh, you need to have a tight ICP. And I'm like, but wait, who says no to a customer? We just did the other day. It's like, it's painful, but like, we don't have venture capital behind us and like massive revenue targets, like, you know, breathing down our neck. Anyway, I don't know what point I'm trying to make. This is always a fun conversation. I think that this role is going to continue to evolve. And I think the modern CRO, they have to understand all of revenue. And that's good. Part of this is just going to be like, how many CROs actually manage the marketing and CS team? I would say like, it's a minority. Yeah, it is. So first, like you have to even just have the mandate. And then secondly, it's just like anything else. Like, how did I learn marketing? I have just like put in like so much blood, sweat and tears over the last like three to five years to learn how marketing works. And one of the things that I've realized is, is like a lot of marketing is just sales, like white paper downloads and all this other stuff. Like you're handing a list of people that don't want to talk to your sales team and telling SDRs to call them 15 times. That is sales. That is not marketing. So I think if that's like your mentality on marketing, like there's just a giant learning curve that a CRO needs to climb to understand how marketing works. Just like there's a giant learning curve for a sales force admin to understand how to go to market works.
TONI HOHLBEINSo, I mean, when I stepped into the CRO role, I also didn't understand how marketing works. I didn't know that at the time. I thought I knew. Now I know I didn't. But I think the trick in general is I don't think everyone can know everything and I don't think everyone should actually, right? I think it's also about knowing where your gaps are and then, you know, relying on other people to fill it up to a degree, right? And maybe this is, you know, leadership, you know, maybe that's also what it is. But what I do think to kind of bring it back to revenue operations, rev ops, while not needing to understand the ins and outs of marketing and sales and CS can at least try and kind of give the CRO some ways of reasoning through some of those pieces, right? Kind of try and be a support system in terms of frameworks of how to relay on, you know, what is the right or wrong thing to do on the marketing side, where does it smell, where does it not smell and so forth. And this is also one of the reasons, by the way, why I have seen this now many, many times. And I've also done it myself as a CRO, you jump to a new job and you take your VP of rev ops with you. It's like, I've done this myself three times, by the way, and I've now at least seen six or seven pairs of CRO rev ops couplets, but are basically together walking around different
TONI HOHLBEINcompanies, right? Because yes, you have on the one hand side, kind of this leadership thing, this usually enterprise sales kind of guy and, you know, understands how sales works. And then you have the rev ops person that basically kind of manages everything around and makes sure that the whole machine actually helps, right? And once you find a connection where you kind of equally trust, hey, you know, I trust in the rev ops perspective, but also the rev ops trust in the CRO slash sales perspective. I think it's really rare to kind of give this up.
TONI HOHLBEINYou rather want to, you know, have your career extended by way of moving around companies for that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think you tied this in well together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI would say like, I don't think a CRO needs to be an expert in marketing. They definitely don't need to like go as deep as I have and like try to figure out how to run a podcast themselves or write content. But you need to understand like, how do marketing dollars translate into leads? Or even if you want to track leads and how does that translate into pipeline and customers? And that is something that I think like, I won't get into like leadership stuff, but there's like, there's a difference between abdication and delegation. There's different levels of delegation. It's like, do you understand maybe not how the sausage is made, but that the sausage is being made and that it is good quality. And that I think is like something where, you know, you see these pairs of CROs and VPs of RevOps. They're constantly learning from each other and leveraging each other's skillset to think together about how do we build this engine?
SPEAKER_56No, absolutely.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Anyway, I know we're at time. Tony, is there anything I always ask, like, how do people find you? But like, is there anything specifically you want to plug about your new company, about what you're up to?
SPEAKER_04So you find me on LinkedIn, Tony Holbein, Adif, we're still in stealth.
TONI HOHLBEINSo I'm actually doing quite a lot of user research right now, you know, talking about some of the issues and pains people have in the analytics space with RevOps folks and actually also with CROs and sales leaders. And no, it's like, it's too early to share too much about it, but it's a really interesting
TONI HOHLBEINproject that we're taking forward, signing up our first couple of very kind of super early on customers right now. And, you know, once you foray into this AI space, it's on the one inside is extremely scary because there's all kinds of stuff happening at the same time. And you're trying to figure out how am I going to provide value with this product in a week from now? Because maybe, you know, some new deep seek moment happened and everyone is like, okay, we don't know. But at the same time, it's also kind of, we're building the product. I go and try some stuff out and I ask it something that we've never trained it to do. Like it's never, never done that. And I just, you know, I was like, you know, screw it. I just asked it and it delivered a perfect result back to me. And this is like always so mind blowing. It's like, Jesus, you know, where's this whole thing going, man? But anyway, if you're interested in what I do, just hit me up. Can't broadcast it too much, but it's really interesting. So you should totally hit me up.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCool. Awesome. I encourage people to do that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSTony, I've learned so much from you via your LinkedIn, your other content, having you on this. If anybody wants to learn from us, we have our frameworks on our website, talking about everything from annual planning to metrics to process improvement across inbound, outbound, pipeline, and retention
SPEAKER_27and expansion.
SPEAKER_04There you go. Tony, so much fun to chop this up with you. Eddie, thanks a bunch for having me. It's always a good conversation as always.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks 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. you
