About this episode
Joel Arnold, VP of Revenue Operations at Union Square Consulting and an operations veteran with three VP-of-RevOps tenures, sits down with Eddie Reynolds, Union Square's CEO/Founder, to tackle one of RevOps' most persistent challenges: the daily fire-drill treadmill that prevents strategic work. The core insight is that many RevOps professionals default to reactive firefighting because they lack the organizational structure and prioritization framework to say no.
The fundamental problem is that without deliberate prioritization and visibility, RevOps teams lose sight of their real mandate: driving revenue predictability and efficiency through data, systems, and process. Instead, they become order-takers bouncing between Slack messages, emails, and ad-hoc requests, never accumulating enough focused time to build the foundational systems (sales methodology, CRM hygiene, closed-loop reporting) that enable strategic work. Arnold illustrates this with the Nut Island Effect, a cautionary Harvard case study in which well-intentioned, competent people working in isolation from leadership eventually create unsustainable systems that collapse under their own technical debt.
The episode then moves into actionable tactics: starting with the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid (a framework for identifying which foundational elements your company is missing), then implementing Kanban boards to organize requests into clear swim lanes (not ready, ready to go, in progress, done), and adopting daily standups borrowed from Scrum methodology to maintain constant prioritization and unblock work. These structures enable teams to balance short-term fire drills with longer-term roadmap execution, provide visibility to leadership, and create a compelling case for why certain requests can be deprioritized or deferred. The conversation emphasizes that structure enables strategy, and that change management and executive alignment are essential to making these tools stick.
What we cover in this episode
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2:45
The Fire-Drill Treadmill Why context-switching and reactive task-bouncing prevent strategic work and organizational effectiveness in RevOps.
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5:15
The Chicken-and-Egg of Prioritization How lack of structure prevents the ability to say no, which perpetuates reactive cycles and prevents strategy.
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9:30
The Nut Island Effect Harvard case study of a sewage treatment plant that collapsed due to isolated, well-intentioned teams losing sight of end goals.
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15:00
Revenue Efficiency Pyramid Framework for identifying foundational RevOps gaps, from sales methodology and CRM through data and AI, in priority order.
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22:00
Kanban Boards for RevOps Continuous-flow task management system using columns to organize requests by readiness and priority for better workflow visibility.
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35:15
Daily Standups and Scrum Tactics Ten-minute daily syncs covering yesterday's wins, today's work, and blockers to maintain alignment and unblock bottlenecks.
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42:30
Balancing Strategy and Firefighting How to incorporate roadmap work into daily operations while handling urgent requests through prioritization and executive alignment.
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50:00
Change Management and Communication Overcoming organizational resistance to new processes by communicating roadmap rationale and providing visibility into prioritization.
The lines worth sharing
You hired me to bring order to chaos. You hired me to build the appropriate tech stack. How do you expect me to be strategic if I have all of these things to manage?
Joel Arnold · 6:20
No one can be strategic when they're jumping from fire drill to fire drill. It's a chicken and egg problem because you'll never have the time to develop priorities unless you develop priorities.
Joel Arnold · 7:45
Your strategy is whatever your sales team is doing. Make sure that they're doing the right things. You need data to prove hypothesis testing and drive insights.
Joel Arnold · 20:30
With Kanban, we calculated we were spending three and a half days a week answering status updates and one and a half days actually working on projects. Automation can solve that.
Joel Arnold · 32:00
Common questions from this episode
Why does my RevOps team never get time for strategic work?
Without prioritization structures and the ability to say no, RevOps defaults to reactive firefighting. Each ad-hoc request feels urgent, causing constant context-switching. You need frameworks like Kanban boards, daily standups, and a documented roadmap to create protected time for strategic initiatives and shift from order-taker to strategic partner.
What is the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid and how do I use it?
The Revenue Efficiency Pyramid is a foundational framework that identifies which RevOps capabilities you need first: sales methodology, CRM, marketing automation, customer lifecycle, then data/reporting, and finally AI. Audit where your company sits on the pyramid, identify gaps, and prioritize work from the ground up. Skip levels and you'll lack the data and process to execute successfully.
How do Kanban boards help with prioritization in RevOps?
Kanban boards organize requests into swim lanes: not ready (waiting for clarification), ready to go (prioritized but not started), in progress, and done. This separates true priorities from noise, provides visibility to leadership and stakeholders, enables automation (e.g., status alerts), and prevents work from stalling due to missing information or blockers.
What is the Nut Island Effect and why should RevOps care?
The Nut Island Effect occurs when capable, well-intentioned teams work in isolation from leadership, developing unsustainable workarounds and technical debt until systems collapse. For RevOps, this means losing sight of revenue impact while optimizing for tool mechanics. Guard against it by maintaining communication between RevOps, leadership, and end-users, and keeping business outcomes central to your prioritization.
How do I say no to executive requests without damaging relationships?
Lead with the job you were hired to do, show your roadmap and Kanban board to provide visibility, and ask clarifying questions about urgency and business impact. Partner with your manager to help prioritize. Most executives accept deprioritization when they see the reasoning. You're not saying no; you're saying what's higher priority and when you can fit this in.
Should RevOps use daily standups or weekly meetings?
Daily 10-15 minute standups beat weekly hour-long meetings. Cover three things: yesterday's wins, today's work, and blockers. Use a Kanban board as the agenda, keep discussions on track with a parking lot, and consider in-person toss-and-talk cadences to stay tight. The daily rhythm surfaces blockers fast, aligns priorities, and prevents status-update fatigue.
SEO meta description
Joel Arnold, VP of RevOps at Union Square Consulting, reveals how to escape daily fire-drills through Kanban boards, prioritization frameworks, and strategic roadmapping to enable RevOps teams to be strategic, not reactive.
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RevOps fire drills
Revenue Operations prioritization
Kanban boards RevOps
Revenue Efficiency Pyramid
Joel Arnold
Union Square Consulting
saying no to executives
Nut Island Effect
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Read the full transcript · 58 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Welcome everybody to RevOps Live number 18,
EDDIE REYNOLDShow to bring order to chaos in RevOps. We're here with Joel Arnold, our VP of RevOps. Joel, thank you for running this as always. Absolutely happy to be here as always. So Joel, tell us why should people listen today? Why should people be here for this event or listen to the recording on our podcast? Yeah, mainly because I think a lot of people struggle with this topic. I find that a lot
OTHER GUESTof folks, especially early on in their careers in RevOps, get bombarded with task after task after task, fire drill after fire drill. And I've gone through the school of hard knocks to learn maybe some ways of helping to bring order to that chaos. And I feel like, you know, taking a moment to share all that could be helpful to a lot of people that are listening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that when we talk to RevOps folks out on the market,
EDDIE REYNOLDSas well as we see challenges like with the work that we do on our team, there's just this flood of requests that's coming in. And people are constantly feeling like, I can never get any real work done. I can't get any time to be strategic. I can't get the most important things done because I'm purely in a reactive mode bouncing from Slack message to email to meeting after meeting and trying to make updates in the tools without ever getting any real visibility into how we drive revenue and how we tackle the big things. And so I'm really anxious to dive into this with you, Joel, and talk about how we plan better, how we stop drowning in this flood of requests, how we get more time to be more strategic. So as always, thanks for putting this together. We also have Sarah Ra, our event producer. So Sarah, thank you so much for helping us run this today.
SPEAKER_10Thank you, everyone.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd without further ado, we'll dive into it. For anybody that's not familiar with Union Square Consulting, we are a revenue operations as a service consulting firm. We work with high growth B2B SaaS startups early and mid stage to help them build out their revenue engines and be more strategic in the way that they go to market. We, as mentioned, we do put this recording up on our podcast, so you can check it out. And we also have a weekly newsletter that's released every Friday. This Friday, we'll release a more concise, distilled down version of what we're going to go over today. But Joel and I are going to talk through this topic. He's going to share a number of points that he has of things he's learned over the course of his career. This is his third time as a VP of revenue operations. And then we're going to open it up to the audience for Q&A. As always, you guys can send your questions in, in the chat, we'll call on you in the middle of our conversation, and we can kind of make this very organic. Sarah is going to share links in the chat so you can access this on Apple, Spotify and our website. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in. Joel, you want to kick us off?
OTHER GUESTSure. So I think we're where we need to begin is discussion, discussing a little bit about the value of what we're trying to do in revenue operations. And I don't think any leader really, if they put their put their mind to it would decide when hiring a revenue operations staff that this would be a fire department. That's not what we're what we're trying to accomplish. And it's no fun being a fire department. So what we're trying to do is bring strategic direction to the myriad of different topics and tasks that you have to deal with on a daily basis. And so it, it sort of presses us to try and make some sort of structure to tackle these problems. And I've, I've been not only a leader of revenue operations, but I've been a product leader. I've been an operations leader in other areas. And I've sort of found some ways or tactics maybe that we can steal from my other previous lives and bring to bear on the revenue operations challenges that we deal with every day.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that raises a really good point. Like I can't tell you how often I have conversations with VPs of sales and CROs that will say, you know, my head of rev ops is not being strategic. And then there's one conversation in particular that I posted about a few times, but I have the same conversation again and again. And he says something to the effect of, look, you know, my head of rev ops isn't being strategic. And I drilled in and I asked why. And he says, well, you know, he's managing the tech stack. He's also training the team. He's also like creating the messaging for our outbound. He's got five different people asking him questions. He's got not just Salesforce, but many other tools that he has to manage. And I can't remember, but there were five other things that we had to layer on top of that. And I'm like, well, how do you expect somebody to be strategic when they have all of these things to manage? And it's not just the sheer level of work, but it's also the context switching where you're bouncing from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing with constant interruptions throughout the day. How could you possibly be strategic in that scenario? Not to mention the fact that as we've talked about a lot in that scenario, you probably don't have the data structure necessary to do deep data analysis and get insights into the business to help you be strategic by identifying what's working and what's not working and thinking about what's next.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, absolutely not. No one can be strategic when they're jumping from fire drill to fire drill.
OTHER GUESTAnd I think that's where we get placed a lot of times if we don't, if we don't maybe push back or, or generate the ability to say no. And when you, it's kind of a chicken and an egg problem, because you'll never have the time to be strategic and to prioritize and develop the ability to say no to things because they're not priorities, unless you develop priorities and have been strategic, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you get out of this, this vicious cycle? It's just going to spin and spin and spin. And at the end of the day, it's really suboptimal because, you know, when you're getting a request for a system update from five different constituencies, they all want different things. And you're going to go start threading in a bunch of different corrections that may not go together. So you might end up with a rat's nest at the end of the day with things that you'll never be able to entirely unwind. If we don't start as soon as we can and try to get and bring some order to, to these topics.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't have much to say on that. You want to go on to the next point? Cause I just agree with everything that you're saying.
OTHER GUESTSure. Sure. Happy to. When we, one of the hardest things that we need to develop amongst ourselves is the ability to say no. I really think that this is really the nature of it. To the point you made earlier, Eddie, you know, we've got someone who's wearing 15 different hats all at once, which I think we've all felt the pressure to do that. The context switching, the fire drills, you will not be able to get ahead of it unless you develop the way to say no. But how do you say no and do it in a way that people will accept? It's very, very difficult. Just know that the lack of priorities or a lack of priorities will be the reason for not being able to say no. And that having priorities is the answer to, or at least the start of an answer of being able to develop a, a no response or maybe a, we'll do that, but not right now because this other thing is more important response. When you have priorities, then you have less context switching too. It's not just the saying no, it's, I can focus my time in accomplishing this task and getting it all the way and completely done and sticking a fork in it and then moving on to the next thing and not doing something half-hearted or with half the time that I should have spent on it. If I was really trying to accomplish the task properly, is going to pay off as you start to build a virtuous cycle that counters the fire drills and whatnot, and start actually like pushing your team into a direction that's going to be productive for both you and the rest of your organization. So let's say that you were to enter a new
EDDIE REYNOLDSrole as head of RevOps or VP of RevOps. This might be a little bit weird because you're probably not going
EDDIE REYNOLDSto take a job as VP of RevOps in this, in this situation, but let's say it is just a complete rat's nest. How do you say no for the first time to those executives? What are some best practices that you've found for like saying no and pushing back? I would say that even VPs of RevOps when they come
OTHER GUESTinto an organization often find a rat's nest. And so I've definitely had to do this more than once. I have an example. I knew like within probably a week prior organization when I, when I sort of joined them, they've been around for a long time, but I knew within a week, like what the roadmap would have to look like for the next 18 months, simply because it's very clear. They didn't have the basis in place. They didn't have a renewal process. They didn't have a customer life cycle mapped out their outbound processes for prospecting were inconsistent, et cetera, et cetera. So what do you do? And how do you say no to exacts? It's I think a couple of things. One, you are hired for a reason, right? You're always hired for a reason. And that rationale for why somebody has invested in you as talent and as a change agent within an organization is to bring a certain value, value, not just value generally, but a specific type of value. So you can always argue back to, especially early days for, you know, you hired me to bring order to the chaos. You hired me to build the appropriate tech stack. You hired me to map out all these processes and make us more efficient and save us money and make us deploy capital better, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say that's, that's the start of the conversation. It doesn't necessarily allow you to drop things right away, but it does, I think, give you a little air cover and a little, a little runway to be able to start mapping out and getting priorities and getting buy-in with the execs who are then going to be on board with you saying no to something or deprioritizing something. So I would say if the execs hired you or the senior leaders hired you, they're already a little bit on board with the idea of you doing something a little bit different than what has happened in the past. If you find yourself on the flip side, if you find yourself as a sort of more tenured person who is kind of within the organization from the beginning and it's sort of organically built up to a certain point where you've been maybe promoted into the role, I think that's a conversation as well that you could have is like going to your leaders and trying to get an understanding of why you are in that role and what they see RevOps value being. And I promise you 99% of the time, if you really push them on it, they're not going to see value as I want someone who's going to put out fires. The value they're going to see is about aligning the organization, making things more efficient and building that, that revenue engine.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I think what I meant was, is not that you don't see a rat's nest when you come in as a VP of RevOps, but that many of the VPs of RevOps that I've spoken to out in the market are having those conversations like during the interview process and they're setting expectations before coming in on day one. And they're kind of have already like set the expectation with executives that they're going to be strategic, they're going to have a plan, they're going to work through that plan methodically, and they have the gravitas to push back because they've been around longer. Someone like yourself. Whereas if you're really junior, it's a little bit harder, right? And so how do you do that? And I think that you've already outlined that there. And then there's also obviously some soft skills around like learning to manage up, learning to say, hey, you know, these are the priorities that we've established or hey boss, I think these are the priorities that we should establish because I'm looking around and I'm seeing what's going on. I see what's happening in the systems. I see how salespeople are using the systems. I see how marketing is using it and CS is using it. Here are the things that look to me like they're not working. And I really think we should prioritize these few things. What do you think? Do you want me to focus here? Or do you want me to just purely be reactive? And I've never met an executive to your point that's going to say, yeah, I just want you to wait around and we'll just ping you with random stuff all day long.
OTHER GUESTThat's right. That's right. It sometimes feels that way, but usually it's just a lack of coordination and they aren't aware of all the different things you're maybe being hit with. So maybe bringing visibility to that could be helpful as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I would just, I kind of stress this point of managing up, like as a early stage startup founder myself, it's so easy. Like founders get so excited about their ideas. And Joel, you've experienced this firsthand that like it could be two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday and I've got some idea.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd like all of a sudden emails start getting fired off. Now I don't expect you to answer those emails over the weekend, but now all of a sudden you come in on Monday morning and it's like, all right, here's six new curve balls. Right. And you have the seniority to say, okay, here's how I'm going to process that. But I think that that's a natural tendency, especially for a founder or an executive in a small company that you've got all these ideas and you just want to execute them. And you've got to take a step back and say, how does this fit into the bigger plan?
SPEAKER_21Yeah. And when you think about priorities, as you work your way through them, the priority list is going to diminish. Right. And so maybe you come in, there's those six fire drills that you have to tackle. Maybe they are all super important. Okay. You set them up in order and you knock them down. And then what?
OTHER GUESTYou still need to go through the exercise of having a roadmap and it's very, very difficult to get the time to do the proper thought that you have to put into it and then like sell that to your leadership and get them to buy in. So what we're going to try and talk about is a couple of different tactics in the future of this conversation today of ways I've gone about organizing that and kind of break it down into small chunks. And I think, and Adam in the chat made a really good point, you know, imagine doing all this and setting the tone in the first 90 days. So the rest of 18 months is a lot smoother. Absolutely. And that's exactly, that's the exact way we should think about it. And if you've been there around or you've been around at a company already for a while, and you find yourself in this position, consider this day one of that initial 90 days. Start over. You can always, you can always reset. You can always re-communicate. You can always resell the idea of prioritization and structure to your leadership.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. Well, you want to dive into how, how to organize this?
OTHER GUESTSure. Happy to. I, obviously, I think we've made the case at this point that organizing yourself this way doesn't, doesn't serve you well. So even if you could go about and knock down everything that comes your way and you've got even extra bandwidth, in addition to that, that's still not the way that you want to organize things. Like if, if you're not drowning, it doesn't mean you're, you're going to win the Olympic hundred meters either. What this leads to, or could potentially lead to that you need to keep your eye on is something called the nut island effect. And I would suggest actually going out there. It's a Harvard business article, I think from the late nineties, early two thousands called the nut island effect. And it's really fascinating. And basically what happens is when there's a bunch of well-intentioned and competent people working sort of in a, in a box where management doesn't really have deep. Eyesight into what you're working on. Then the people in that group or the person in that group will start developing their own way of handling things, their own way of basically fixing problems and putting out fires and get into the sort of duct tape and bubble gum and bailing wire way of fixing problems. And then eventually the whole system collapses or you reach a crisis point because you're, the way that you're doing things is inevitably going to fail at some point. And so it's basically the phenomenon that you want to make sure that you're, you're guarding against. And it all kind of comes back to both a sense of apathy from your leadership or not having really like hands-on things. And you as a, maybe the leader of a, of a small team that kind of has expertise that no one else has. So no one really knows what you're doing. You're going to be well-intentioned, but there will be sort of a breakdown of communication between management and yourself. And it never, it never ends well. So we're trying to guard against a lot of that. So a lot of the points and the strategies that we're going to be talking about today is trying to avoid the effect of like coordinating yourself off and kind of going into your foxhole and like putting blinders onto the rest of teams and just try to grind away at stuff. Just try to grind away at stuff. And like, I know that you know what you're doing, but there always has to be a communication channel between you and all the different stakeholders that you're working with beyond the technical, yes, I can add that field. No, we shouldn't design the page layout that way, et cetera, et cetera.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJoel, can you share that story? I briefly skimmed the article on the Nut Island effect and can you share like what happened?
OTHER GUESTSure. So Nut Island is actually, it's not an island anymore, but it's a sort of a spin of land that is on the coast, just south of Boston, I believe. And there was a sewage treatment plant and the people in that plant basically kind of developed their own, their own fiefdom. The people that were supposed to be managing them didn't really manage them. They didn't really fund the sewage treatment plant with the tax dollars that they should have been spending on it. And people on the, long story short, people that worked in that sewage treatment plant over years and years and years developed their own ways of running things. And they were all well-meaning and they were all competent people. But at the end of the day, all of their sort of duct tape approaches to things caused a collapse and billions of gallons of sewage was released into Boston Harbor or nearby to there. So it's a really good, just case study about how you don't want to cordon yourself off and get disconnected from your, from your managers and why, if you're a manager over a team like this, you always have to be, you know, actually having your hand on the wheel. And so it isn't just a breakdown of communication between different, maybe marketing and sales and silos and things like that. But it can also, you can also have really bad consequences of just being sort of order takers and doers and being well-intentioned. That's not going to get you to where you want to be. And I think that case.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, it was really interesting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think like if I understood a bit of it, it was that you had these people that were hardworking and they were intelligent and they were dedicated to their work. But because of that sort of lack of planning and process, they lost sort of eyes on the end goal and then ended up having this catastrophic event that occurred because of that, if I'm understanding it right. Yeah, that's exactly right.
OTHER GUESTThat's exactly right. And it's a two-way street as far as blame is concerned. Obviously, they should be communicating or trying to be better communicators with people above them, but also not having that connection and leadership, not spending the time to actually like get in the weeds and like learn what this team is doing and help guide them and provide that strategy, et cetera. They have a lot of blame to shoulder as well. And it's, again, yeah, it's not about ill intentions or trying to do anything bad. It's just naturally things break down if you lose that connection point.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's such an apt metaphor for revenue operations because I see this all the time where you have somebody that's very competent, especially someone that's really focused on tools. And leadership looks at them and says, okay, look, this person is like a Salesforce ninja. We're good. And then they start focusing on, I've got all these requests. I need to build this workflow in Salesforce. I need to build this report, et cetera, et cetera. We've lost sight of the end goal of we need to generate leads, pipeline, close deals, retain and grow customers. We're in the weeds. We're thinking about workflows and automation and reports. And we lose sight of this slippage of like these leaks, right? Metaphorically speaking, that are coming out of the revenue engine where we're losing deals and losing customers because we've lost sight of that. And that happens so often in revenue operations, especially for junior folks. It happens so often that it's, it's actually a meme.
OTHER GUESTHave you ever seen always something in Philadelphia, you know, Charlie, you know, crazy Charlie. He's got like the wall full of these different like maps and pictures and stuff. And he's got them all pinned together with strings. It's like trying to solve some crime or whatever. It just absolutely looks crazy. And the meme is RevOps trying to explain what's in Salesforce. The number of times you go into an organization and there's custom code and there's custom objects and they don't quite tie it together. And data is all over here, but it needs to be migrated over there. You've got a thousand duplicates and it's just kind of like all over the place. That's the result of just trying to put out fires all day for years at a time. It becomes a mess. We can beat this to death, but that's really the goal of what we're trying to, trying to get it with.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right. Well, let's move on. Let's make sure we deliver value in this session here. So tell us more about ways that we can organize this better.
OTHER GUESTYeah. So first off, uh, we need a roadmap. We need a roadmap. We've published, you know, articles about the revenue efficiency pyramid, which is sort of my approach to this. But more or less what you need to do is start and figure out where you are on that journey. From the absolute basics of, of documenting your processes and building your CRM from the ground up all the way through having massive data sets, tracking the right thing, visualizations, automated, uh, things, and AI, for example. So there's this whole pyramid, I would suggest to go take a look at that article. Basically what, what we want to do, identify the gaps, build the fundamentals, and then sort of work your way from the bottom of that pyramid upward.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, that article has really resonated with a lot of people since you published it. And it's really just about identifying, like, what are those foundational elements that we need in revenue operations before we move on to the next thing? Things like having a sales methodology in place, having the CRM set up, having people actually adopting and using the CRM before we start worrying about, like, machine learning and artificial intelligence. It's people, like, have, like, oh, let's buy these shiny objects. It's like, well, how are you going to use artificial intelligence to analyze your data when you don't have data? You don't have reliable data. Like, we can't do that. So, like, let's get the data in place. Like, wait, we can't even tell, like, how much pipeline we've generated because we don't have a sales methodology because deals just go in and out of the pipeline. For no reason whatsoever. So, let's fix that first, right? So, all right. So, we've gone to the article in our newsletter. We've read through the RevOps pyramid. We have an idea of how to prioritize these major items. How do we translate that into, like, an actionable roadmap for things that we're going to work on in the next quarter or the rest of the year?
SPEAKER_21Yeah, yeah. So, essentially, there is a priority sort to all the different items that are on a roadmap like that.
OTHER GUESTAnd I think, well, Sarah, do you mind pushing a link to the chat for that article? There's also a podcast about it. We did one of these a couple of weeks ago around that topic. So, hopefully, that can help if you want to dive in more. But the priority is most fundamental to least fundamental. And what I mean by most fundamental is something like what Eddie's talking about. Your roadmap could just be the five most fundamental things that are missing from your current build. If you don't have a sales methodology, you need one. Go get that done. That's a top priority. A number one. You know, if you don't have a CRM, absolutely, you need that next after you have a sales methodology. You can go a little bit further up the funnel. Let's say you've got all that stuff in place. Perhaps marketing automation is the next thing for you. And linking that and building that and having a consistent workflow through and into the sales portion of the CRM, etc. Having a post-sale handoff process, having a customer lifecycle post-sale that leads to a renewal. These kind of things are fairly straightforward, but I think it's very clear to hopefully anybody that, you know, if you start with this fundamental approach, it's naturally going to capture the data that you want and you'll be able to build the shiny objects on top of it. So that's really, that's the roadmap. But that still doesn't help you with all the fires that you have to put out. So there's, it's actually a combination of, it's, well, it's about setting you and your team up in a way that will allow you to prioritize the consistent flow of both prioritize roadmap items and high priority tasks and or fires to be put out. Because you're going to have to do both at the same time. So what I'm going to try and answer here in the next little bit is about what are some things that you can do to kind of create an engine that can handle both and do it so you're always working on the most efficient and effective thing that's the highest priority for your company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. I think as we talk through that, one example comes to mind that, you know, we can talk about like not having a sales methodology or a CRM in place. We're talking about a very early stage company, right? But let's talk about like some of the later stage companies that we've worked with. I, you know, I can't tell you how often we've run into a company with a very sizable sales and marketing team, plus 100 million in revenue. And we look at like the actual step-by-step process of how they just sell. What are their lead stages? What are their sales stages? What are the definitions of the entry criteria to move from one stage to the next? And they don't have that defined. And so going back through that and saying like, all right, we want to get actionable data so we can drive insights for leadership. And why do we want to do that? Well, we want to test what's working and what's not working in our revenue engine. That should be a top priority. Every executive that I've ever spoken to in the 10 years that I've been talking to people about CRMs and revenue technology, every executive wants insights. They want visibility into the business, right? That is almost always a top priority. So how do we get that? We've just outlined a lot of that right there. And then what I'm a huge fan of is creating a roadmap with these major projects, things that you want to do, such as defining that sales methodology or integrating your sales and marketing data together, things like that, and aligning those with the objectives for the company and the revenue team. So, for example, if the goal for the company is to double revenue in 2023 or with this economy, maybe it's just to maintain revenue. What exactly do we need to do as a company and as a revenue team in order to achieve that? And then how does that roll into revenue operations? It's probably because we want to improve our close rate or shorten our sales cycle, or have better visibility into what's working in our marketing engine or convert more of our marketing leads into revenue. things like that have real tangible impact on the bottom line. And I think that that is where, in my opinion, though, Joel, feel free to, you know, share a different perspective if you have one. That's where there's really power in being able to have that executive level discussion with leadership to say, this is why we need to focus our resources on this project. Yeah, and what we're trying to do in revenue operations is kind of, and really any operations, is trying to bring a little bit more science to where there was art before.
OTHER GUESTBut you could be very much you think about like what was what was sales and the equivalent of revenue operations back in something like, I don't know, the 80s or something. Well, it was a lot of handshakes. It was a lot of, you know, just go talk to people that you have relationships, trying to build relationships as well. It was very people centric and soft skill centric. And that's and that's all great. We talk about providing insights. The insights is what's going to drive the value. So if you think about like, what are our win rates? How do we improve them? What is our sales cycle? How do we improve that, et cetera, et cetera. You need, first of all, to understand what your baseline is. And you can't do that without data. You can't do the data without the systems. You're trying to figure out what an experiment might be that you can run against that. So you need to be able to do data and hypothesis testing, et cetera. So running maybe a pricing campaign over in this region and seeing it have it, if it has an effect on win rate, et cetera. Like there are so many things that we're trying to do now and tighten up the system to make revenue predictable and more revenue in for every dollar that you spend. And we need all of these systems humming in order to do that stuff. Like you need the visibility just to just to make a start at it. Otherwise, everything remains entirely art. If you don't have a sales methodology that you're actively training people on, applying in your systems and holding people accountable to, like, just your data is not there. Like, so when you go through the process of the data is not there to be able to prove one way or the other. So as you go through and build out these systems and you go through the revenue operations pyramid assessment, make sure that you're taking all these things and saying, you know, not only do I have the fundamental building blocks in place, but are they actually being operationalized at the end of the day? Because a wise person once told me, you know, your strategy is whatever your sales team is doing. Make sure that they're doing the right things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's so well said. I think like process is more important than strategy and adoption is more important than process. By the way, if anybody has any questions, feel free to throw them into the chat. What I'd love to ask you, Joel, is how do you organize this? I know you're a huge fan of Kanban boards and Kanban in general. Do you want to talk through that a little bit?
OTHER GUESTYeah, I'd be happy to. And this, other than the pyramid, this is probably the first place where you might want to put a marker down and just be like, okay, here, we're getting tactical. We're going to dive into the nuts and bolts of actually how to do this on a day-to-day basis. Kanban boards, first describe what Kanban is. So Kanban is an operations methodology. It was developed in Japan, I believe, back in about the 1970s, and it was used for assembly lines, I believe, at Toyota. And it's, I think this is the source of the TPS reports from Office Space, if you remember that. But it's actually really, really valuable. Maybe not those reports, but a tool called a Kanban board. And the reason why Kanban and Kanban boards are valuable is because they work really, really well organizing yourself in what's called a continuous flow environment. So if some, you know, process is going on forever, it's not, it's not necessarily like, we're going to do a project, we're going to close that up, we're going to do another project, we're going to close that up. Really, what this is, is designed, it's more of like, let's say, an oil refinery.
SPEAKER_06You just got this constant flow of things coming through your system. Now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSHey, Joel, let me interrupt you for a moment. I just want to give people a visualization, just in case they haven't seen a Kanban board. Best way I can describe it is you think about, like, putting Post-it notes on a wall, and they're in different columns. You know, it's not started, started. And you're moving, like, individual tasks or pieces of that project from one status to the next. Yeah, so the structure of actually having a Kanban board, and the reason why that I think it applies, even though maybe RevOps isn't a continuous flow environment, is like, think of the flow of tasks that you get hit up with every day.
OTHER GUESTIt's pretty continuous sometimes. You know, there's never a day where the work is completely done and you're, you know, close up shop, let's take the day off. You're always going to have things coming through. And so how do you work on them? And how do you organize them? You use a Kanban board. As Eddie mentioned, a Kanban board is a white board, typically a chalkboard. It could be just a board or a wall in your office. It really doesn't matter. There's digital versions of it. But what it is, it's kind of a place where you're going to knock or break those little requests into component pieces and then prioritize them into different columns and sort of map your flow, let's say, from left to right, through those columns, so for example, a typical Kanban column for RevOps could be column one is things that are, have been requested, but they're not ready to pop. You know, you're waiting on someone else to do something first, or you haven't been given the green light or the ask that's been submitted. It isn't quite clear, and you need to go ask the person that submitted it for a little bit more detail around the requirements. That stuff goes in that column. Then the next column is, yeah, this thing's ready to go. You know, so the tasks are ready to go. They haven't been started yet, but they're priority ordered. So that we know the next time anybody has any bandwidth, they're going to grab the thing from the top of the stack and start working on it. The next thing could be, you know, in progress. The next column could be, you know, it's ready for testing or, you know, it's got a blocker when we need more information. And then the final column would be done. Right. So you've organized your stuff into sort of a logical flow from left to right. There's a couple of things that come from doing this that are really, really great. One, you should separate your tasks that you've received into these things are ready to go and these are not. And you should, as a leader, then your job should be going in and like finding the missing pieces to get those things from that first column of not ready into that second column of ready. Okay. So that will be a shift for a lot of people because initially when you're coming in, you're getting bombarded with fire drills. You're just going to jump on things when they happen. And you might not even assess whether or not you can actually bring that thing to a close. All right. You might need other people to be jumping in. I mean, how many times have you started a project, gotten three quarters of the way done with it, and then kind of had to drop it and move on to the next thing? Because, you know, you've got a blocker and you just couldn't stop moving. It's not a great place to be. You end up with a lot of technical debt in systems, in processes, working with whatever it is, if you don't follow this approach.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe've got a question. I think this is a good one, too. Adam, do you want to jump on camera and ask it?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'll give him a second. Hey there.
SPEAKER_47Hey, Adam. That beanie on, so I was just a little off. I'm not completely professional, but absolutely. So a lot of times your Salesforce admins or the engineers will have a little more light here. There we go.
EDDIE REYNOLDSDon't worry. We only post the audio to the podcast.
SPEAKER_47They'll have a process that more mimics R&D. And so their Kanban will be a little more granular at times than a RevOps process. How do you go about orchestrating both? Or do you kind of splice them out so they have their own while it's still falling under you?
OTHER GUESTYeah, if there's already a Kanban process around Scrum or Agile or something akin to that methodology, which is likely what you're probably talking about. They have a sprint process and they go and they do sprint planning and they are more granular with it. I think actually splicing that out and providing that to them as a separate thing is totally fine. I would just want to make sure that, you know, your ingestion of requests comes in through the same place. And then you as a manager sort of parse that out to the appropriate team to take it from there.
SPEAKER_51That makes sense.
OTHER GUESTYeah. Appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. No problem. I was talking about benefits and I think there's one more that is going to go along with, well, actually, you might call it two more, but I think the second one kind of goes with the next tactic that I'm talking about as well. The next benefit of running your operation through kind of a Kanban board approach is that you're in the second column. You're supposed to be prioritizing everything on a constant basis, like daily, maybe hourly as you go along. You know, you've got this list of tasks that haven't been started yet and tasks that are ready to be worked on. From that point forward, the work may be done by you, but the work may be done by a member of your team. Approach that as appropriate, you know, everybody's got different skills, but you as a leader should be working to get that thing prioritized at all times. And so this is a great communication opportunity to have that management opportunity to manage with your direct manager and get their feedback on what things should be prioritized. It's very simple to say, you know, bring them over to the board or walk them through it on, on a zoom call. These are the top five things that I've got in order. What do you think? Is that the right thing? And so you're providing visibility, you're opening up lines of communication and your team always knows what the next most important thing is to work on. So you have no idle time trying to figure that out for everybody on your team. Surprising you'll, you'll be amazed at how much more efficient you become with this. There's a question about Kaizen and Kanban. The methodologies, to be honest, I've, I've worked at all of them. They kind of blend through my head. I can probably research that and get back to you. I'm not an expert on Kaizen. I believe it to be quite similar, but I'm sure there's, there's a difference.
SPEAKER_06And unfortunately, I'm just not an expert on that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, Joel, I'm not either. My understanding of Kaizen is the main core of it is just continuous improvement. This idea that like we're never done that we just keep working away at it, but I, I'm no expert on it either.
OTHER GUESTKaizen is a mindset. There you go. I'm sure it is. I'm sure. I lived in Japan and it was beaten into us about Kaizen.
SPEAKER_57And I, I honestly haven't heard of Kanban. We, I mean, I guess it's more of philosophy or something of teamwork and things like that, that I guess Toyota implemented many years ago. But, um, I, I, I'm sure you're right, Jamie.
OTHER GUESTI, I, I, unfortunately you've got a lot more experience than I do on that. So I just, I live in Japan.
SPEAKER_54I hadn't heard of Kanban, but we did Kaizen. So there you go.
OTHER GUESTIt sounds great. Yep. I don't see a problem with continuous improvement. Uh, so if that's the philosophy, then I'm all for it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBy the way, fun fact, Jamie, I think it was Deming, who is an American that created that. And he went to the auto industry in the U S and they're like, we don't need that. We run the world. And then he took it to Japan. If I remember correctly. I think, I think you're right. Yep.
SPEAKER_34There you go. There you go. That's a, that's a great little factoid. I love it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd as we can see, that worked out really well for the American automotive industry. Um, so, um, Joel, I'd love to ask you a couple of quick questions here. This is my own personal curiosity. So we use Asana for everything, as you know, and in Asana, they have Kanban and they also just have a basic list. And it seems like everybody on the team loves Kanban. And I just like to see it in a list and you can bounce from one to the other very easily. Why, why Kanban? And why do you guys like these vertical columns instead of just having everything horizontal and in order?
SPEAKER_37The list doesn't give you information about whether something is ready to pop or not.
OTHER GUESTSo I think there is a distinction and it's helpful distinction for a lot of people to say, you know, these are in the waiting tank and these are ready to go. Also, you can always have a prioritization taken care of if you're doing Kanban appropriately. And then just having a visceral representation of where things are in flow, um, as sort of the steady state thing that you can then provide to other people, your head of marketing, your sales leadership, you know, even reps, whoever, whoever cares about this thing, your CEO, you can give them access to your Kanban board. So they don't have to ask you questions. One of the things that we've been able to do with a lot of the technology that I've used, it's me, we built one of these in JIRA. So JIRA, I know you can do it. I know that you can do it in a lot of other technologies as well, is as something progressed through the stages, we automated alerts to people and sent an email to the person that submitted the ticket saying your, your ticket has gone from prioritized to in progress. And so I'm sure that you've experienced, you know, someone submits a ticket and then three hours later, they're calling you up saying, Hey, where's that thing? What's the status report on that, et cetera, et cetera. We actually did a, in my last company, we did a calculation that we would spend three and a half days a week, just answering all the requests for status updates and our day and a half a week, actually working on projects. If we didn't have some sort of automation, automated thing in place. So I think there's a lot of things you can build off of the Kanban board or the visualizations that come along naturally with it, that are a little bit superior to just the list, but you know, it is essentially kind of like a work list.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJoel, it's a great point. I'm looking at timing right now. We've only got 15 minutes left. So I want to hold my questions in the audience questions for a moment. Cause I know you're only halfway through your agenda, so you can burn through it and share all your nuggets before we have to end the recording. And then we'll leave time for questions after.
OTHER GUESTSure. Sure. So the other thing I'd steal, and I'm going to transition to the next thing now, but we can come back to the whole Kanban idea if you would like later. I really love Scrum. So when I was in the product world, we use Scrum and agile approaches to creating requirements and then prepping things and communicating with the development team and doing testing and such. I think Scrum is a great approach to organizing work. I really do, do like it. And the one thing that I'd like to steal from Scrum and apply it to a RevOps team is a daily standup. Now, no one, no one likes extra meetings. I don't like extra meetings, but the value that you get out of a, for a RevOps team for having a daily, just 10, 15 minute meeting is I found really, really valuable. And what you do is you discuss with something like the Kanban board and your prioritization when you get together and have that meeting. So what are the three things you accomplished yesterday? What are the things you're going to be working on today? And what are any blockers? Just those three questions will result in keeping people up to date on the status of everything. They're going to relay to you as the leader, what are the things that are slowing work up and stopping us from being ultimately efficient in doing what we do. And so I just, I, I've always installed this, you know, don't do the weekly for an hour where you sit down with the team, do 10, 15 minutes a day, keep it popping. If you're in person, grab a ball and like throw, throw it to the next person. They say they're 30 seconds worth of content and they throw it to the next person, just like pound through it quickly and it won't become laborious. Use a parking lot. So if somebody starts to get off topic or, you know, talk about something that only matters to like one person at the table, have them parking lot and keep the thing moving. And then people won't, won't get bored or sort of tune out as you go along there.
SPEAKER_64The goal, let's keep rolling, Joel. Yeah. Yeah. The goal with all of this, the two things combined, both a Kanban board and the daily standup
OTHER GUESTis to optimally attack everything that comes your way. So constantly having the items that you're working on prioritized, having no downtime where you're either waiting for somebody else to accomplish a task or continue on a task and you're not waiting for, you know, word to like figure out what the next thing is that I'm supposed to be working on. Everything's prioritized all the time. Everything is always worked on in priority or, and every, everybody has always utilized a hundred percent of the time and you don't have any downtime. And that's just like, it's, you'd be amazed at how much you, you can accomplish, like keep tasks or track of your dones, make sure you report that to your leadership. And I promise you, you'll see a huge increase, the amount of things that you can sort of like hang your hat on and say, we did 120 things last month. Here's a list of every single thing and what we accomplished. What this is also going to do is you're going to recognize that there are some things that you work on that are super important. There are some things that you work on that are just not as important. They were just like brought to you by the person that screamed the loudest. And so you can kind of weed through all that stuff. And that gets you into a place where hopefully you can start developing that roadmap a little bit more and getting those things identified and get them out of the not ready column and into the ready column. So for example, if you don't have your handoff process post-sale done and sort of buttoned up, now you've got time to say, okay, I want to work on that. That's constituted by three different component pieces that are each going to take two or three hours. Okay. Let's break this into three pieces. Let's get this on the Kanban board and let's start working that into and through the process. And so you can start incorporating your roadmap into your day-to-day operations, just the way that you get the requests from other people. And again, you'll be amazed at how much progress you can make on that roadmap. And then also you can drive the prioritization conversation to your manager through those first two columns as you develop, develop the priority.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. That makes a lot of sense, Joel. Oh, sorry. Keep going. I was just going to comment that like one of your next points was talking about the challenges of installing these methodologies.
OTHER GUESTYeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the biggest one is kind of the place that we started. So it's, it's always that people want to, or don't want to say no. So especially you're going to get a lot of requests from people that are higher up in the organization than you and saying no to that is often very difficult. You, what I would say is if you have your priorities in place and they're very clear to everybody by visualizing and sharing the roadmap and sharing the Kanban board, et cetera, that it makes it a lot easier, but who provides you the request is often a thing that impacts the priority. Naturally, if it's coming from the CEO, it's probably going to be a higher priority. Even if the task is maybe not necessarily the most important thing for everybody at the organization, you know, that's just the way the world works. But if you work with your manager, you can sort of lean on them to say, to help you to say no to the right things and really make them a partner in this process is going to be, it's going to be good for you. The next thing that will be a challenge is that this is change management, right? So people, some people really, really like the ability to just throw you a fire and have you put it up. That's really helpful for them. So getting people bought in on any sort of change is a difficult thing. So I would say like double down on communication, telling them where we're going to be moving to and then move that direction and then tell them when you're done moving in that direction and when it's done, you know, over communicate, be clear, be consistent, have your ducks in a row before you go out with this sort of thing. It's going to just be the only way that you get through any sort of change management situation is over communicating and being clear. People don't want you to prioritize their thing lower on the list. That's a natural thing. It's one of the benefits of throwing you a fire is that, you know, you're going to dive on that fire and you're going to put it out. Great. What if the leader of the leader of marketing shows up one day and their thing is like eighth most important, that's probably good for them to know at the end of the day and people will get used to it. They'll only, I found that they're always sort of questioning why their thing isn't being worked on. Where's that thing? They get a lot of stats requests on stuff that's deprioritized, but then they go and they look at something like a Kanban board and they say, Hey, that thing from the CEOs at the top of the list, Hey, that, you know, mission critical strategic project is maybe the next two or three things on the list, et cetera, et cetera. And then suddenly, you know, being sixth, seventh, eighth on the list doesn't seem so bad. And they understand the rationale for it, you know, and, and working with your leader, if they're not the head of marketing and sort of to help communicate and balance, you know, whose projects you work on could be something that leads to better alignment between marketing, sales, et cetera. So it could have a, you could really flip this into a positive, into a positive thing. Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_30Yeah, Joel, here's the thing that's really burning in the question I have that's really burning, right? So as a CEO myself, I want my team to be most effective.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike I'm literally pulling money out of my own pocket to pay for everybody. And so it's more important for me that the team is effective than that I get whatever I want, whenever I want it. Now I don't run a huge company. So if we were doing, you know, $50 million in revenue, I would imagine that CMO has got a multimillion dollar marketing budget. So I would want somebody to say, Hey, Eddie, I appreciate that you want this report run right now, but we're working on this thing for the CMO because the millions of dollars reporting into marketing depend on X, Y, Z. How do you manage that? And is that really in your experience, a lot of like the personality of the CEO and the senior executives I'd have to imagine?
OTHER GUESTNot necessarily personality. I think it, I think it does pertain to position because I think what happens is you don't necessarily have visibility into why they're requesting the thing. So I'll give a clear example. If the director of FP&A asks you to run a report or an analysis of, let's say last month's sales. And, you know, maybe they can get that a couple of days from now, but maybe the CEO asking the same thing has, you know, go to, has to go to a board meeting tomorrow and present it. That's a much more, it's much more likely that CEO is going to have a position where what they need is critical and time sensitive than just the average person that the company is going to have. So certainly you, you need to ask, you know, put that in the not quite ready column, because maybe you don't know why they're requesting it or what exactly they're looking for. But as you go through the process of fleshing that out, you're probably going to find that the CEO's request on average is more as a higher priority because they just, the things they work on are higher priorities.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think though, this kind of, this dovetails into the question that Adam was asking is like, is it worth placing a monetary value? And what I really want to ask is, is how do you see this overlapping with that longer term RevOps roadmap? So like what I'm getting at is that, you know, our goal for the quarter is to double like marketing generated revenue or this side of the other. Sure. If I've got a board meeting with like, you know, with the board, with investors, et cetera, like it's going to be pretty high priority. But what I would personally want is for you to push back on me and say, Hey Eddie, like, I appreciate this request. Here are the other things that we have on the roadmap. Here's what we have in this sprint. Do you want me to push these things back in order to fulfill this request? At which point I could say, yes, this is urgent. Get on it. Or I could say, whoa, no. Like those things are actually more important. My request can wait.
OTHER GUESTI absolutely, I don't disagree with that. What I'm trying to get at is just simply that the structure, uh, it helps you to prioritize and to communicate. And sometimes things from higher up are more important just because of the nature of who sent it. I, I, we could go down that path all day of like, what do you say and how do you frame things? But what we're really trying to get to is maximum efficiency and constant prioritization and communication within your team by creating a structure that fosters that. Um, so that's, that's really the goal here. The individual conversations about individual topics or, or requests, everything's going to be a little bit different, but yeah, absolutely. If, if you get a request, that's not a priority from the CEO, you should still take a look at and see where it fits in your prioritization and, and, uh, and attack it and communicate,
SPEAKER_06uh, appropriately around it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so how do you balance these short-term requests and this like, you know, biweekly sprint planning in your mind? I have my own view, but how do you balance that with the longer term planning, the OKRs and the, the strategic roadmap? Yeah. So the first off, I, because I think you're going to be a lot more efficient by instituting
SPEAKER_37these sorts of processes.
OTHER GUESTI think you're going to have more bandwidth to actually attack the strategic question. So that's the first thing. The second thing is once you have your roadmap in place, then it's working with and getting buy-in on that roadmap. Right. So you have to sell that roadmap. Otherwise you won't be able to convince some, somebody that your idea is the most high priority thing. And, but then once you get the buy-in from the right people and, and what I mean is at minimum your, your manager, but like ideally, you know, maybe people above them or, or all the way up to the CEO is having a roadmap that creates small maximum efficiency for as many people as possible and ends up with a high revenue results. Right. Cause we're trying to drive revenue. It's a lot easier to have the prioritization conversation around the roadmap and start fitting your items into that roadmap when they have a number attached to them and a value attached to them. And then it's just a matter of just figuring out what things based on urgency level and importance and revenue impact, et cetera, are the right things to prioritize. And you do that every day with everything that you, you talk about. And that's what, that's what senior executives do, right? They have a myriad of potential priority priorities. Which ones can you do quickly? What things are urgent? What things are going to have the biggest impact in the business? What are going to have the biggest impact long-term versus short-term, et cetera. Everybody's constantly balancing that. So if you, if you have questions around that, I'm certain that your manager and potentially the people around them and or above them can help you with that.
SPEAKER_06But that's just, again, that just gets a really good conversation going that you're going to want to lean on later.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMan. Man, I wish we had more time to dive into this, Joel. This is really great. I think I'm going to wrap here because we've only got two minutes left and we'll end up spending all of it if any question is asked. But I want to say thank you to the audience. We've got, Joel wrote a really amazing newsletter on this that's going to come out on Friday. So check that out if you want more detail. As we mentioned, we're going to post this recording onto the podcast. And of course, we're going to be here every week and posting that newsletter every week. Maybe we'll do another session on this and dive even deeper. But thank you guys all for coming. And Joel, thank you so much for putting this together. And Sarah, thank you for helping us organize all of this.
SPEAKER_72Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_73Thanks, everybody, for attending.
