About this episode
Joel Arnold, VP of RevOps at Union Square Consulting, makes a fundamental case for why revenue operations exists and what it should measure. With nearly a decade of RevOps leadership experience, Arnold challenges the prevailing narrative that RevOps should focus primarily on revenue growth, arguing instead that the function's true purpose is to maximize enterprise value across the entire organization.
The core thesis is direct: you cannot win in the long run without RevOps, and it should focus on enterprise value, not just revenue growth. Most RevOps practitioners face the criticism that they are cost centers or systems administrators rather than strategic advisors. This framing becomes especially problematic during economic downturns when growth slows and CFOs question headcount investments. Arnold reframes the conversation entirely, showing that RevOps operates at the intersection of profitability and growth—two levers that no other department can pull simultaneously at the scale RevOps can manage.
Using the "Rule of 40" framework from SaaS valuation theory, Arnold and Eddie Reynolds demonstrate with concrete math how a single additional $2 million in revenue—combined with the operational efficiencies RevOps creates—can more than double a $10 million company's valuation, generating a 30X+ return on RevOps investment. The same logic applies to efficiency gains: cutting $2 million in wasted spend can yield roughly 12X return on valuation. This exponential relationship exists because both revenue growth and profitability impact the valuation multiple non-linearly.
The episode covers why investors continue hiring RevOps talent even in a low-growth environment, how the shift from cheap capital to expensive capital has forced companies to optimize rather than burn cash, and why market share dynamics require consistent operational excellence. Arnold emphasizes that in markets with only two or three dominant players, you cannot afford to waste 30-40% of your revenue spend on inefficient go-to-market processes—and RevOps is the only function positioned to prevent that waste at scale.
What we cover in this episode
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2:30
Why RevOps Actually Exists Challenge to the revenue-focused narrative; RevOps must focus on enterprise value creation, not just top-line growth.
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8:45
The Shift to Efficiency Mode How rising interest rates and expensive capital forced companies to pivot from growth-at-all-costs to profitability and retention focus.
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15:20
The Rule of 40 Framework SaaS valuation metric combining growth rate and profitability margin; benchmark multiple improves exponentially as the number increases.
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22:15
ROI of Revenue Operations: The Math Concrete example showing how $2M additional revenue with same costs can more than double company valuation; 30X return on RevOps spend.
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32:40
Profitability Gains as Valuation Lever Cost efficiency and waste elimination deliver roughly 12X valuation return; different but substantial impact versus revenue growth multiplier.
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42:00
Market Share and Long-Term Positioning Only two or three players win in any mature market; consistent operational excellence is required to outgrow competitors and capture share.
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50:15
The Peter Principle in Revenue Operations Without RevOps infrastructure, companies plateau around $20-25M ARR as process breakdown, misalignment, and customer churn accelerate.
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58:30
RevOps vs. Cost-Cutting Without Measurement CFOs often cut blindly in downturns; companies that maintain disciplined RevOps gain market share and rebound faster than competitors that slash ineffectively.
The lines worth sharing
You cannot win in the long run without RevOps. RevOps should be focused on enterprise value and not just revenue growth.
Joel Arnold · 3:15
We straddle the line between both cost center and revenue center. I can't name another organization in the business that can significantly impact both efficiency and revenue growth.
Joel Arnold · 36:45
If you spent a half a million dollars on a RevOps team and added $2M in revenue, you more than doubled the value of your $10M company. That's about a 65,000% return on investment.
Joel Arnold · 28:10
If you aren't outgrowing your current market, you're losing. There are only two or three companies that make it to the top of the heap in any market segment.
Joel Arnold · 54:40
Common questions from this episode
What is the real ROI of RevOps?
Using the Rule of 40 valuation framework, RevOps can generate 30X returns on additional revenue generated and 12X returns on cost savings through efficiency gains. A $500K RevOps investment can create $64M+ in additional valuation by optimizing a $10M company's revenue and profitability metrics simultaneously.
Why do companies need RevOps even in low-growth environments?
RevOps is table stakes because it controls 30-40% of company budget and pulls levers on both profitability and growth. In downturns, RevOps shifts focus from growth-at-all-costs to efficiency and retention, enabling companies to maintain or gain market share and exit at higher valuations.
How is RevOps different from sales operations?
RevOps integrates sales, marketing, and customer success into a unified function focused on enterprise value, not just revenue. Sales operations is typically siloed; RevOps straddles cost center (efficiency) and revenue center (growth) functions that no other department can.
What is the Rule of 40 and why does it matter?
Rule of 40 adds a company's growth rate plus profitability margin; a score of 40+ signals a well-run SaaS company. Revenue multiples increase non-linearly as the Rule of 40 score rises, meaning small improvements in growth or profitability can exponentially increase valuation.
Why do CFOs struggle to justify RevOps headcount?
RevOps ROI is hard to measure without the data infrastructure and systems already in place; it's a circular problem. Companies can't prove RevOps value until RevOps establishes baselines. This mirrors the challenge of losing weight without owning a scale first.
At what company size does RevOps become critical?
RevOps should start early, but most companies hit a breaking point around $20-25M ARR where lack of unified processes, territory management, handoff protocols, and retention infrastructure causes the Peter Principle—growth slows due to operational breakdown rather than market limits.
SEO meta description
Joel Arnold, VP of RevOps, reveals why RevOps maximizes enterprise value beyond revenue growth and delivers 30X ROI through the Rule of 40 framework.
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Read the full transcript · 60 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 20. Our topic today is the
EDDIE REYNOLDSreal ROI of RevOps. We're going to share some stuff with you that I think is going to be pretty interesting and not so obvious. As always, I've got Joel Arnold, our VP of RevOps, who put this
EDDIE REYNOLDStogether and brought the agenda. Joel, why should people listen today? Because as I said in the
OTHER GUESTwarm-up, this is the raison d'etre of RevOps. You know, why do we exist? It may not be what people think. So like beyond the numbers that we're going to get into, you know, we're going to try to make the point today that you cannot win in the long run without RevOps. And the point, the second point is really the overarching theme is RevOps should be focused on enterprise value and not just revenue growth. Sometimes we get pigeonholed in that way and it's not really the full story. And I'll try to make a case to back that up. I think this is going to be really interesting to dive into. And I think I
EDDIE REYNOLDSwould add that I think a lot of folks in RevOps are fighting this idea that they're a cost center, that they are systems admin, and they're fighting to get that strategic advisory position with leadership. And even in that, it's a little short-sighted because we're so often just thinking
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout revenue growth, revenue growth, revenue growth. Where does that leave you in a low growth environment when companies are looking to cut costs, when the CFO is asking you, what is it we're doing in RevOps? Why do you like, why do we need headcount? Why do we need one person in RevOps? Why do we need an entire team? And you're seeing people get headcount cut. And I think what you shared here in the
EDDIE REYNOLDSnewsletter that you've gotten ready for Friday, as well as what you've got ready to share today is really insightful in how companies can think about revenue operations ability to impact the entire value
EDDIE REYNOLDSof the company, not just top line revenue growth. So I'm excited to dive into it with you.
OTHER GUESTThat's exactly right. Exactly right. So hopefully we make a pretty good case today and we'll go from there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCool. All right. So for everybody listening, if you're not familiar with us, we are a revenue operations consulting firm. We do both strategic work as well as systems work in revenue operations. And we do this event every Wednesday-ish. Sometimes it's a different day for traveling, but every Wednesday-ish at 12 o'clock Eastern, nine o'clock Pacific. We post this to our podcast on Apple and Spotify, ideally every Thursday. And then we publish a newsletter either on the same topic or on a different topic each Friday. If you want more, it's a five minute read. So it's pretty quick and you can sign up for, well, all of that on our website, unionsquareconsulting.com. But Sarah's going to share all the links in the chat here in Zoom as well. But without further ado, I'm going to jump into this with Joel. He's got a bunch of talking points he wants to go through. I'm going to pepper him with questions. And you guys in the audience, as you have questions, feel free to put them in the chat and we'll call on you when we're ready. You can jump on video, ask your question. And if you guys don't have questions, we'll just keep moving through the agenda like it's a podcast. So without further ado, want to kick us off, Joel?
SPEAKER_19Yeah. So the whole point of today's conversation is trying to figure out like why RevOps exists at a most fundamental level. And I would pose the question in response to a lot of
OTHER GUESTthe posting that I've seen on social media or podcasts of other types besides ours, where people make the case that revenue operations is primarily there to drive more revenue. And you hear this, it's not a trope is a little bit of a condescending word. I don't really mean to call it that, but it's sort of repeated phrase of RevOps needs to be focused on revenue. RevOps needs to be focused on revenue. And it's true, but it misses kind of the point a little bit. And I think it's an easy thing to say, but it's, it's short-sighted in my opinion, and it's could be detrimental to your organization. If you get back from that corner, the reason why this is so pertinent right now is because if you think about, well, where the smart money is moving, I think people are already past this idea, but I don't think practitioners have gotten past this idea. And so what I mean by that is like, if you talk about investors and the people making executive level decisions in organizations right now, they're really, really jonesing for more RevOps talent, but we're in an economic downturn. There's not a lot of growth to be had. So what does that tell you? Does it mean that everybody is like seeing this as a way to grow in a bad growth environment? I don't know if that's really the
OTHER GUESTcase. I really think what we're looking at here is people valuing RevOps for things other than revenue growth. And we're going to dive into that a little bit today. Awesome. So one of the first questions I
EDDIE REYNOLDShad for you, Joel, is just curious, you've been a director and then a VP of RevOps since 2015, quite a long time. What have you seen change over that time, you know, through the multiple roles
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat you've had in the way that executives view revenue operations?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So I guess I came up, came of age, so to speak, when RevOps wasn't really much of a thing,
OTHER GUESTit existed in a couple of different places, particularly in the Bay area, but, um, it really hadn't made its way to other, you know, tech centers. There weren't that many tech centers outside the Bay area, maybe Austin, Texas at that time. But really what it, what it has been is this like long growth story for the function as a whole. And I think that that growth story continues coming to this whole thing in 2015, it was very much like sales opsy focused stuff. Um, and I don't think people really had a mind on or had their minds focused on like, what is the overall value? What is the reason that this department exists? And it kind of develops and into, I guess, more broadly focused role. I was lucky enough to be part of a private equity firm that really was thinking about these kinds of things. And I kind of got taught very early on to see revenue operations as something broader than just like dashboards and systems. And over time that has really come home because I think as the industry sort of picked up the narrative of revenue operations is a really powerful tool to help you grow your company, there's, they sort of stopped there. And what I'm what I'm trying to say is that like, there's so much more than that. And it kind of goes along with the training that I received is like, I've always looked at it a little bit differently than I think the market eventually came to. And so I'm just trying
OTHER GUESTto share what that is today.
SPEAKER_20Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think for me, I've seen a very similar thing in that
EDDIE REYNOLDStrajectory where it started with sales operations on one side, not that we didn't have marketing
EDDIE REYNOLDSoperations on the other, but it's not been really well integrated until more recently. And still many companies have a long way to go. And also just really thinking of it primarily as systems admin, whereas the folks working in strategy were maybe thinking like more holistically about the company, but not really focused on the actual revenue engine. And so I think that a lot of CFOs today are still trying to like mentally grasp what is revenue operations, how do we unify sales marketing and customer success, and not taking that extra step to think, it's really about driving revenue, it's really about ROI of our entire revenue spend, which is what 30 to 40% of revenue. So this is a conversation I've had with CFOs recently, is okay, you got a $10 million company, that's three $4 million you're spending on the revenue team. And you're worried about whether or not it's a good investment to spend a couple hundred grand a year to have somebody who is solely focused on making sure that that entire $4 million investment gets invested wisely, and you're not wasting money on things that don't work. And what's exciting, and what you're about to share is to take the next logical step further to say okay, we're not just focused on revenue, we're focused on other things that maximize the value of the company where most of these companies we're talking about are backed by by investors, they want an exit. So how do they get a high, a large exit, it's going to be more than just revenue growth. So excited to dive into this. But that's all the questions I have on your first point, you want to go to the next thing? Sure, sure. So I think people are
SPEAKER_19constantly looking to justify revenue operations, partly because it is a new wish role, a lot of people that are really senior haven't experienced what a full RevOps team can do for you. And while I
OTHER GUESTthink that has led a little bit to the narrative of revenue, revenue, revenue, sort of a legacy of growth at all costs, it's kind of out of step with what's happening. I mentioned, you know, the combination of low growth environment and demand for revenue operations. What I'm seeing right now, or what I think is happening right now is that people are recognizing that the other side of this, or revenue efficiency, or I guess, doing more with less, retaining more of your base, etc, is another thing that RevOps can help you with. And I think that's what's driving the need for more RevOps talent. So we're flipping from growth mode to efficiency or profitability mode. And really, because revenue operations touches 40% of your budget, as you just mentioned, with the sales and marketing team, but at the same time also touches various aspects of your revenue growth side, you're talking about the marketing and sales for new growth, or for new growth, and then retention to solidify the base of that through like CS operations, it has the ability to pull levers that other areas of the company outside of maybe the CFO don't have. And that it sort of, you can, you can do multiple things in RevOps and you can align your business strategically through RevOps, where if you don't have RevOps, you can't. So it's really, really powerful in juicing the valuation of your organization from an investor standpoint. And so if you're thinking about looking for an exit someday, you really can't win or you can't engineer the most valuation possible,
OTHER GUESTunless you have a revenue operations organization that's pulling the strings. Yeah, I'm curious, Joel, what have you seen sort of like, last year before you were working with us,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou're still in the role, as the economy started to turn? What were you seeing like, in your company,
EDDIE REYNOLDSin the market with people you talk to, in terms of the way that executives were changing their viewpoint on RevOps and overall go to market? Yeah, the overall go to market, when interest rates started
SPEAKER_19going up about, what was it, probably about nine months ago, in order to sort of tap down inflation,
OTHER GUESTwas money was, went from being cheap to money became expensive. And so when you're thinking about, let's say, going to the bank and asking for more debt to keep your operations running, that is one of the ways that a startup would gain leverage, that was sort of taken away from people. And so your, your ability to sort of, I guess, get that kind of leverage from the CFOC meant, the lack of that ability meant that you had to run more profitably. The typical startup company is actually running profitability negative or EBITDA negative. And so what you need to do in this environment is get that back to as close to zero or positive as you can. And the way that happened was really rapid. And I think that caught a lot of people off guard, they raised interest rates really quickly. And so when capital is expensive, you need to, you need to flip back to not burning as all the capital, which means you need to focus on efficiency metrics. And revenue operations was a great way to try and, I guess, get there. So that would be what I would say, as an, as someone who is in that role, you'll also notice that people are going after larger deals and fewer of them. So your typical deal needs to be more profitable. That's one of the steps that happens tactically. So you'll probably notice if you're speaking with your sales friends, or maybe your experience in this year, in your company today, is you're focusing on parts of the business that are naturally more profitable than others. And typically you're talking about larger ticket deals, and really put a lot more scrutiny on the
OTHER GUESTsmaller deals that you may have done in the past, that maybe weren't so profitable. Yeah. And I see this, even though we haven't raised capital in our own company, I see this myself,
EDDIE REYNOLDSas I make budget decisions, when you're landing a bunch of customers, when you're growing fast, you get really excited about all this opportunity, you want to move fast. And this creates incredible waste. Right. And so this is where we're, we've been talking about revenue efficiency so much lately, you see tons of dollars get poured into marketing just to generate MQLs that don't close, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWithout RevOps, nobody's looking at that. The marketing team is saying, and I don't mean to poo-poo all over marketing teams. There's a lot of people that get this, but some marketing teams are incentivized to generate MQLs and they are pouring all these marketing dollars in just to generate leads that don't close. The sales team's not following up with them. They don't have a proper follow-up process and/or they shouldn't have been qualified in the first place. And so we're wasting a lot of marketing dollars. We then move over to sales and the same thing is happening with outbound. We're spraying and praying. We don't have a good definition of our ideal customer profile. We don't have really great and effective messaging because nobody's looking at what messaging is working and what's not. Everybody's just kind of patching it together and it's just go, go, go. Put more money in marketing, generate more MQLs, make more calls, more activity, more meetings. We fill the pipeline with very unqualified deals. So that ends up being mismanaged. We can't forecast accurately. We're raising more money. It's just a very sloppy engine. And then we bring in customers and churn them because we don't have a good process on the back end to hand off from sales to onboarding, to really nurture that customer, make sure that they're taken care of and they're healthy, to identify signals where they're unhealthy, to expand that account if they are healthy and to ultimately maximize the renewal rate. So you have all these leaks coming out of this bucket that you and I, Joel, have been talking a lot about in these weekly events. And it's easy to understand from a financial perspective when the economy is booming, when capital is cheap, how easy it is for a CFO that has a mandate to triple, triple, double, double to just start pouring money into these things. And now that the spigot is sort of being turned off, I think a lot of folks are looking at this and saying, hold on, what's going on here? How much money are we wasting in marketing? How much are we wasting in sales? And how can we do more with less? If we have less budget, it's not like these growth figures are going away. It's not like venture capital is all of a sudden changed. And now they don't need a 10X exit in order to get their returns. That most of these businesses in good times were not succeeding and not getting that exit. So now all of a sudden in bad times, like five out of 10 companies are going to be successful. No, their business model hasn't changed. And so we still need that growth. They still need these big exits in order to return capital to their investors. But right now, we really need to sort of like plug these leaks in the bucket so that these companies can continue to survive and thrive through a down economy. Yeah, what you're describing is sort of opening up the aperture away from just a really,
OTHER GUESTreally hyper focused ICP attack, you know, like marketing to and selling to just like the core of our ideal customer profile market. There's always inertia that kind of pushes you outside of that. And the more money is cheap, the more you open that aperture, and when money is less cheap, more expensive, you close that aperture. And so what we're seeing is the money is closing, or the cost of funds is closing that aperture. So that really what you're going to see on the inverse of that is your cost per acquired customer is what we're trying to tap down. And that means that each individual deal that you're doing is going to be generally more profitable, because the businesses have to sort of self fund through their operations as opposed to going to the debt markets or the banks are raising equity at a low multiple in order to get this, the cash to run their business. So yeah, that's those are the mechanics of what's happening. And it's, it's so out of step with that narrative, right, of like growth, growth, growth, RevOps is supposed to focus on growth, because there's not a lot of growth right now. It's about maintaining, it's about doing the things that are super efficient with your money, growing against your base of customers, retaining a higher percentage of customers. And it's less about spending anything possible to just get that next new logo, which was the case, it was the modus
OTHER GUESToperandi, you know, three, four years ago. Yeah, and you know, I think something that I skipped over was
EDDIE REYNOLDScost of acquisition or CAC, you know, that's obviously gone way up. And now it's even harder to obtain a customer. So if in good times, you're spending more money to acquire a customer than you make off of them. And that's all being funded by venture capital. And now you can't get access to more capital. And it's harder to win a customer, you can't run the same playbook, right? Not at all. So it just it like you literally can't fund that acquisition. So now you got to go and look at how are we acquiring customers and breaking it down in more granular pieces to understand, well, where are we acquiring customers in a sustainable fashion? And where aren't we? Because without that, you just have a model you can't repeat without that capital influx that that supported that model.
OTHER GUESTWhat I would what I would argue is, yes, that model is broken, but I wouldn't even look at that model. What I want to look at the model is RevOps is there to maximize the valuation of your company. If you're focused on revenue growth and revenue growth only, you'll never have a backup option when it comes to the downtimes. If you look at the purpose of revenue operations being maximize the valuation of the firm, then you have a bunch of different levers you can pull in good times and in bad. And so I want I would challenge our professionals here that are on the call, the RevOps people that are listening to this. Like your remit, it may be different than what you think it is. And if we put people in the box of your job is to just grow revenue, like just win, baby, like it may not work. It may not work all the time. And so you get in sort of cyclical, you sort of align to the business and you get in these sort of cyclical patterns of hiring a bunch of people and then laying a bunch of people off. And like, it's just not not the purpose of RevOps at the end of the day. And you kind of make RevOps second class citizens and a support function for the sales team way too easily and way too quickly by sort of labeling them and backing people into a corner.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I couldn't agree more. And Juliette, forgive me, I'm a little lost in our agenda here. So I might
EDDIE REYNOLDSstep over what you're going to say next. But, you know, you had made the point to me offline about how critical it is to have your basic operational functions in a business, things like accounting and legal, etc, where these are not revenue generating functions. But can you imagine trying to grow a 10 or 100 million dollar billion dollar company without that? That'd be crazy. Nobody would make the argument against that. And yet there are people saying, well, you know, do we need revenue operations? Are we sure we need revenue operations? Well, at the end of the day, a company is a it's a machine, right? Or maybe, you know, it's supposed to be a machine, you can create a company where it's just a group of individuals that are just trying to slap things together. And every single thing that each one of those individuals does is sort of stuck in their head and they're trying to figure it out. But there's no business coach or business book in the world that advocates for that. It's literally business 101 that you need to create systems and process to to create a repeatable motion. And revenue operations is just that concept focused in on sales, marketing and customer success. And so, by definition, if you say we don't need rev ops, what you're saying is we want to pour money into this engine, three million, four million dollars in a 10 million dollar revenue company, double that in a 20 million dollar company. And then we go from there. We're going to pour millions and millions of dollars into this engine. And it's OK if it just kind of splashes around and leaks out out all over the place. Can you imagine a company saying, yeah, you know, we only collect like 60% of our invoices because like we don't have accounting. Like we just send out the invoice and hope they pay it. Like it's insane to think about that. Right. But we see that when we look at
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe way some companies run their revenue engines.
OTHER GUESTYeah. Or think about accounting. Oh, we only need accounting when we're in good times, not in bad. We'll cut the accounting team when when things get tough. It's like just that's that's crazy.
OTHER GUESTIt's crazy. I think revenue operations is just as fundamental as that and just as important a part of the business. You I think you're going to make a point later that like the ROI of rev ops is often something that you can't measure unless you have rev ops. So it's kind of this sort of circular problem as well.
OTHER GUESTSo it's hard sometimes to justify that. And I think that's why we've kind of gotten to that narrative. Typically, a revenue operations leader will roll up to someone like a CRO. And someone in that seat is very much focused on revenue growth. And so it's a very easy thing to say revenue growth, revenue growth, revenue growth is the reason why we exist. That's what we can help you with. Here, let me show you five ways I can do that. It plays. That's not a problem. I just want to make sure that people understand that it's a little bit incomplete. And, you know, we're,
OTHER GUESTwe're trying to do more than just help one team. We're trying to help the whole company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I think that what you're about to lead into about how this impacts enterprise value, coming back to the measurement system,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI can't tell you how many conversations I've had with CFOs that are trying to justify this. And we're saying, look, like I can't tell you the ROI because you don't have the data structure in place to even know what knobs you can turn. But when we look at it, we can look and see that money is being poured into marketing and you can't today measure how much of that money makes its way through revenue. You're doing the same thing with your outbound. We can't look at conversion rates. We can't understand what's working and what's not working to build pipeline because you don't have the systems and process and data structure in place. And so if we had that in place, we could then measure it. And then we'd have a baseline to say, okay, we improved the ROI and marketing by X. We improved the production of each salesperson by Y. Each SDR is now generating pipeline that actually closes like this. But it's funny to me that people need to ask this because could you imagine signing up for a weight loss program and not owning a scale, right? I want to lose 10 pounds. Well, how much do you weigh today? I don't know. Should I buy a scale? I'm not sure if I can justify that investment. It doesn't make any logical sense. I think we all as human beings know that you can't usually accomplish a goal if you're not first measuring it. And yet people are debating like, and the reason they're doing this is because you can go buy a scale for 10 bucks in the store and problem solved, but RevOps requires months or years of work to get things right. And everybody wants that immediate quick turnaround. And unfortunately, when it comes to something as complex as analyzing your entire revenue engine, it just doesn't work that way. No, it's absolutely a long-term play,
OTHER GUESTthis whole maximizing enterprise value. It's also really funny you mentioned the scale thing because that's, that's absolutely it. Like it's the same problem. If you look at a scale and you go, all right, well, well, I've got a scale now, uh, have I lost weight yet? Well, no, you started today. Well, I want to lose weight. Did, did it not work? It's like, that's just not how we think about things either. Like you have to put these things in place. You let, you have to let them run for a little bit. And then if you do that, if you measure it and you keep up to date and someone is like coaching you and I don't know, cooking you food or whatever, proverbially rev ops would be doing that. You'll, you will get better. Like there's no way that you won't get better unless you just decide to completely like spit out the bit. So anyway, um, well, actually I'm going to run with this metaphor
EDDIE REYNOLDSjust for thinking about this a lot. So I've been doing CrossFit five days a week, uh, pretty consistently for the last like six months or so, and then inconsistently for eight years. And I've seen some pretty
EDDIE REYNOLDSincredible results. And it's just so funny to me because like, I don't have time to even think about fitness right now. I'm so busy running a company, but I show up to class and there's somebody who is really thoughtfully planning out that class. And they're thinking about everything that needs to be done. And I just do what they tell me or yell at me to do and crazy how it works. Right. And if you really think about this, like, uh, my wife also goes to CrossFit with me and she, she tried to go to like Equinox, which is a traditional gym for a couple months. And she came back and she's like, yeah, it's not working because like she doesn't have the time to motivate herself to figure out what exercises to do it. Same concept. And so I think of RevOps very much in that light where I can do the work. If I'm an account executive or a marketer, like I can produce the calls or the content, but to have somebody to guide me and say like, this is our ideal customer profile. This is who we need to target. This is the messaging that's been working for us. This is the playbook that's worked for us. This is what it means to have a deal in your pipeline. This is what you have to ask for and just map that all out, not just in the systems, but in the process, in the data, in the analytics, then that's where salespeople and marketers and customer success professionals can do their best work.
OTHER GUESTYeah. If you're it, we've talked a lot about like what salespeople spend their time doing them trying to figure out a fitness plan and like coach themselves through a gym session. It's not worth their time. Not when we can do it for them and we can do it for a bunch of different people. As a proverbial trainer, you got 15 people in a class, you can do it for all of them concurrently. It's a very big lever and it's a super like efficient way of doing things. And without it, like to be frank, sales and marketing and CS to a growing degree are so technologically driven that if you don't have somebody like tending to these things, you will lose like in the long run. Like if you are a venture backed startup and you think you can get away with not doing rev ops in the B2B SaaS world, you might as well shut up shop right now. Like you have to have it, you have to have it at some point and you should start pretty early. So like it's again, it's a bit like table stakes, but I want to arm people with a little bit more ammunition to be able to go to others and sort of justify not just the existence, but like the things that we can do for you. There's a lot more that we can do that I don't think like executives at your company are really thinking about very much. And where I want to go with is we're going to use a simple example today of just a typical way that evaluation works for B2B SaaS company. And we're going to use the example of what's called the rule of 40. So let me talk you through what that is. And then I'll share a visual too with you to try and just explain the point here. But as I mentioned before, there's really no one like a revenue operations leader that has the ability to pull as many levers as we do in engineering the valuation of our company, the way that we can do it because we're right on the front lines or right behind the front lines actually like interacting with with people on a day-to-day basis. I would say, you know, a CFO can probably do as much or more to value engineer a company, but they're not boots on the ground. They're not with the front line. So when you actually talk about the tactics that lead to an increased valuation for your firm, a higher multiple at exit, you know, things like that, that matter more than just the exit. They matter in the way that you raise funds. You'll be able to raise more money at a lower cost if you have a higher multiple, which means that you're going to be able to run more campaigns and be able to fund that growth later on. There's a lot more reasons to increase your valuation. You always want to have a high valuation for a lot of reasons. But anyway, one of the ways that we look at the valuation for B2B SaaS company is through this rule of 40. And what this says is we look at the profitability of the organization and there's some percentage based on that. It's like, what is your profitability margin percentage? And then we look at the growth rate of the company and there's some percentage that is associated with that. You add those two percentages up and sort of a benchmark well-run, you know, good company in this space should have a number around 40. So 40 is sort of the benchmark. That's why they call it the rule of 40. Sorry, Joel. Yeah. So let me just articulate that with an exact example. So we have a company that's
EDDIE REYNOLDSdoing $10 million in revenue. For example, they are, they grew 60% in the last year,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut their costs or expenses are $12 million. So they've lost $2 million. That's 20% of revenue. So their profitability is negative 20%, but they grew 60%. So it's a very high growth company being fueled by outside capital. And they've hit that rule of 40. They're at 60% growth minus 20% profitability or plus a negative 20% profitability to be exact equals 40. They're at the rule of 40 and investors can look at that company and say, wow, they're losing a bit of money, but they're growing fast. And that makes up for it. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you know,
OTHER GUESTpeople have preferences, different investors will invest in different things, but really this rule of 40 holds pretty true. And so you'll have some companies that are at zero profitability and 40%
OTHER GUESTgrowth or 20% profitability and 20% growth. What you're really measuring here is the ability of your organization to produce profitable business and then fund value creation through recycling those funds into, uh, into growing the business and doing that profitably. So a lot of companies, especially in a growth mode a couple of years ago would run negative profitability margins and have huge growth rates. But right now you're probably seeing a zero to 10% profitability and a much lower growth rate, but people are still trying to get that 40 number. And the reason that's it, go ahead. Sorry.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI was just going to say, anecdotally, it's interesting. I'm just remembering, I had a conversation with the CFO at Salesforce about this. He came to the New York office. We're
EDDIE REYNOLDSchatting about it. And I was asking him about this because everybody asks like, well, how long is Salesforce going to not make money? And I haven't looked at their financials recently,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut when I worked there, they weren't making any money and they were still growing at 30%. Now,
EDDIE REYNOLDSgranted this rule of 40 doesn't apply when you're talking about like a $10 billion company, but what he said to me is still the same idea. He's like, Wall Street will continue to support us as long as we can grow at 25, 30% year over year, even without any profit, but we have to maintain that growth. If that growth slows down, they're going to want to see profitability. You can't have it both ways. So I don't think the rule of 40 applies when we're talking about a company that big, but the same general concept does apply even all the way through to a large public company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. We're, we're, we're talking in general concepts here, but this is one that's sort of
OTHER GUESTrubber stamped by the investment industry in this space. You know, what's funny is it's not just Salesforce, you know, Amazon turned to first profit, I think in the last five years, like they've been around since the nineties. They, they never made a profit until recently. So like, this is a very common thing is as long as you're still in growth mode, double down on growth, but at some point you'll, you'll lever more toward the profitability angle. Um, and there's nothing wrong with having a very slightly less, uh, growing company. It's still something that's exciting for an investor. I'm going to show us a screen grab of, this isn't our, our visual, but I saw this on a website and it's actually super interesting. I'm going to try and talk you through it and apologies for those just listening on the audio version, but we've got kind of a graph shown here on the, on the screen. And you've got all these different dots that are plugged along and axes of where do they fall in the rule of 40 and then what is their, uh, their revenue multiple, right? So as, as it's sort of plotted out here, there's sort of a general trend up into the right. And there's sort of a line that's sort of drawn as a best fit line kind of in between a bunch of the data points. What, what you can get out of this is that not all rates are equal. So if, if you, you would expect to see, like, if my, um, rule 40 per combination is, I don't know, 10, let's say 5% growth and 5% EBITDA. I, on this chart, it would say you'd have somewhere around a six X multiple. Well, you would expect that if the company was more profitable and, uh, uh, more growth oriented, you might go up to 20, then you're at, you would have a much higher, but sort of in line multiple. What we're going to show you is that the effect of this is, uh, exponential growth. So there are some things that you can do in revenue operations to focus on getting more growth out of the sort of dollars invested. And it's not a linear thing. And it's kind of hard to see on this graph. We're going to go into another example, but just sort of keep that in the back of your mind. It's not, it's not linear. It's not linear. You're going to see a huge improvement in your, um, in the valuation of your company as you sort of tick up a couple of,
OTHER GUESTof these things. And there are areas that we would recommend focusing on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd Joel, I just want to sort of emphasize this for the podcast listeners. So in this chart,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe're looking at a rule of 40 at zero. So for example, let's say that they're 20% growth, but negative 20% profit. This chart is saying that on average, the valuation multiple is about five times revenue. Uh, whereas when we go to a 40% rule of 40, meaning like a 40% growth and 0% profit, for example, you know, we get up to about like a 9.5 X. That's a pretty substantial increase. Even the same revenue, you're getting almost twice the valuation. Not to mention the fact that if the growth rate is pushing the revenue higher, then you get even more valuation there, which is what you're about to go into. And I'm excited to see this. Yeah. Yeah. So where I, where I would go with this
SPEAKER_18next is just kind of show you the example. Um, and I'll kind of try to walk you through the math.
OTHER GUESTSo, um, to Eddie's today's scenario here, you had a 20% growth or negative 20% profit. So a rule of zero, you've got a five X, uh, revenue number. Whereas if you had 45% growth and zero profit or 40% growth and zero profit, you're having a, a huge, uh, multiple, the effect of this on 10 million of revenue. And I'm going to talk through this scenario here real quick is pretty extreme. So kind of clean slate. If you start over and think about a company that has 10 million in revenue, if you keep everything else, the same, uh, you're going to see a significant growth by just adding 2 million in revenue on top of that. So this 5 million multiple for a $10 million company is a $50 million evaluation. Uh, cause it's a five X multiple of the revenue. If you increase this by $2 million, there are cascading series of, of effects that, uh, lead to higher and higher impacts on the multiple and therefore higher impacts on your, on your, uh, evaluation. So let me, let me step through this. If you all else equal, if you added 2 more million dollars in revenue, your growth rate goes up because you've got more money coming in the door and you have the same costs, your EBITDA goes up. So that 2 million in revenue has an impact on both sides of this rule of 40 equation. And because this is non-linear, you don't have the five X multiple on the 12 million dollars, which would be 60 million. You've got a rule of 40 number that has EBITDA or profitability and, uh, revenue growth on there, both of which are increased by this. And you, therefore your multiple goes up as well. So you have three things working in tandem, both for all of them in the same direction. And the result of which is you added $2 million in revenue on a $10 million company. And you more than doubled the value of the company. That sounds non-intuitive, but this stuff is exponential. It really, really is. And so if you try to say, okay, well, to get that 2 million in revenue, we had spent a half a million dollars hiring a revenue operations team. Well, you spent a half a million dollars, kept everything else the same, and you just added $64 million to the value of the company, more than doubling the value of the company. Like this, this is the power that a revenue operations team can bring to an organization. And this is what I would focus on if I'm trying to sell the idea, but also like, why just like,
OTHER GUESTI don't see why anyone wouldn't want this in their company. It just, it screams at me just like the obvious ROI. I don't even know what it is 65,000% or something. It's nuts. So
OTHER GUESTSo this, this is the story that I want to share. Revenue, revenue, revenue is great, but why we have, if we go deeper, like the amount of benefit you get for each dollar in revenue, all else equal, we, we did the math. It's about 30 X right now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. You're putting in, you get $2 million of additional revenue and you're getting 64 million in additional value. So 32 X times revenue, right? And we're talking zero cost here or 500 grand, if you want to call it that, because it's kind of inconsequential in comparison to 10 or $12 million in revenue. But to your point, it's an exponential return.
SPEAKER_04It's an exponential return. You get less. So to not poo poo, the revenue thing entirely, you get more
OTHER GUESTjuice for the squeeze, adding revenue and revenue growth to your company, all else equal. You do get quite a significant return on profitability growth. So if for example, you kept revenue the same and you were able to improve the profitability of your organization, you would get about a 12 X return on the valuation of your company based on that year's improvement in profitability. So for every dollar that you save in profitability, you get $12 in return on valuation of your company or thereabouts. The numbers are a little bit different depending on the size of the company here, but they all fall within a similar window. So 30 X for revenue, all else equal 12 X valuation improvement on profitability, all else equal. And the reason there's such a big difference between the two is that all else equal piece. If you can get profitability, extra profitability out of your business by running things more efficiently, you improve the profitability metric and the multiple to a degree, but you don't hit the revenue growth multiple or multiplier there. And so it just has less of an effect. I would question or ask anybody out there, if you think there is another organization in the business that has the ability to like significantly impact both the efficiency or profitability of the business and the revenue growth of a business. I can't name another one. I can't name another one. Somebody is always either a cost center or a revenue center. We straddle the line between both. And that's why
OTHER GUESTwe're so important where I think we should be so important. And Joel, I want to drive this example
EDDIE REYNOLDShome. And so like you and I were going back and forth trying to figure out how to do the visuals. We need a graphic designer desperately, but if you want to actually share that slide again,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI want to add in like, since I created this slide, I wanted to show you like, or show the audience what went into it. So the assumption here was that in the previous year, we had 8.3 million in revenue,
EDDIE REYNOLDSright? So it's a fairly real world example for an early stage startup, not super early, obviously. 8.3 million in revenue. And then there's two options: grow to 10 million or grow to 12 million in revenue. Either way, our cost is $12 million. So what we're saying is that we're going to spend $12 million on all the expenses of the company, from the revenue team to everything else. And based on our performance, we're either going to achieve $10 million in revenue or 12 million in revenue. The difference there is, is that if we go from 8.3 million to 10 million in revenue, that is a 20% growth rate. And if we spend $12 million, that's a negative 20% profit margin. So 20 plus negative 20 equals zero. So we've got a rule of 40 of zero, which gives us a 5X multiple. We multiply 5X times 10 million in revenue, and we have a $50 million valuation. However, if RevOps, by some miracle, can figure out how to get the team to generate $12 million with that same 12 million of expenses, instead of the 10 million in the first scenario, now our growth rate goes from 20%. We went from 8.3 to 10 million. That's 20%. It goes to 45%. So we go from 8.3 to 12 million. That's a 45% growth rate. At the same time, because we have more revenue, $12 million in revenue, and the same expenses, $12 million, we have 0% profit. So now our rule of 40 is 45. So our multiple is almost doubled to 9.5X plus the baseline revenue is higher. So we're multiplying 9.5 times 12 million, getting to that $114 million. So that's the incremental 64 million, where we're getting this exponential 32X return on every dollar of additional revenue. This is all without spending any additional money. And this sounds crazy, but when you think about all of the waste that goes into the marketing engine, the sales engine, and the CS engine, it's not hard to visualize how somebody that is really focused on optimizing every step in the customer journey could find an extra 20% of performance. But to your point, Joel, the alternative example, which we should have like done in all the preparation we did for this is to say, okay, well, what happens if revenue is still $10 million, but instead of 12 million in expenses, we get the expenses down to 10 million. So now we've got 20% growth, um, with negative 20% profitability versus 20% growth with 0% profitability. Right. And so now that's going to bring our multiple up to, I don't have the chart in front of me, but what is that going to be? That's going to be probably about seven or eight. About seven, about seven. Yeah. So now without any additional revenue, the valuation of the company has gone from 50 million to call it 70 million. It's $20 million of additional value. So that's not quite as exciting as $64 million of additional value, but it's nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're spending two, three, $500,000 on your revenue operations team to achieve that. Yeah. And that's the mode we're in right now. So that is a really pertinent point. And a really
OTHER GUESTgood example is right now, growth is hard to come up. So what are the things that we can do to be more efficient in maintaining and trying to get as much growth as we can, but really trying to sort of strip out
OTHER GUESTthe waste and the leakages in our process. That's what we do. We look for efficiencies. We build consistent and scalable things pertaining to the revenue organization. So we have the ability to affect 40% of the budget because that's what sales and marketing spend usually is for a company
OTHER GUESTin this category. So yeah, we can do a lot of things. We can do them in good times and in bad. And without it, I mean, I just don't get it. Like I just do not, I do not get it fundamentally. I don't know you
OTHER GUESTwould replace this organization with. It's going to try and like maximize evaluation and you can have serious impact on the business without doing seriously difficult work. You know, if you get
OTHER GUESTyour territories right, if you have good handoff processes, if you have good retention processes, if you're marketing effectively and going after the right ICP and personas, like if you can do some of these fundamental and basic things, you will be so far ahead of everyone else. It's crazy. And like the return to the business for all of this is extreme. So this, this is my case. Hopefully this makes sense to a lot of people. If you don't have us, you will eventually reach a point where your processes and efficiency falls apart. You'll get spaghetti code. You won't know how Salesforce is organized. You won't have great handoff processes. You'll probably have some miscommunication. You might have infighting and misalignment. There's all kinds of things that you would see develop as a company grows. Eventually they're going to run into these problems in this, in this world without a revenue operations team to sort of help tend this stuff and kind of keep everybody aligned. And that will result in what we lovingly refer to as the Peter principle. Basically you continue to rise until you reach the level of your own incompetence. It's usually referred to, I'm sure everybody's heard of it, but it's usually referred to as like a person getting promoted until they struggle with the job. The same sort of thing happens with companies. You know, you're going to continue to grow until these
OTHER GUESTthings rear their ugly heads and these things rearing their ugly heads is really hard to like unwind and they will result in often churning more customers than you can grow against. And so eventually you
OTHER GUESTjust sort of plateau. I I've seen this happen many times, somewhere in the 20 to 25 million in ARR range. There's several sort of break points in, in these growing businesses. That's the one I've seen or had most experience with, but like you gotta, you gotta tend to this stuff. You gotta tend to this stuff or eventually it will catch up with you. You know, it you'll never, you'll never also be able to tie revenue operations directly to sales for everything. And it's easy to make the case on the, on the flip side of the revenue is what RevOps should be focused on. On the flip side of the case is like, if something good happens, it's hard to say that like we caused it. And so it's a dangerous game to justify everything through revenue just on that case. And you know, it imagine someone selling a really big deal that you had a hand in because you did the territories right. And you helped, you know, market to them and you organize the right events and tracking and all that kind of stuff. And they got handed off and they got followed up on quickly and all that kind of stuff, but the salesperson sells it. The salesperson is going to get credit for that. And they're, they should, there's a huge amount of effort that goes into getting that deal. But like, did revenue operations cause that? I don't know. They probably had a hand
OTHER GUESTin it, but like how they get it. Joel, you're, you're much kinder to salespeople than I am because I've, I've been in sales my whole
EDDIE REYNOLDScareer. I still sell everything for unions for consulting. And like, I'm so tired of this like mentality that like salespeople are lone wolves and they do it all. It's, it's impossible to close deals in 2023 without it being a team effort. Like the days of like, give me a desk and a phone
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike Glen Gary, Glen Ross. And even those guys were complaining about how they didn't get the good leads. Yeah. Right. Those days are over. Like you can't do it alone anymore. And anybody that thinks
SPEAKER_26that sales is solely responsible for closing deals is delusional. Well, it's delusional, but it's also a difficult business case to make. So like, if you say, Hey, we want to spend more money on revenue
OTHER GUESToperations. Well, how much revenue does that generate? Well, I don't know. Well, let's use a really, a really simple illustration, right? I think what it comes
EDDIE REYNOLDSdown to is this $10 million company that we're using as our example, spending $4 million a year in their sales marketing and CS team. Those are physical people as well as the technology that they use and the marketing budget that goes behind their activities. What that literally is doing is going into areas that may or may not pay any return. So without rev ops, you can't see that. So for example, you're going out and doing SEO, you're generating a bunch of MQLs, you pass that over to the sales team and none of those MQLs close. Yeah, sure. One or two do out of like the 10,000 that you generated last year. And you can't get visibility into that. So you can do one of two things. You can take that money and reallocate that to something else to get your revenue growth. Or if you're in budget cutting mode, you can say, we're going to cut that program, we're going to cut SEO because these other channels are working for us. And now you have the same revenue at lower cost. The thing though is, is what I'm seeing is a lot of CFOs, unfortunately, that in boom times were spending frivolously and saying, just fund this, fund that, hire more people, more headcount, more marketing, more everything, right? Those same people turn around and they have this mandate to cut costs and they cut costs with an equal lack of measurement. So they might go and say, let's cut the podcast because they can't, they don't see clearly that the podcast is generating an ROI and they just kind of say, let's kill this, right? When they're not informed on how that's actually impacting revenue or the organization overall. And so they're actually sort of like cutting their nose despite their face. And I see this all the time. There's, there's a really famous Harvard business review case where they talked about the companies that made it through the 2008 downturn and how these companies had sort of through like three forks in the road, like just continue to spend foolishly or just cut everything or be really diligent and careful about how you spend your money. And it's really obvious in hindsight who survived. But the reason why I think is really interesting, the companies that spent foolishly went out of business, they ran out of money, that's obvious, but the companies that cut foolishly, they somewhat survived, but they suffered because their customer experience suffered, everything else suffered and they gave up market share. The companies that spent really carefully, they started capturing market share and they may not have like blown out their revenue number during the downturn, but when times got good again, they skyrocketed past their competition because they had put in all the infrastructure, all the systems to give a better customer experience, to have a better go to market. And they were able to just shoot right past their competition that had been neglecting all of that through the entire financial crisis.
OTHER GUESTYeah. A lot of good, a lot of good points there. A lot of great points there. I, I just want to try to make the case. And I think I have, hopefully that revenue can't just be the only North star that revenue operations has. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And you're going to struggle in the ways of like justifying your existence. If you stick to that revenue narrative and revenue only, it's, it's a legacy of growth at all costs. It doesn't work in the current environment. And I believe people are moving past it, but, but I want to make one final point because I know we're coming up on time here in a little bit. And what I actually want to go is even further beyond and higher order than the investment decisions that people make. And that's the long-term nature, the scalability, et cetera, of revenue operations funds, you know, or provides value engineering for the organization to maximize that. And then people buy companies for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to acquire them, or maybe they IPO, you know, you want to be a unicorn. You're never going to be a unicorn unless you're one of the top companies in your space. So the point that you made about, yeah, there was a downturn and then they gave up market share and they weren't able to bounce back strongly. That's really, really important right now. It's really important. Everybody needs to sort of absorb, absorb that point because what, what we're looking for and why people invest in small and fast growing companies is they're not in trying to invest because, you know, like I'm going to get a lot of money out of this today. You know, I'm just going to, I'm, I'm in as an investor. I own this company. They're just going to pay me all the profits and that's it. No, what they're looking for is somebody who's going to create a market, create a segment maybe, and, and be one of the leaders in that space. And they're betting on the horses that are going to be there at the end of the day when this market develops to the point of maturity and everybody's trying to buy the next Google, the next Amazon, the next sales force and to varying degrees, of course, but like you have to understand that your market is growing as a group or your segment is growing as a group. And if it's profitable, other entrants will join. You will never be the only one in a growing market. That's like doing really well. So a bunch of companies will enter if they discover that this is a growing space and then they're all sort of competing to gain market share as they go. And eventually at the end of the day, there will be usually two companies that, that make it to the top of the heap. So think of the the classic examples of like Nike and Reebok in the nineties or Nike and Adidas. Now you've got Microsoft and Google or Microsoft and Apple, or, you know, there's, there's always only a couple. There's always only a couple. So if you aren't outgrowing your current market, you're losing. And that is why in a high growth environment, everybody's tripling down and funding at a loss, the ability for you to grow. Okay. What is happening in the market right now? Well, growth might not be that fast. You're still trying to outgrow your market, but maybe your market's growing at 3% or 5%, not the 40% that we saw a couple of years ago. So you still have to go on the growth thing, but you're also at the same time, always trying to position the business so that it's always one step ahead of the other competitors in the space. And if you're gobbling up a little bit of market share every year, you're sort of are always going to be like heading in the right direction long-term. And that's why people want to invest in you.
OTHER GUESTThat's why people want to buy the company. There's only two or three players at the end of the day. They're usually 40% market share at 30% market share. And maybe there's a third one that's like 15% market share, but everybody else gets crushed. You want to be one of those top three, which means that all of this stuff that you're doing has an end goal years down the line in place. And people are looking at your company and judging you based on this stuff. Yeah. And you shared a really good example in the article that we're publishing on Friday, Joel,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhere you talked about how if you're acquiring the wrong customers and they're just churning, like that doesn't get you there. Right? So we just look at top line sales. That's not the same as
EDDIE REYNOLDSmarket share. If customers are just churning out on the back end, as fast as you bring them in.
OTHER GUESTYeah, that's exactly right. Like the last thing that you want to do right now is double down on the growth story when growth isn't available and acquire a bunch of customers unprofitably and burn through cash. That's really expensive. Like that may work for some people in the short term. That is not a long-term play. That's going to tee you up for growth later when the markets fall and you know, it's growth time again. So just, just keep that in mind. Profitability and efficiency and value creation is really the story that leads to the valuation increases. And that leads to the
SPEAKER_41exits later. Well, and that's the key are the exits, right? And so it's easy to get really excited
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout these big, like, you know, C series A series B rounds, but that's not the end goal. You know, the end goal is to have an exit and at exit that's only, you know, not even close to the end of the story. So the investor, whether it be a private equity firm coming in, I guess if you're looking at a strategic acquisition, like Salesforce acquiring your company, it's a little bit different, but a private equity firm coming in is going to be looking and saying, well, what's the next exit there? The IPO as well. The analysts are looking at what is your sustainable competitive advantage and ability to continue to grow for years to come. And same thing, if Salesforce acquires your company, they want to understand that you have a tight operation that can integrate into theirs and you can continue to like win and keep customers. Because if you can't, it doesn't
EDDIE REYNOLDSmatter what your growth rate or your revenue, or even your profitability is today. Yeah. It really doesn't. So anyway, RevOps is the stewards of all of these things. So I would close
OTHER GUESTby just saying that your remit, our remit, I think is a lot broader and more strategic than a lot of people are thinking about it. And I think hopefully with the case we've made today that you can go back to somebody in your organizations, trying to describe this, maybe share the article and help you get your seat at the table, help you get your voice heard. Because we feel a place of great power and great responsibility within companies today. Awesome. Well, as always, Joel, thanks for putting this together
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto our audience. Thank you very much for coming. We hope that this was valuable for you. We'll be back next
EDDIE REYNOLDSweek with something else that we hope will be valuable and actionable for you. All right. Thanks, everybody.
