Sebastien van Heyningen
SUMMARY
Where does revenue operations fit in at this early stage?
Revenue operations should be adopted early on to help define the value that a firm offers to the market, create a sequence of steps for potential customers, and reduce friction in the sales process.
What is a common revenue-operations mistake made by early-stage startups?
Early stage firms frequently make the error of purchasing technology without first defining their customer journey and revenue organisation requirements, which can result in overpaying for technology and improper use.
In today's quickly changing technology ecosystem, what are the essential strategies and challenges for establishing a functional outbound department?
Building a functional outbound department entails identifying the value proposition for the ideal customer profile, leveraging technology and tactics, and being part of a supportive community that shares what works and what doesn't, while challenges include maintaining high velocity and efficiency in cold calling.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
Ricky Pearl: Today on a couple of pointers podcasts, we are lucky enough to have Sebastien van Heyningen from Central Metric. Did I get that right?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: You got it. You got it. Well said from my American perspective.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. It's Heineken with a G.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: Right? That should be your catchphrase. Like do you wanna have a Heineken with a G? Yeah.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. That's my intro to the call. I'm sending out Heinekens.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Love it man.
What does Central Metric do?
Ricky Pearl: So tell me quickly, what does Central Metric do?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, so Central Metric, we are a revenue operations consulting agency, and that is a lot of words to say. We help software companies make more money efficiently and lower costs associated with making money.
Ricky Pearl: Right. Revenue operations must be the catchphrase of 2022.
One of the least understood catchphrases.
Give me an example of what that looks like
Ricky Pearl: So you broke it down simply helping tech companies make money efficiently. Give me an example of what that looks like.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. I think the best way to put it is all encompassing. You as a software [00:01:00] company, you use a series of software to bring people from, never heard about you to becoming a client. That could be your website, your email tool. If you have a sales team, you're using something to send out calls, and you have a database to capture all of that data.
So all of that needs to be managed. It needs to be set up efficiently. There needs to be certain process around it. But beyond that, you as a revenue organization, you need to have strategies that will work and treat your business more like a hypothesis than something that you're playing around with.
And so that's what we help do. Turn a business more scientific. Focus on, the inputs and the outputs versus what I think a lot of folks end up doing, which is what everyone else is doing or the thing that might be a good idea, but they're not sure about. So, it can be over complicated, but yeah.
Ricky Pearl: That creative middle piece where people never know, like, if I put something in here, this comes out over there, all they know is I put this in over here, I shake [00:02:00] it, I dunno how long I'm gonna shake it for. I just shake this and eventually something comes out the other end. No idea of what's going on the inside of this machine.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. And that can be fun, but it's not a scalable business.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Most of the people I talk to just my end of the market are startups. They early stage, they haven't necessarily figured out their product market fit. They haven't necessarily figured out their go-to-market strategy.
Where does revenue operations fit in at an early stage?
Ricky Pearl: Where does revenue operations fit in at an early stage?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I would say right there. So like you said, your go-to-market strategy, you are coming up with. Like I said earlier a hypothesis behind an amount of value that you bring to the market. And so it's your responsibility to quantify that value for the market and then build a series of steps, a slide, a funnel, a flywheel, whatever you want to call it that. Your potential customer or buyer can go through and in those steps, they are being educated about their problem. They are being offered advice and help about that problem. And so when the [00:03:00] time comes for you to assign the value that you know, you bring to a given client, the timing is right. And so we're all about just increasing the, I would say, decreasing the friction that leads to a problem over here and a solution over here coming together.
Ricky Pearl: I love that man.
Marketing falls into revenue operations?
Ricky Pearl: And that means, just correct me if I'm wrong, that means marketing falls into revenue operations.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I don't wanna say falls into, I think we're hitting like a, like I said, friction, a friction point. I don't wanna say that revenue operations is over these function because it's not. It's more of the connective tissue between them. So marketing needs a translator for sales, who needs a translator for customer success, who needs a translator for product. And so revenue operations is that glue that's supposed to hold it all together so they're still making the decisions they want?
Ricky Pearl: I can sense some deep trauma in that response that you just gave me.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Oh yeah.
Ricky Pearl: That was the most fucking diplomatic [00:04:00] answer I have ever heard. I've never heard such bullshit.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Hey, we're all in this together, man. We're all in this together.
Ricky Pearl: Oh, wow. My god. There's some trauma to unpack there, right? All right. Let's define the revenue operations as all business functions and revenue. All business functions and operations that are in the purpose of generating revenue.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yes. Perfect. Ricky, it's like you wrote it yourself.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. But I am gonna take that leap out to say marketing falls into it.
Right, it's all about taking your product to the market.
Which is a part of selling of course.
What do you think early stage startups are getting horribly wrong?
Ricky Pearl: So, alright, now that we've got we've cleared the air. Rev Ops is the connective tissue joining marketing, sales, customer success, products, and all the other operations.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yep.
Ricky Pearl: What do you think early stage startups are getting horribly wrong?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, they are going to a blog that says, here are the five pieces of technology you should put in your software company. And then they're going out and [00:05:00] buying those things immediately. And then they are getting sold on those things and then months later they are overpaying for those things and not using them correctly.
And so, I think the solution to that is to start with your requirements. So before you go to a technology vendor, you should know exactly what you want that technology vendor to do. You should know exactly what you want your revenue organization to look like, your buyer journey to look like, and then you have the leverage in that conversation and you are asking for specific things rather than checking boxes on a must have list of technologies.
Ricky Pearl: Can I tell you why I don't like your answer?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Why not?
Ricky Pearl: Because that's hard work. That is hard work. I have to define my buyer journey. I can't just buy HubSpots to solve my problem. Right?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Nope.
Ricky Pearl: But it makes obvious sense, right? It's gonna be perfectly obvious for anyone to say. If you just buy HubSpot, you are in their environments and you do what the software does.
Whereas if you define what you need, it might not be the tool that you need. You might find a different tool to do it. [00:06:00] Or at a minimum, at least, when you are operating within a restricted environment of your current software, you have an understanding of where it's falling short and how you can compensate for that particular gap.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Ricky Pearl: All right, so I'm definitely gonna write this one down. Don't just buy HubSpots, right?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. Hey, I have nothing against HubSpot, we're HubSpot partners, so yeah
Ricky Pearl: It's a great piece of software. Great. I think honestly 90% of my customers are in HubSpots. We early stage, some of them may have this inclination in the back of their head that they may end up on Salesforce.
I think some of them potentially should have been on Salesforce. They've got slightly too complicated a set up. And they've had to straightaway, even as an early stage push onto HubSpot Enterprise because they need custom objects and they needed the data. The data hub, ops hub or whatever they're calling it.
And once they're at that with only three users, I was like, ah, you're probably starting to build up in the wrong environment. But we've got customers on Pop Drive, Go High Level, fucking Excel, Google sheets, [00:07:00] just their inbox, pen and paper.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yep.
Ricky Pearl: There's all flavors here
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. It's all sales.
Ricky Pearl: it is all sales.
Do you have any suggestions in general or do you really need a deep dive?
Ricky Pearl: Tell me. Do you have any suggestions in general, like when you're doing a needs analysis, are there any like real big buckets or ways to summarize just between Salesforce or a HubSpot, like where people might land up being a better fit, or do you really need a deep
dive?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Hmm. Yeah, I think a deep dive is necessary. I would say, my original thought on HubSpot versus Salesforce was that HubSpot was for smaller, less complex organizations. Salesforce is for the more complex. They also hit more industries as well. But something that my co-founder told me really stuck with me, which is like, in HubSpot, there's typically one or two ways to do what you need to do. And if they can't do it, then something needs to change in the platform.
It's pretty straightforward. It's less of a need for hours and hours of experience within the platform. Within Salesforce, to do a simple thing, there are 10, 20, 30 [00:08:00] different ways, all of varying levels of complexity that could affect other systems, other parts of the platform.
And so it's really about when you look forward into your future, how complicated do you think your sale will be? Are you a marketplace so you're to have a buyer journey and a seller journey, or are you dealing with really complex personal data or financial data that needs to be locked up and secured really well?
And I think that is what you makes you determine, which one of the two you might be going to but I could tomorrow meet somebody that's 900 employees, almost a billion dollars in revenue, and they're using HubSpot and they love it. So yeah. I'm open to being corrected on that.
Ricky Pearl: No, of course. I find people start tend to look at things like user adoption and those are really important attributes too, like the actual seller's experience, the sales team's experience, or the marketing team's experience and all of that. But yeah, I really like that approach of fundamentally you need to look at how complicated your future is, but I definitely [00:09:00] appreciate the challenges of getting started with HubSpot, where you're like, I just want a list of customers.
And they're like, well, let's sit down and discuss.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: When you say customers, what do you mean? And when you say list, what do you mean? And would you like the list? One of these 37 different ways? I'll tell you why. Cause if you choose option two to seven, you won't be able to do these other 30 things.
But if you choose option 9 to 12, you can do them, but it's gonna be about a $30,000 development process.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Sounds about right.
Ricky Pearl: Right. A good friend of mine that I think as well, Eric Steves, it was either him or his partner who said they were talking about Salesforce not-for-profit cloud, being free.
And they, there was so it must have been Rebecca actually who was involved in the not-for-profit cloud. He said Salesforce for free is like giving someone a free puppy. It's amazing. It's amazing. But you've definitely given them a long-term commitments to maintenance and lifetime.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah.
Well, I like I deep at my core, I love Salesforce. That's my job. But I'm a tech. I'm like, I love the potential. I like [00:10:00] knowing that there's a potential to do anything.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: Maybe that's considered a flaw of mine. So now
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I think it's a good point.
Ricky Pearl: Let's chat a bit more. So we've got some of the biggest flaws people are making, which is they're buying the technology before scoping their needs.
What about customers that know that their needs are going to be changing drastically?
Ricky Pearl: What about customers that know that their needs are going to be changing drastically because they're in like a very dynamic environment. They're growing pretty quickly.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, I mean, I think with any business, at least in our world, in this B2B software, fast growing venture capital world, you grow in stages and usually they're delineated by the level of funding that you have or how much revenue you're having. And, it's usually around, five to 10 mil is a big change.
50 mil is a big change. A hundred mil is a big change, and you still have to keep growing after every milestone. And that's why sales leaders, there's turnover that's so high in that field because, you get to be good at growing a business from 5 to 25, and once you reach 25 you don't exactly know what to do.
[00:11:00] And so I am of course, incredibly biased. On the answer to this question, but I think that when you don't know where you're going, you should ask somebody who's been there before. And so, but I think the best thing to do at those inflection points is to at least speak to, if not bring on a consultant. It doesn't have to be someone from my agency, but I know personally, I've learned a ton from just people who have looked at my problems and said, oh yeah, I did that five years ago. This is what I did. These are the results that I got. Here's what I think you should try. And so that's kind of the attitude that I've always taken to it. Talk to somebody who might know what they're doing.
Ricky Pearl: That's such sage advice. And I've really seen it because it's so dynamic. We had a customer recently on HubSpot just implemented HubSpot, very moved off Pipedrive onto HubSpots, and six months later, their entire go-to-market strategy shifted entirely, and now they are already in HubSpots.
With a partial implementation
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: And I was shifting [00:12:00] their go-to-market strategy. And it's just so common. And the problem is that their technical setup is not keeping up with their need for speed within the market. And so their teams back on Excel. That's the only thing that they can whip up in an afternoon to present the data the way they need it.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah,
Ricky Pearl: Yeah.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Sounds about right.
Ricky Pearl: Still the number one. When people ask me what's the number one CRM in the world, I always just say, number one's inbox and number two's gotta be Excel.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, yeah.
Ricky Pearl: People say Microsoft isn't the biggest CRM company. I'll say no no, you're wrong. They are. It's just not Microsoft Dynamics.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: There's product databases too on there, client databases, everything.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Right. Then we get the Trellos, the Airtables. Yeah. All the rest.
Do you do any works with Microsoft Dynamics?
Ricky Pearl: Now do you do any works for Microsoft Dynamics?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I, to this point, I don't think we've had a single Microsoft Dynamics client. No. Yeah, no. And in my last consulting job, I had one, but I was more on the process side, so I was building playbooks and scripts so I didn't have [00:13:00] to touch dynamics. Thank goodness.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah, I find that it's very industry specific. Like if, you know, you need dynamics when you in the industry that you know, you need dynamics, otherwise it doesn't seem to be like a really good ops for startups at the moment. Then let's talk a bit about outbound revenue operations.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: yep.
Ricky Pearl: a very fast moving space.
How have operations like yours kept up to date with the tactics changed so quickly.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. Yeah.
How do you build a functioning outbound department and incorporate that within a broader system?
Ricky Pearl: Technology's changed so quickly. How do you build a functioning outbound department and incorporate that within a broader system?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. I think a lot of the strategies still do carry over. Even if the tactics change, you still want to be able to reach a lot of people with a message that you understand will benefit them. And so I think just starting from the beginning on what value do you bring? What is your ICP and why are you valuable to them?
Why would they pick up the phone? Because you will be interrupting their day and you will be trying to tell them about [00:14:00] something new. And so if that first step strategy is not done, which I think is again a part of revenue operations, then the entire thing falls apart like a house of cards. And then I think what's been really useful for me on the technology and tactics side of things is just the community.
The one thing that's really great about software people is that they're very loud about what's working and and bragging and more recently they're failures too. You're seeing a lot of like, oh I got fired, or I had a tough company that didn't work out. And so people are willing and able and open with sharing exactly what is working and what's not. And I always think back to the time where I was an SDR in a bullpen with 20 people in the room, all making a hundred cold calls a day. And that was the highest performing I ever was as an SDR because as soon as I heard something that worked over there, I was taking it and vice versa. As soon as I said something that worked,[00:15:00] I was spitting it out to the crowd.
They were picking it apart, editing it, and then it was going back into the machine. Like I think the community is how we grow and make sure that we're on top of all all these trends.
Ricky Pearl: That's amazing. And I've never really thought about the technology community. As part, when considering what technology to use. I've thought about it from a support perspective, cuz often the companies are so useless themselves at providing support that you need a community to be able to ask a question, Hey, how do you do X, Y, Z?
But at the moment, I guess there is so much value in community just in terms of the advice and the consulting and the opinions that you can get, learning what works or what doesn't.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, exactly.
Ricky Pearl: What are some of, like in that outbound then,
What are some of the challenges that companies are having to be able to achieve this high velocity making a hundred phone calls and doing that efficiently? Let me ask it this way.
What are some of the outcomes, the negative outcomes, when companies are getting that wrong that you come in to fix?
Ricky Pearl: What are some of the outcomes, the negative outcomes, when companies are getting that wrong that you come in to fix?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, I mean, the simple negative outcome is a really huge burn rate and a low amount of [00:16:00] pipeline generation or fulfillment. So like, yeah, bring it down to the simplest numbers. So like when it's not working, you won't be making money and you will be, spending money. Yeah that's the first metric that you need to watch when it comes to that, in my opinion.
Ricky Pearl: Fair enough. That is pretty simple. Tell me maybe a little bit of off camera chat.
What are some of the ways you found salespeople trying to manipulate the metrics that you're trying to record?
Ricky Pearl: What are some of the ways you found salespeople trying to manipulate the metrics that you're trying to record?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I knew a guy that would just make calls and hang up and then it would register in the system. I've seen people create tasks manually that look like they came from the automated system.
Ricky Pearl: Use the same format in all of it.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. I've seen people, I think, and this comes with the fast growth is when you start to put in rules around, let's say if an account has not been touched in 30 days, it's no longer yours.
So I could, I've seen people just program mass spam emails to the Inca [00:17:00] Tire sales database just so that they could raise their hand in claim. Every lead here is mine. If anything comes in inbound, the revenue is mine because here's a touch. And that's what happens when you value the touch over the outcome behind the touch.
Ricky Pearl: That's the best example I've ever heard because it'll be a legit sales leader with a really good considerate perspective saying, Hey, if a sales rep has not touched an account in 30 days, it is not theirs. They're not actively pursuing it. We would like to be fair to the community and allow ever like someone else to take this inbound lead.
We can round robin them. And there's some sales rep going, ah, so that's what you're measuring. Here's a way that I can fuck the system up. And make it benefit me. I'm just gonna spam your entire database.
right? and
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I have an unpopular opinion there. I have an unpopular opinion there, which is one. It's not their fault, it's your fault as the leader for setting up those rules. And two, that type of energy is entrepreneurial, which is what we want our salespeople to do, which [00:18:00] is find the little thing that they can exploit, where a little bit of effort will get them a lot of results.
So we need to reward that behavior, but put in better guidelines so that we're not disadvantaging our other reps.
Ricky Pearl: Of course. The problem is that rep will get promoted cuz they're gonna have the biggest pipeline. But they're gonna fail at their next job potentially, because the reasons that they were promoted might not translate. They were creative. They had clever ideas, they had good strategies and tactics that maybe they would be better to go into sales leadership.
Then into, in a closing role potentially, for example, where they may be anyway. That's such a good example. I had a new a, a company where the comp the people had to do a lot of demos. They were measured on demos and they were using one of those tools that tracks the actual demo that was done.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: And so they were just doing what they called can't remember what they called. It was like ghost demos or dummy demos all day long. They would sit there and, because it would track how long you were on each slide, because they were looking for a formula that worked. They couldn't just like open the [00:19:00] demo, close the demo, like they had to sit there actively spending an hour doing nothing, clicking through a demo. And
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Wow.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. And it became so institutional that like reps were being onboarded and then the manager would like, take them inside and say, Hey, listen the metrics here are like unachievable. We want you to actually do 10 demos. But you have to hit 40, which is like fucking impossible. So, every day you just need to do two of these.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Oh my goodness.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. And it got worse than that. It got worse than this. They then started doing this in-person demo, so they're doing it off an iPad, and now the iPad could track the GPS location of where the demo was done and could even have the microphone on to record the room that it was done in because they now trying to combat dummy demos by adding on technology to track GPS and record the demo.
So now people were driving to the parking lots of where the customers were and doing a live demo for an hour to drink the system like [00:20:00] it, it just escalated so, so hard where it was a fucking cultural issue. It was just a misalignment of expectations. And things got out of control. And I'm not talking this at a small scale.
I'm talking this institution, like I'm talking like 80 sales reps, spending 50% of their time doing fake demos and being measured and recorded on
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. That's a rev ops horror story right there.
Ricky Pearl: a horror story. But I think it's, it was, for me, it was just this enlightenment of wow, you get what you measure,
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Oh
Ricky Pearl: Get what you measure, not what you need.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
How do you help sales leaders determine what they should measure?
Ricky Pearl: How do you help sales leaders determine what they should measure?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I think it's a part of, and I'm gonna be a broken record, that value that you bring and measuring the impact that it has on your current client, because that is what brings in the next client. I mean, there's like standard metrics that everyone should be tracking. Your conversion rate from one stage to another.
How many activities it takes to get a [00:21:00] meeting versus how many it takes to get a close. Those are pretty easy to find. Again, the community is strong. Those metrics are everywhere, but I think every company has those ROI metrics where if you use us, X percent change will happen to you.
And that is what we need to measure first before we get into how many calls and emails and texts and LinkedIn messages and all that.
Ricky Pearl: So now looking at you specifically, there's obviously a positive return on investment for employing Central Metrics, otherwise you wouldn't be in business.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: For you, how does a company determine like how much they need to spend on revenue operations to get a positive return on investments? Like some companies spending millions, they've got sales teams, with a hundred people on their sales team.
Obviously a 1% improvement will have a dramatic impact
for startups, for founders, I feel like they're always in this place where they've, they're trying to do everything as cheaply as possible.
They're not necessarily generating revenue yet cuz they [00:22:00] either pre-revenue or at least don't have product market fit where they've got consistently great revenue.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Should I be spending five grand on a HubSpot setup or is now the time to spend 50 grand?
Ricky Pearl: Where do they place themselves? Like how do they find like, should I be spending five grand on a HubSpot setup or is now the time to spend 50 grand?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, I think there's a formula here that we haven't figured out yet, but it starts with the revenue goal for the time period that you're measuring. And then it immediately extends to the current costs of your daily operating expenses. And then if you wanna extend that further, that next step is, a number that I'm seeing a lot is a burn multiple, I think it was David Sachs that made it popular, which is just, how much money you're spending over a time period and how much new revenue you added over that time period. So how much are you spending per new dollar that's coming in? And that's where I
think you need to start. Yeah,
Ricky Pearl: The thing I love the most about Rev Op is how you can take a complex problem like I gave it in a very complicated way that I could promise you. Most people are sitting there thinking, I don't know the fucking [00:23:00] answer. And break it down to such simple maths, saying like, there's a science to selling.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. There is.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah, there might be a creative solution, but at least let's bring clarity. Let's turn this data into information. Let's look at the burn rate. Let's look at the conversion rate. Let's look at your revenue goals. Let's look at your current spend. All of this becomes a framework now where you can start plucking out some logical assumptions.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. And I would say like, it's hard to get there, and what I've, what's it's taught me to own a business and run a business. It has taught me more than anything how little the scientific method comes in to a small and growing business, a scrappy business. We are trying to get to tomorrow, not two years from now. And so like I understand even from personal experience how easy it is to be a referral based business or be a custom order based business because that's what we were a year ago and two years ago and we did not put in these levels of value that I'm explaining to you.
And we did [00:24:00] okay. We made some money, but the ceiling is a lot lower. When you're not thinking like this and lifestyle business you can do without this thought process, but a scalable, impactful business that you know can survive without you needs this energy.
Ricky Pearl: Oh mate, you are motivating me something hardcore at the moment. Because this is where Pointer's at. We are doing such incredible work for our clients. The value they're getting is, I feel almost too much. But we are currently going through a process to saying like, what would Pointer need to look like to double in size this year?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: And as soon as we ask that question, alright, this works but can this process be doubled? We're like, can't be doubled without hiring another Ishan. Like, well then it's not a great system because Ishan's a very unique character very unique in his skillset, in his experience, in his capabilities.
There aren't other shots. If that's what we need, this won't work. So how do we double this? And we are currently changing all these processes to be able to be doubled. So really that resonates a [00:25:00] hell of a lot. And I imagine a lot of companies are there cuz even though they're selling technology, it is technology that requires heavy onboarding, to the point that it's a service business.
Yeah, it's services based technology. There's a lot of that at the moment. There should be a whole category.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah
Ricky Pearl: Really should be whole category.
Tell me a little bit about customer success and is that something that you feel all revenue operations consultants have great insights into
Ricky Pearl: Tell me a little bit about customer success and is that something that you feel all revenue operations consultants have great insights into or if that's your focus do you need a shop really hard for an agency that's specialized there?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. I mean, I would say that is a personal gap for me, customer success. I started as an SDR. I've closed deals, I've done demand gen. I've gone into marketing. But when it comes to CS, that is something that there's still a lot for me to learn. I mean, there's still a lot for me to learn in everything I just said, but I think there's more for me to learn in CS than the other functions.
With the consulting org I would say like, funny enough, the company mimics the founder, which is[00:26:00] out of everyone that we're working with, I can think of one or two that have kind of full cycle experience. So CS was a part of it, but I can't think of anybody that we brought on with specifically that expertise.
And I've been in startups for 10 years-ish. And 10 years ago CS was not getting enough attention. And 10 years later, I still feel like that's the case.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. As hard as the team at Winning By Designs is trying. People still aren't catching on that a dollar earned in CS is worth more than a dollar earned top of the funnel.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah, I mean, that's like basic. you take a college management consulting course, you know they're telling you that same thing, the money that they're, and to let's simplify it, right? The money that you're already going to get is more valuable than the money that you have to try and get.
it's as simple as that.
Ricky Pearl: The cost of acquiring that dollar is very different. Yeah. You're gonna see a full dollar of your CS dollar or a large percentage of it, and you're gonna see a fraction of the percent on your new [00:27:00] business.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yep, exactly.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Anyway, mate, I could keep chatting about these things, I really can. And I probably do keep chatting about these things for hours and I want to talk to you more about everything revenue operations.
What would you say is your biggest gap in revenue operations that you, even as qualified, skilled consultants are actively working to improve?
Ricky Pearl: I want to ask one final question.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Okay.
Ricky Pearl: I was gonna say, at your business,
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Okay.
Ricky Pearl: what would you say is your biggest gap in revenue operations that you, even as qualified, skilled consultants are actively working to improve?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: Yeah. I think you caught me, Ricky, I've brought up aligning value about four times in this call because that is what our biggest issue was last year, and that is what my biggest focus is this quarter. I also brought up that you can't just be a referral based custom order business because again, that's what we were, and so the gap right now is, scalability.
Right now revenue does not come in without Sebastien, and clients do not get serviced without Kevin. And Sebastien and Kevin are unique individuals that you can't just go out to [00:28:00] the market and find some carbon copy of them. But what we can do is standardize our processes. Understand at a granular level how much value we actually provide and turn it this thing into a process that anybody can run and improve upon over time.
How do they get a hold of you?
Ricky Pearl: Well, I will just add that at the moment whilst any clients are getting the Kevin and Sebastian show, they're fucking lucky cuz those are two seriously talented individuals that you know, I mean, let's be honest, that most organizations can't afford to bring in-house but can get all of the benefits of just through the consulting.
So, if somebody did want that benefit how do they get a hold of you?
Sebastien Van Heyningen: LinkedIn is the best way. And shameless plug, our consultants are better than me. Many of them I reported to at previous jobs, so that's, I just want to say that yes, whoever's working with me is lucky, not as lucky as our future clients will be. No offense to our current clients.[00:29:00]
Ricky Pearl: Fair enough. Fair enough. So if you wanna have Heineken with a G, grab two beers, get Sebastien on LinkedIn. And yeah, mate, thank you so much for being in the show. I've loved talking to you and I'm really motivated to try and improve the revenue operations at Pointer help our customers improve our revenue operations.
And you obviously know that if any of our customers have a hairy need to align their operations with their strategies I'm gonna say, Hey, I know two people two very uniquely shaped and skilled individuals that can sort this problem out.
Sebastien Van Heyningen: I appreciate that, Ricky. Thank you, and thanks for having me. This was fun. I agree.
Ricky Pearl: Cheers.
