Brad Rosen, Sales Assembly President on RevOps and Growth

Michael Koenig: Hey, it's Michael. If you've been on a

Brad Rosen: Yeah, um, I ended up there kind of just out of the blue, if you will. I started my career in finance, so I was in finance for a long time at big banks. I was going to business school and recognized that I wanted to not be in a big bank in a small cubicle, and, uh, so did the proverbial switch to startups and got really fortunate to be included and starting to work with some serial entrepreneurs. They had started a few different B2B SaaS companies, joined them early on at G2 and helped scale over 7 years the, the go-to-market functions. So sales, CS, both of those for a few years, and then was scaling the partnerships team. And actually, our founder and CEO, Goedert, came to me and said, "Hey, why don't you come run RevOps?" And I'm like, "Don't know what that is." That was, this is 8, 10 years ago and it was kind of just starting to evolve. Second time he came to me, I said, "Still don't know what that is." And by the third time I was like, "All right, I get the hint. I'll come run RevOps." But it was actually a wonderful intersection of my experience, which was, you know, kind of that financial data analytics background coupled with my go-to-market commercial strategy background.. And so it allowed me to really dig into the business, have a meaningful impact, and help to scale in a really great way. Uh, so we did that at G2 for a long time. Um, and then about 4 years ago, I joined Sales Assembly as a president and, uh, running all operations, strategy, and a number of different departments, uh, from product to CS to go-to-market operations is rolling up to me.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. So two things coming from this. The first What is RevOps? Give us the primer. And then second, this is pre-LLM ChatGPT era. It feels like forever ago. How'd you go about learning it if you couldn't just pop it into a prompt?

Brad Rosen: It's actually a great point. So first of all, the definition, I don't think you can define it. And then that's part of the issue is that every company, it means something different. RevOps, is it RevOps? Is it sales ops? Is it marketing ops? What does it mean to you? And especially at smaller or growing companies, usually it starts too late. I actually just saw a piece from Andreessen Horowitz that basically said what the optimal ratio should be, and you would be shocked at what it should be. You should have like a RevOps person basically once you have 10 go-to-market people, and then like 2 by the time you have 25, and 3 by the time you're at, you know, 50, and it scales up. Usually you're way behind that curve because it's hard to recognize the value and be able to make the business case because It doesn't— it's not a one-to-one linear, let's hire a RevOps person and this is the revenue we're going to see from it. I'd rather go hire another account executive or BDR, which is usually what happens. But ideally, if you're doing it the right way, it's actually exponential, is that one RevOps person can make all the go-to-market team significantly more effective. So the definition really depends on what you're looking for. Some people say RevOps and they mean somebody who's really in sales ops, a glorified Salesforce administrator, if you will. Other people are looking for a strategic partner, and then the problem becomes how much are you willing to pay? You want the strategic partner who can also do Salesforce administration, who can also do go-to-market strategy, who can also lean in when they need enablement. That's a, first of all, a tough person to find, and second of all, you're gonna have to pay that person a good amount of money. Um, and so I think there's this like level setting that you have to do when you dive into, I want someone from my organization to do this, That's wonderful. The first thing I ask somebody when they tell me that, I say, what exactly are you expecting and what do you want out of this person? And then we can talk about what you should be expecting to pay and see from the market to get that. So that was kind of like the definition side. And then your second question about not having AI, what happens there? We did a lot of learning by trial by fire is the first problem, right? I think you still do that in a growing organization. You're always trying to figure out how things work. And then I would try and connect with people. I would connect with them. Actually, Sales Assembly was one of the first places. We used to be in-person networking opportunity. I'd meet up with 10, 15, 20 different RevOps people in the city of Chicago for breakfast. Great opportunity to trade ideas and learn. And then the second is we'd go to our VC partners and say, who else in the portfolio is doing this well? We're revamping comp plans. Can you introduce me to 3 to 5 different people that have done that?

Michael Koenig: So what problems does RevOps actually solve?

Brad Rosen: It really depends on what you're looking for for them. In the early days, I think it should be solving— let me frame it that way— what I think they should be solving is one, setting the right foundation for your organization. When you don't set the right foundation, what happens is you have poor data hygiene, you have poor systems and processes, and that makes it much harder to scale because you can't ramp people as quickly. You can't identify the high performers versus the low performers all the time. You don't have a consistent sales process. You're probably letting leads fall through the funnel. You're probably letting customers slip that you should be servicing in a more meaningful way. Um, so you're not optimized for success. And so they should be solving how do you optimize for efficiency and success? And then as you get later on, you're doing a lot of data analysis, you're doing systems and tooling, you have different parts of RevOps that are all solving different things. And then as you get even larger in a much larger organization, Uh, you probably have different RevOps functions servicing different parts of the organization. You could have RevOps for enterprise, RevOps for SMB, you know, RevOps or CS Ops for customer success, and kind of start to bifurcate so that they're all solving challenges that those specific departments are facing.

Michael Koenig: It sounds like we have a couple pieces to RevOps. The two main ones are going to be an analytical function, and the second is an execution function. The analytical function is essentially looking at where are we losing sales, right? Because that's the end goal. And then the execution function is what tools do our sales folks need and how things need to actually run in order for them to close the sales that they otherwise wouldn't. Is that a fair summary?

Brad Rosen: I'd probably add in a strategic function as well, like what is the strategy here? How are we actually going to go about doing this? And I think that's where the hard part comes in, is this person, if, if there's a leader of the group, which there should be, um, but the leader actually has a really tough job of melding the data with the feedback from the field with the strategy of the organization. You're playing this kind of triangle, right? And you have to be able to go to the field and say, what are the things that are challenging you? How can we make your life easier? Like, how do we make your life better? But you can't say yes to everything. So you have to like take that feedback, prioritize it, understand what that is, Then you go look at the data. Is this actually a problem or is this a squeaky wheel thing? How big of an issue is it? If we fixed it, how much would it cost and what would be the impact and the outcome of fixing that problem? And so how do we prioritize those projects? And then going back to the business and saying, what are our goals and how are we going to achieve those goals by maximizing these three things? So it's a really challenging place to be. I loved it because of that. I felt like you had an opportunity to have a true impact on the business. You're in every part of the business, so you get to understand what's going on and problem solve. Like, if you, if you love problem solving, RevOps is for you. There's always a challenge, always something new, but it's also not for the faint of heart. You have to be able to say yes and say no. You have to be able to, and by the way, say no not just to an account executive that's asking for something, say no to the CRO, say no to the CEO. Like, there's a lot of people that you might have to make business cases too for why or why, why you're doing something or not doing something. And you have to be prepared to have those executive-level conversations and be able to back it up, obviously, with coherent arguments and data.

Michael Koenig: You talked about the foundation, setting up that foundation early on with functions like this, especially if you're maybe a bit of an older company. You need to modernize, you need to introduce regular practices. What What does a good foundation look like if you're setting up from day one at that early stage when RevOps should be introduced to a company?

Brad Rosen: Yeah, if you're able to do it early on, it allows you to put the right practices in. I think that's probably, you know, you could set up the perfect tooling, but if your company doesn't truly believe in what's going on and doesn't have that ingrained in your culture, it's never going to work. Like, people have to understand that this is part of what we do. We input this data, we actually follow these specific things, we are comfortable giving here but not here, we get certain approvals in different ways. Like, that's a cultural thing, and it has to come from the top down, by the way, like CEO, CRO, all the way down. It cannot come from like, oh yeah, the reps just know how to do it and they want to do it. So obviously the sooner you can implement that, the better. But there is also a data and a tooling perspective of that. Once you get ingrained into a messy system, it's really hard to rip things out, as, as you know, well know as well. You and I have talked about this before, but it's really hard to decouple. Now, given AI and the new way of doing things, it's probably easier than I would say it was in the past. You can export data, you can, you know, use APIs and different things to move data across systems, so you have an ability to do that. But still not easy, and you're still in this issue if you have an older company, a legacy company that has— they're kind of set in their ways. You still have this change management part that you'd have to run internally to get people to, in the future, do it the way you want them to do it.

Michael Koenig: Hmm, interesting. And so with the foundation that you've set up, how does AI change that foundation? How does AI change the picture now?

Brad Rosen: It definitely allows you or will allow you at some point, right? I think we're not at that point where we feel, at least I have seen or feel like AI can actually change that in a meaningful way. I think there's certain points where it can help, but to transform a whole organization and all of the data within it, I think we're probably not there yet. But you could imagine a world where already you can see it's taking unstructured data and making it structured. You have a call and it records it., and you see the, you know, the summary and the takeaways, and it can put, you know, all this different information into different fields in Salesforce. Like, that's the tip of the iceberg, but you can imagine this world where all our calls and emails and unstructured data is all being structured, not only from a recording standpoint, but also from a forecasting standpoint and being able to then project of like what's going on, who are our best reps, where do they need to get better at what they're doing, Can we actually forecast better? Because we can say based on all the unstructured data, you know, we have some understanding of intent to buy. That's again, a lot of tools are already working on that, but it'll get considerably better. So that would be one is you don't necessarily even need to make the data better than it already is, because even if it were messy, the AI could actually couple it and make sure that it like is all summarized in the proper way.

Michael Koenig: So going on, let's say, I don't know, 8 years now. RevOps is still around. It doesn't seem like it's the buzzword du jour. Why is that? Why are people really latching on to it?

Brad Rosen: I think it is becoming more and more because people recognize the value in this idea, especially as things have turned and we're away from the

Michael Koenig: And just a quick clarification,

Brad Rosen: Short answer is a lot of times it doesn't, especially because even if you wanted to, you would have to get to a place where people let down their guard and their ego and are able to say, "I'm gonna do what's right for the business and not necessarily what's always right for me or my team," right? You'd have to have that mentality. Some companies have it, some companies don't. Some people have it, some people don't. So I think it's challenging. But what I do believe is that there's two parts of that. The first is, are we all speaking the same language? Do we all have the same data? Are we all looking at the same thing? Right? Marketing is not looking at, oh yeah, well I sent you MQLs and sales is looking at closed one business. Like there's a disconnect there, right? And then CS is sitting there being like, yeah, great, you closed this business, but it's not renewing. So like we have to change the top of the funnel here to make sure that we have the proper LTV for our customers. So everybody's incentives are different. And then you talk about incentives, like are we actually compensating our people on those things as well. So should marketing have some component of sales? Almost definitely yes. But should they also have some component of like retention? Maybe. Like there's things that you can look at in ways to tie everybody's views together. Compensation helps, but I think visibility is probably the most important thing. Are we visibly looking at all of the data in the right way, all the way through the funnel, through retention? And then are people actually actioning on that? Here's what's happening, here's what we would like to happen, and here's how we can get there. And I think a lot of times we're just very myopic in our roles because that's the way that SaaS companies were set up. Everybody does their job and they do it really well, but they don't do anything outside of their job, right? Like, we want them to master the idea of marketing and then master BDR and AE and CSM. And like, there's just— now I think a lot of companies actually, frankly, just by way of having to do this because of cuts has to kind of meld into other things. You know, AEs have to do more prospecting and other people have to, you know, CSMs. I'm seeing a big trend here where there's a lot less non-quote-carrying CSMs. People are transforming their teams into quota-carrying because from a financial standpoint, it's just really challenging to hold people in a role where they're getting paid good money, which they're doing great work, but then don't have a commercial aspect tied to it. You, you can understand obviously why that might be financially challenging when you start to break down the economics of it.

Michael Koenig: And then just a little further clarification, MQL is a marketing qualified lead, LTV, lifetime value of a customer, CSM, customer success manager. You talked about essentially what it sounds like is breaking those people out of their clear, defined, black and white definition of that role and then creating alignment seems to be the overarching theme here of creating alignment across the teams. How do you, as president, as a leader, how do you go about doing that? How do you create alignment?

Brad Rosen: It starts from when you hire, right? Do people actually buy into what you're selling? Does a marketing leader believe that they are responsible for sales? Does the sales leader believe they're responsible in some capacity for retention? Um, and does a, you know, a CS leader, do they believe that they're responsible to giving feedback and closing that feedback loop all the way back to those other leaders to say, this is what we need to understand on the first call to get the right ICP and the right, you know, customers into our, our customer base. So I think that starts to the top. Um, that's not easier said than done. Interviews are tricky, and then figuring out exactly who's going to fit is tricky. So I also think it's a cultural thing. It's just like, like visibility and transparency. Are we always showing all of the metrics? Are we talking about all the metrics in every team meeting? Are we saying, you know, are we involving the other folks? If we have a problem with retention, are we bringing marketing and sales into that discussion? Or are we just saying, no, the CS team is going to go off on some offsite and talk about how they're going to get better at retention next year? It generally doesn't work, right? And so I think people feel ownership when they have visibility into something and then also have an ability to help try and craft the solutions to that., uh, problem. So that— those would be my big things.

Michael Koenig: Certainly there's some things that you can do in the hiring process, but how do you get people to kind of set aside and maybe not have sharp elbows?

Brad Rosen: That's challenging, I would say. But I think the, the key would also be that they see how it benefits them. Like, you also— it all comes back to everybody is looking out for themselves. That's the reality. If you break it down, yes, there are certain people who are more willing to help others regardless of like how it affects them than others, but The reality is everybody wants to do better in their career, right? And they want to continue to improve, but ultimately everybody wants to succeed. They want to do well and they want the company to do well because they want to financially succeed. They want to feel like they've accomplished something. They want to build their resume, whatever that may be. And I actually recognize a lot of that as we were building RevOps out at G2. It's just like the money really matters, but you know what else really matters? Hitting quota. Like saying that you hit quota and going back to your family and your friends and on your resume, like being able to you know, pin that up there and say, I hit quota, right? And so that's the same with anybody, leaders or not. Everybody wants to feel a sense of accomplishment. And so if you can go back to the marketing team and say, if we can solve retention, this is going to help marketing in XY

Michael Koenig: Let's talk about metrics. How do you decide what are your best practices for metrics that matter? What do you watch?

Brad Rosen: We try and distill it down to a few core metrics for the company. And then yes, there will be departmental metrics that tie into that. But what we don't do is we try and as best we can, vanity metrics just don't cut it. Like, yes, they can be part of a discussion, but those are not what we show. We try and show everything that ties back to revenue or retention or whatever it may be, but like really tied to our goals. For instance, we sell training and development. We have a thing called CSAT, obviously, that shows how happy somebody is with the programming. We track that religiously. We love that, that stat. It is not part of one of our core metrics as a company because we believe that is just a means to an end. That is not actually a metric that will drive business results. It's something that is a precursor to showing whether a customer is happy, which then in turn could drive retention. But like, you're starting to draw a line. There's different steps there. So I think the metrics have to be very clear, definable obviously, and then actionable. Can you actually take action on this and make a change based on what your job is? So those are the big things that we look at.

Michael Koenig: So what's the single metric to really evaluate customer happiness and, and thereby the health of the business?

Brad Rosen: I don't know, especially in this day and age, if, if people renew on happiness. I think that You talked about, you know, we talked about the

Michael Koenig: Yeah, that's interesting. We've mentioned

Brad Rosen: Yeah, for sure. And AI SDR is one of those that's very well known and talked about. I think there's value potentially there. Like you said, it sounds like it was working pretty well. Obviously, the challenge is if everybody's doing AI SDR, it's the same thing that happened when we were sending personal emails and all of a sudden we got Salesloft and Outreach. All of a sudden, like, you could just blast hundreds, thousands of people a day. And so what happened is our inboxes just became this, you know, graveyard of emails because anybody could send it and they would, you know, personalization back then was like, hey, first name, you know, hey Michael. It's like, okay, they They know my name. And now with Clay and all these other tools, well, now you can say, hey Michael, I know you went to University of Michigan. I know you, you know, all this stuff, this stuff about you, which is great. That's fine. It doesn't necessarily show me, it just shows me that you did a nice scraping job, but that doesn't imply that I'm necessarily in the market for your tool. So then you gotta layer in intent and I don't think we're fully there yet. But the point is same thing with AI SDR. If everybody can make these calls, and it's not a person, so it can literally just like keep going as fast as it can dial, which is really fast, then it's just a bunch of waste and it gets drowned out, in my opinion. Uh, doesn't mean it can't work. I think it's just very noisy. You make a point though that I think is interesting around can AI actually speed up the sales process? Like, as a buyer, I actually find that interesting if I am interested in the tool. I've always found that people try and slow down the sales process. They want to qualify you and they want to understand exactly who you are and what you're doing and make sure they handle projections and all this. Usually as a RevOps person, you kind of know what you want. Like you're going into a buying process, you're like, no, no, no, I get it. Like I understand how this works and I understand the data that needs to go into it. I understand the integrations and partnerships and all this stuff. I'm like, can we just get to the meat of the conversation? And so with a bot, like maybe you can, maybe you can get to the meat of the conversation much more quickly, whether that's purchasing something, support. Like there's a number of different use cases where you could imagine that when you sit on the call, and it's Xfinity or whoever. I'm sure everybody calls into somebody. It could be anybody, but Xfinity is a lot for me. And they're just like, you're typing different numbers, you can't get to— can I just talk to somebody? But if that agent actually could answer your question really quickly, that's fine. I don't need to talk to somebody. It's just that you're asking me, like, you're trying to lead me down this path. But if I could just say, I want to change my plan because of this, that, and the other, and they're like, great, here's the new thing, I'll send you the contract. Wow, that was easy. I would love to do that as a, as a buyer from my experience.

Michael Koenig: We'll be right back. Hey, it's Michael. If you've been on a

Brad Rosen: They don't get offended, right?

Michael Koenig: Right. And maybe, you know, maybe I should start being nicer to agents before they become our, you know, overlords. I have started saying like please and thank you in ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Brad Rosen: I actually thought about that the other day when I was typing in ChatGPT. I was like, should I be like, because at some point they're gonna, I know they're gonna run some like analysis on me and they're like, oh, he's not very, you know, not in a bad, not very polite, even though I'm a bot. And it's like, oh, okay.

Michael Koenig: Yeah.

Brad Rosen: Yeah.

Michael Koenig: I, and, and like, Nonetheless, I actually found it to be a refreshing sales call where I would never want a sales— if someone pings you and they're like, hey, can I get a few minutes of your time? Absolutely not. Right? If I wanted this tool, I would come to you. If an agent, agent bot pings me, like, that was actually quite nice. There you go.

Brad Rosen: I think that gets down to the bottom of like what you're looking for though. You're just looking for information. And you don't wanna get sucked into, one, having to let somebody down. I think from like a personal standpoint, you're like, you know what, I'm good here. Like, I, you know, now you're making excuses, hey, I gotta run, I gotta meet you. Like, you just feel bad 'cause you don't wanna do that. But like with a bot, if you hang up, you don't care, it's not a person, you don't feel bad. And two, you don't feel like you're gonna get sucked into a whole sales process. Now you probably are with the bot, but you don't feel as much like, hey, can I follow up with you on Tuesday and let's set this meeting? You're like, no, no, no, I'm good. And you again feel bad because you understand the other side of it too. You're— you've been on the sales side of it, the go-to-market side, and you would want your sellers to be doing those exact same things that a BDR would be asking you about. So it's an interesting dynamic there.

Michael Koenig: Well, at the end of the call, it asked me, can I set up a meeting for you with one of our account executives to see how this customizes? And my next thought was, why do I need to talk to an account exec? Can— let's just do this. Let's just hammer this out right now. And so that was my other sort of, oh wow, this is, this is going to be something for sure. Let's get back to RevOps, SalesOps. We talked about RevOps, SalesOps. What is the difference?

Brad Rosen: Good question. Uh, I think a lot of people conflate different things. It, it doesn't really matter what you call it. Uh, you know, SalesOps in theory would be for sales and then you could have CSOps and MarketingOps and. You know, business ops. Like, there's a number of different ops that could go under RevOps in theory. Uh, so I think that that's just the difference is like what you're focusing on. Somebody might call themselves sales ops and actually be RevOps. You can call yourself RevOps and actually just be sales ops. It really depends. I think it also depends on the organization and who's involved and, and how you actually want to align the organization. So a lot of times things like marketing ops and DevOps and things will kind of be split out and Sales usually will include CS, but not always. It depends where the organization runs. Sales ops will usually run up through the— they could report to a CFO or someone, but usually through the CRO. And the CRO also oversees CS, then now they're CS ops, and there you go, now I'm RevOps. So it really just depends like what the structure of the organization is. And, uh, I will say, if the more bifurcated those roles are, the harder it is. Because now you have different people with different competing priorities having to work with each other as opposed to if you had one organization that was the operational foundation of your go-to-market team. They can see around corners, they know what's going on in different departments and can also be kind of that tiebreaker when you need to prioritize certain projects or budgets against one another. They should be able to understand what the highest priorities are for the organization.

Michael Koenig: So why don't we just kill sales ops, let's kill marketing ops, let's kill rev ops and have GTM ops or commercial ops, and let's just put this to bed. And there you go.

Brad Rosen: Yeah, I mean, that's, uh, yeah, just keep naming it something else.

Michael Koenig: We need another name.

Brad Rosen: Yeah, right.

Michael Koenig: If you want to replace names, yes, exactly. We just need to introduce a new one to kill the others. So let's talk about budget. We've gotten to this a few times. How would you advise someone in RevOps to go about, one, advocating for RevOps and to trying to get some more budget?

Brad Rosen: Advocating is really challenging. Uh, showing that you're having incremental impact across an organization is really tough. As we've said, it's hard to draw direct revenue to a role that is enabling other roles for, for better or worse terms. And also, like, if you talk about the strategic side, like, how do you get budget for strategy? Like, that's not very intuitive. I liken it to enablement and partnerships. The leadership have to understand the inherent value of these things to be able to maximize their ability to execute within the organization. Like, they have to give those roles autonomy and a leash and an understanding of like, no, I, I just know that what you're doing is valuable. Having said that, here's the way that RevOps should be advocating for themselves and showing the value. They should be taking the things that they're doing and measuring against the go-to-market operations. Like they should be improving. So whether that means that they're getting better at forecasting, that the sales team is getting more efficient at what they're doing, are we able to reduce team size or keep the team size the same but grow the revenue? Like cut costs, are we able to reduce burn? Like RevOps should be aligned to the organization as a whole. The same way you would say that marketing should be tied to revenue, like RevOps should be tied to the organizational growth. And so if you're not doing that, then you're probably not hitting on the right priorities, because ideally you are aligned with the organization and being able to grow it. Uh, but showing that the organization's growing turns into this idea of like, how do you actually show that it was you and not the sales team or some other aspect of the organization that was helping to grow as well? You have to be very clear on what you're working on That also the time management thing, by the way, RevOps can easily turn into like a support system where everyone's like, oh, this is broken and that's that. And you're just like fighting fires all day. You have to say, hey, the fires are 20% of my time. The other 80% are gonna be focused on these strategic projects. If you can start checking those off the list, it becomes a lot easier and more visible to the CRO, CEO, board on what you're doing. Cause you're able to say, hey, we, we put in this new tool. And it ramped our reps, uh, you know, a month faster than they were ramping before. And then we also put in this new, you know, sales process, and that allowed us to be able to forecast, you know, 3% more accurately. Then you can really tie back to real true business metrics.

Michael Koenig: What's one of the things earlier on in your career in RevOps that you wish you had known and learned the hard way?

Brad Rosen: The spreadsheet is just a sheet. And people don't operate out of spreadsheets, they operate from emotions and they operate from feelings and they don't always have the information that you have. You are sitting in a room with your CEO, your CRO, your board, you have all of this data coming in, you understand like what the capacity planning looks like, you generally understand like how much people make, like you're very sensitive information, how people are attaining to quota, what the plans are, and then you make these really sound judgments based on all of this data that you've internalized and run, and you feel good about it. Maybe even leadership feels good about it, and then you roll it out and the sales team's like, what are you talking about? Like, what's going on here? And you may or may not be able to fully explain why something is the way it is. And then there's emotions that get involved, as they should, and everybody deserves the right to like understand how decisions are made and how that affects their job and their, you know, earning potential and all that. And so I think that that is a— early on, that's a challenge for a lot of folks, myself included. It was because, one, you're still trying to find your footing and understand, like, where do I have the authority and the ability to make these decisions and to roll them out properly? And then how do I do that properly? You know, I rolled out, you know, different territories, comp plans, all these other things. And I thought I understood them. I did. I think I thought that the teams understood them a lot of times and they didn't. And that's on me to like make sure that people actually understand what's going on and have a grasp on how things should work internally.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. So often we'll think about something and by the time we're ready to chat about it, by the time we're ready to roll it out to the team, it's so familiar to us and we fall victim to not realizing that this is brand new to people. So we have to actually bring people on or help them get to where we are. And that can take patience and time. How would you do it? What would you do differently? Like, how do you go about it today if you had to do the same thing knowing what you know now?

Brad Rosen: I would be really in tune with the field. Like, I would just— I would be on sales calls. I'd be meeting with the sales team, not just like the leaders, but like the actual reps and understanding like where they're coming from, what they care about. And then I would very clearly have much more documentation, training, and probably timing. Like I would roll things out much sooner, have more time to digest, get feedback, share ideas. Like people nodding their heads is, you think it's agreement. It's actually just them nodding their heads. Like it doesn't mean they fully understand something. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way. I mean that in a, you're in a training with 50 people and everyone's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Like whatever. But when it gets down to brass tacks, like the they, they maybe don't, and that's on you, that's not on them. And so just taking more time to elaborate on things, create calculators, documentation, being like really true to trying to be as transparent as possible what's happening and how it's going to affect those people and what went into the decision. For instance, people always ask like how many people it should be hitting quota or whatever. You have to set a target and then you have to like tell your team what that target is. Like, we expect this much, and you have to then be willing to say we missed our target or we hit our target, whatever that is. But just like a little more of this, um, ability to be extremely transparent, because then I think people will appreciate that. And also you'll feel better about the idea that like we're all on the same page here, whether we're hitting or missing, at least everybody's understanding that we're, you know, marching towards the same goal.

Michael Koenig: Question for you: team missed quota, what's that next conversation? What are you telling them?

Brad Rosen: Uh, if the whole team misses quota, you're saying, versus like Specific people. Yeah. Um, I think obviously circumstances are very— that play a big part in that, but ultimately it comes down to if you are in sales, your job is to hit your goals. And same with leaders, by the way. So if you're the leader of the sales team and you're missing goals, then like, and we see it all the time, then obviously your job is in jeopardy as well. I used to have this conversation actually with CSMs that were looking to transition into quota carrying. I'd say, that's wonderful, we'll help you get there. I just want you to understand that there's a much shorter leash in sales than there is in, you know, a CS position. And by the way, that's, you know, that's why they generally get paid more, because they have a high stress— it's a really hard job and, uh, high stress, big ups, big downs, like, you know, very big swings. And so if you miss, you have to be open though. Like, here's why I believe we missed, here's what the company is going to do. Like, this is the part that the company is taking on. Hey, we need to get you better marketing, more BDRs, the product is improving, all these things. Or if unfortunately if they have to go through some organizational changes, this is why we went through them. This is why we believe that people that are still remaining can and will hit quota. And here's, you know, we've already laid out all— here's all the opportunities you should have. Here's what your new books will look like. Here's, you know, the data to support the idea that we have the right people in place to affect it next year. But ultimately, it's some combination of the company and the people. And you gotta figure out what that, you know, that combination looks like to make it successful.

Michael Koenig: You talked about RevOps not being for the faint of heart. Sales, certainly not for the faint of heart.

Brad Rosen: Most definitely.

Michael Koenig: You talked about in terms of the faint of heart for RevOps, folks who go into it need to be able to say no to leadership. Can you tell us a bit of what's, what's the time you had to say no to your CEO or COO or CRO?

Brad Rosen: Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of times where, you know, it could be no. It could also be like, let me share this other opinion. Like, you have this opinion of why we should do this. And a lot of times that comes from— we talked about having a pulse on the street and understanding like what people are actually feeling. And a lot of times they'll say, we don't need these resources, or we don't need to invest in this or that. And you say, no, actually, I think we do, or vice versa. Hey, I really think that we should look at, you know, hiring another 2 people because that would help us, you know, increase our revenue. It's like, I just don't see the pipeline. It's not there. They're not going to be successful. So it's not necessarily like a yes, no all the time, but it's definitely providing a different perspective because of the information that you have. You are sitting at the precipice of all this information. You should have the data and then you should have the anecdotal feedback from the team and be able to make an informed decision. But you have to be able to have that conversation and say, that thing you just suggested, I actually don't think it's a great idea, and here's why. Now, it doesn't mean you're always gonna get your way. Like, they might do it anyway, which is their prerogative. I do the same as a president. Like, I'll take in what my team says and their feedback and then say, okay, based on that, what do I want to do? But you want people that are going to challenge your thoughts and your processes, especially if you believe that they're competent and have rationale as to why they feel differently.

Michael Koenig: One of the things that I love— obviously we're connected on LinkedIn, and I'm connected with some of your team members, and as I watch you guys interact on LinkedIn, you guys rib each other back and forth, and it's actually hilarious. And what you take away from this, and I actually haven't seen it anywhere else, is that it seems like you guys, you and the team, that you all actually like each other.

Brad Rosen: Sometimes. No, we know, we know, we really do. And I think that that's— we talked about culture, we talked about, you know, how do you get people in lockstep I think if you have a good time, and by the way, you have to then be able to take it yourself. Like, you can't just give it, obviously, the same way. But our CRO, Matt Green, is a perfect example of this. Like, he's self-deprecating in some of the most, uh, some of the most I've ever seen in somebody. But he's a wonderful person and an amazing salesperson. And, and so he connects with people on a personal level because he's able to do that. And we— that's what we like to do. It's not right for every company, but I do think that if you can get to that point, people see it and say, you know what, I, I think they're having a good time. Like, I want to work with people like that, or at least like be, you know, friends or colleagues, or however you want to frame it. It kind of lets the guard down. And so I think you need to be you regardless of, you know, if you want to take it to that level. But you say this in sales, you say this in any position, you have to be yourself, and, uh, that's when you'll be most successful. And if you're not being yourself and not being genuine, um, I think at some point it's just not gonna fit well, or you're gonna— there's gonna be tension.

Michael Koenig: Brad, it's time for my favorite question. We've all had those moments in the leadership role where we've seen something completely off the wall and we've just thought, holy crap, I never thought I'd see that. Do you have one you can share with us?

Brad Rosen: Uh, there are a number of ones. I mean, early on, especially as you're building like a startup, crazy things happen. And that could be personnel, it could be like physical. Like there was a time at G2, we literally, it was like we had just gotten all these computers, all the MacBooks are laid out. And it literally starts raining from the ceiling. We weren't on the top floor. The water like just starts coming down from the ceiling. What is going on? And the building manager comes in like 10 minutes later, all the computers are ruined. We're like, what? He said, did you change the filter? I was like, what do you mean the filter? What are you talking about? And this filter, he wanted us to move that ceiling tile over, change this air filter in, by the way, like a commercial building. This is not like my job to change the filter. I didn't even know we were supposed to. But it's like that day we were supposed to go out, sell, and do all the things we were doing, and we didn't sell. We were like cleaning up this mess. And so you say crazy things like stuff like that happens. Obviously personnel stuff happens too. People come, they go, they in, in obviously, you know, funny ways. But I think that's the joy of when you look back on it, it's funny. Maybe in the moment it's not as funny, but, uh, I think that's the joy of, of especially startups and building businesses. And, and I liken this to RevOps as well. I said it earlier, problem solving. It's always new. Every day is something new. You figure it out, you laugh. And then we talk about the way that we joke around on LinkedIn, but it's the same thing. Like, if you can laugh at yourself and with others, then it'll be all right, you know. Like, things— good things are going to happen, bad things are going to happen, and you keep kind of roll with the punches. So whether it's like raining from the ceiling, or, you know, you're— you hit goals or you miss goals, you kind of just have to look at it in a positive lens. And then when you're on a podcast, you know, 10 years later, you can talk about That's, I mean, rookie, rookie mistake there.

Michael Koenig: You guys always gotta change.

Brad Rosen: I, I check the air filters every time I go in the office now. Yeah.

Michael Koenig: And you, okay. You've mapped all of the pipes and everything like that so computers aren't underneath it. Obviously we learn from mistakes. We don't wanna repeat the same lessons. Abundance of caution, they call that. Well, Brad, thanks so much. Where can people go to keep up with you?

Brad Rosen: Yeah, I would love to connect on LinkedIn, or you can, you know, check us out, salesassembly.com. And yeah, thanks so much for having me, Michael. It's great to talk with you.