The Emergence of Revenue Orchestration Platforms with Forrester's Anthony McPartlin

Sean Lane 0:00 as listeners of this show no better than anybody that go to market is overtaxed and under resourced. tigereye can help. They bring revenue management, segmentation and planning all together in one platform. tigereye monitors your CRM to learn from every change and predict where every rep and every team will clock out. It's easy to see who needs help and how to get them back on track. tigereye extends your rep ops team with personalized AI to accelerate planning, segmentation and revenue growth. Go to Market is faster and smarter with Tiger eye. Learn more and schedule a personalized demo at Tiger ai.com. Hey, everyone, welcome to operations the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean lane. It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the pace of change in the tech landscape, new tools, new possibilities new categories emerge. And all that's asked of us as operators is to simply learn every new concept or tool that pops up and seamlessly integrate them into our company's operating systems. No problem, right. What is helpful though, is that there are folks whose job it is not only to keep tabs on all of these trends, but to decipher them for the rest of us. One such person is our guest today Anthony McPartlin Principal Analyst at Forrester, the research and advisory firm, a longtime operator himself, Anthony joined siriusdecisions Back in 2018, and later Forrester to support operations leaders and their businesses from the analysts point of view. I came across Anthony when he co authored an article about a new category that he and his colleagues at Forrester had identified, not necessarily as something that one company had crafted from scratch. But instead it was a convergence of multiple other categories over a number of years, the category that emerged revenue orchestration platforms, revenue orchestration, as I mentioned, is actually the consolidation of sales, engagement, conversational intelligence and revenue intelligence platforms. And look, if that's not enough buzzwords to make your head spin, what we're really talking about are the changes the acquisitions and the consolidation that have taken place. with companies like Clary, outreach, Gong and SalesLoft. In our conversation, Anthony teaches me about the market conditions that led to the creation of this category. Why too many people solve for tech, not business outcomes instead of the other way around. And, of course, how Gen AI is going to disrupt this newly formed category all over again. To start though, I asked Anthony, how he defines the revenue orchestration category, and how it came to be. Anthony McPartlin 2:53 We've seen a kind of a period where organizations have been under severe pressure, right to deliver growth at all costs over the past few years. Now, obviously, the economic challenges that we face have changed that a little bit, right, and it's become more of a profit focus. But if you think back over the last couple of years, CEOs and owners have been pressing revenue leaders to meet or to exceed aggressive targets, that are tied to funding timelines, to valuations, to share prices. And you know, in return, revenue leaders are coming, demanding more control of their related revenue tech investments. And they're doing that to try and figure out how they can optimize the customer lifecycle, the related revenue processes that they have, whether that's in terms of the capabilities that they're looking to enable within the team gaps, that they're looking to fill within the sales organization, processes that they need to evolve or develop. And so that's driven a kind of a big splurge, if you like, in terms of tech software that we've all seen, right. But it's it's also kind of led to an often kind of very ad hoc approach from organizations. But clearly, from a provider perspective, you know, we saw all of these different sales categories emerge from that over the last seven or eight years. And they all came from different areas with a different focus from sales engagement to conversation, intelligence to revenue intelligence, or revenue operations, intelligence, depending on what you want to call it. And those companies, you know, especially some of those area companies, you think about outreach or you think about sales off Clary, etc, right. They saw some pretty significant growth early on, and then obviously, in order to maintain that grow tend to maintain the value that they're delivering declines, they've seeked to then expand those platforms over time. And so you saw over the last number of years, a lot of these bigger providers, adding either through acquisition or through platform expansion, capability, capabilities that you're seeing in each of these other categories. So you saw the legs of outreach, and in conversation, intelligence, sales off doing the same clarity, acquiring conversation, intelligence, Gong, adding forecasting, sales after adding forecasting, etc, etc. So the these three kind of areas of conversation, intelligence, sales, engagement, and then revenue intelligence, or revenue ops and intelligence, they've started to kind of coalesce. And you saw that a lot of these capabilities now are available from a single provider. And so, you know, as we were thinking about our coverage of these markets, we were looking at and really trying to assess does it continue to make sense for us to cover these and to evaluate these categories as individual categories? Or are we at the point where really, we can assess these as one? That's got to be a fascinating Sean Lane 6:21 conversation internally at Forrester. Right? Like, when you all kind of get together and you're covering your own, no separate categories? Like, what is that conversation? Like really like? Hey, I think there actually might be a new category here, given all the acquisitions and consolidation that have taken place. Anthony McPartlin 6:39 Yeah, you're right, it is it's an ongoing conversation. And this happens, by the way across all of the categories that Forrester covers, right, because these types of patterns of evolution in terms of tech categories happens everywhere, not just in sales tech. And so when I talked to other analysts at Forrester, who are covering completely different tech areas, they see very similar patterns of you see an explosion in a particular category, rapid kind of addition of multiple vendors, then you see a level of consolidation, and then the pattern changes again, right? We're in a period of consolidation now, but that's not necessarily to say that that's the way things will remain, we may see the influence of Gen AI and other factors, driving more disruption in these spaces over time. So assessing whether or not we're at that moment, right now, whether there's enough critical mass for these changes to support a single category is important, whether there's enough vendors involved to make it a category, because oftentimes, there's not right, and so you need to ensure that you There's enough here to really be able to provide our audience, which are practitioners and buyers of technology, to be able to give them significant comparison and be able to do that in a comprehensive way. So yeah, it's a really interesting conversation that is kind of ongoing, Sean Lane 8:11 new market dynamics, mergers and acquisitions, new emerging technologies, all of these factors converged. And the end result was this new category, the revenue orchestration platform. And what's interesting about the major players in this category, Gong outreach, SalesLoft, Clary, they found themselves in this category, not necessarily because they set up to create it. But instead, they all had their own unique entry point to which they've now added capabilities over time. And presumably, they've done so not just to keep up with one another, but because customers see value and have needs for those additional capabilities. So with all the customers that Anthony speaks with, I wanted to understand the types of challenges they are telling him about that led them to evaluating one of these tools. Anthony McPartlin 8:59 So I think there's a lot of confusion when when buyers look at the market in terms of understanding what these categories, the existing categories, and the vendors attached to them actually represent in terms of functionality, because there tends to be a lot of conflation in the messaging. And there's not always a lot of clarity in the messaging around the outcomes that these things deliver for buyers. So I think for a lot of the conversations that we have with buyers, it's helping them to kind of parse through all that stuff. And to really understand what are the core outcomes that these things can deliver for their organization? Part of the challenges that I think they face is that they are kind of inundated by tech providers across a wide range of different areas. And so there has been, I think, a kind of a traditional allure towards the kind of the shiny stuff, right? And a lot of the conversations that We have with clients are helping them get beyond that and helping them focus their strategy when it comes to technology on business outcomes, business objectives, forest, and tech categories, and tech providers comes last, right. Whereas a lot of the conversations we have, it starts with the tech. And then eventually they try and reverse engineer into the business objectives. And that's, that creates a challenge, because when it comes to then getting stakeholder buy in approval, renewal of these things, it's very difficult to do that when you haven't really aligned to the business objectives to the stakeholder objectives. That's kind of one part of the challenge. But in terms of the kind of core things that they're facing, I think it's around, you know, how do we engage efficiently and effectively with buyers across the customer lifecycle? How do we do that across a range of different channels? How do we do it in a way that sellers can be differentiated in terms of of the message that they're giving? How can they personalize the communication and the interactions that they have? How can we accurately capture all of that, so that we can attribute it and match it to the right contacts and opportunities in our CRM system so that we can then use that to make good decisions and get insights around? Well, what does it tell us about our buyers or customers? The performance of our employees in terms of the sales folks? What does it tell us about what works and doesn't work in terms of engagement? And then what does it tell us about the health of our pipeline, our bookings and revenue? And then the other part of the last part of it, I think, for organizations is, how does it allow them to improve? How does it allow them to optimize that engagement, right, so you kind of have a kind of a virtuous cycle of, we need to be able to effectively engage, we need to be able to capture that, that surfaces, insights that tells us what's working, what isn't. And then we can make changes then and continuously improve, how we engage with customers, how we manage our deals, how we plan our accounts, how we do forecasting and cadences, etc. Sean Lane 12:24 When I hear about kind of all the outcomes that you're driving towards, with these tools, and kind of the means to get there, right, like controlling the customer experience, having that full view revenue leaders who want to have more control and visibility like that to me, and I'm biased, so hold me accountable here like that, to me screams operations, right, that to me, screams, revenue operations, sales operations are the folks that are kind of under the hood, designing the day in the life and the processes and the tools that support the day in the life of all of the customer facing team members. So am I BIAs are all of these revenue orchestration platforms now going to need to go through the Reb ops folks? Because, yeah, the CRO might say, I want this level of visibility, but the first thing they're going to do is turn to their rep ops leader and say, How do I get this visibility? Yeah, Anthony McPartlin 13:12 I think that's absolutely right. And I don't think that's any different than what it was with the previous categories. Right. I still think that they were tools that rev ops, were primarily driving and analyzing. The difference here is that that decision that organizations have to assess here, around the benefits of consolidation on bringing these capabilities together in one platform, right, because there is some level of trade off at a certain point between best of breed point solutions around these capabilities, versus an integrated platform. And those, those differences and those pros and cons play of both in terms of the frontline seller themselves and their experience of those, but also in terms of the operations team, and what they have to do to manage, implement drive adoption, manage the vendor relationships, etc, etc, etc. Right? So these are some of the things that we try and tease out with customers, depending on the context that they have, right? If you think about operations teams, across b2b, there's a range of scenarios there in terms of organizational size, in terms of the broader organization, but then specifically, the operations teams themselves, the resources that they have available, to manage all of these things that they're being asked to do, not just in tech, but across all of the other responsibilities of the operations team. Sean Lane 14:44 And then he's right. This isn't new territory for ops folks, just because we're calling the categories something different. But as the ones who will most likely be handed the responsibility of evaluating, selecting, designing, implementing training and managing these platforms It's worth reflecting on his advice. With so many options available to us, we have to focus on the business outcomes we're trying to drive, the problems we're trying to solve, instead of just adopting the thing that our CRO had at their last job, which also got me thinking most of these tools we've been talking about, while called revenue orchestration are really primarily just sales orchestration. Yeah, sure, CS teams surely use gong to listen to their calls, or Yes, CS teams surely use Clary to forecast renewals. But should we expect even more capabilities and consolidation here across the entire customer journey? Anthony wrote in his announcement about this category, quote, revenue orchestration platforms are the closest revenue technology has come thus far to providing a single pane of glass for frontline resources. So should we expect adoption churn health scores in our revenue orchestration platform soon? Anthony McPartlin 16:01 I think they're going to have to right because I think it's fair to say that the primary focus today has been for a lot of these platforms around acquisition. And while they're developing and have been adding capabilities to support the other revenue motions, the further they move beyond their kind of core markets, or the core original markets in high tech, the more those requirements are going to be significant, right? You move into non traditional b2b tech acquisition becomes a smaller part of the percentage, the sales cycles get much longer, far more complex, the range of signals that you have access to drop significantly right or that not necessarily they drop, but they're a different type of signal, because they're less about signals at the top of the fall. And they're more about the first party signals around what's going on within that relationship in terms of product usage, in terms of orders, contracts. And that type of data is not something that these platforms have fully embraced yet, right? Because they haven't had the customer base, or the demand from the customer base to focus on those one party first party signals, those back office signals, if you like, as opposed to the front office signals. But if you're thinking about how to drive expansion in b2b enterprise, then you have to be able to combine both of these types of signal types. So interesting, Sean Lane 17:37 like, I'm just picturing adding in all of those other layers that you're describing. And I'm like, is this just a CRM now? Is that the end of the rainbow for revenue orchestration platforms? So I Anthony McPartlin 17:48 think I think that's the kind of the interesting piece and this is ultimately where does this all lead to? Right? We were looking at this in a recent report that we published and looking at it, I kind of was thinking about it from the perspective of kind of the predators of the ocean, right. And if you think about, you've got these kind of pioneers, some of these these leading ROP providers or revenue orchestration providers, that have have grown out of the kind of the much bigger set of sales tech minnows that are out there today, right that they've found path to growth. But surrounding them are, you've kind of got your kind of Salesforce automation providers who are, they're not quite ready to get to give up just yet. And let's face it, they've got enormous scale, right. And they've got the commercial power, the market penetration to crush platform providers over time. So these RP providers face significant challenges as they scale into broader b2b markets. And then they also face challenges from some of the adjacent category predators, right? You talked about customer service or customer success platforms as one of them sales enablement platforms as another data providers, sales performance management providers, right. And then the other question is what happens with Gen AI, you think about organizations like Microsoft, who are building that link to office and teams. So from their perspective, their vision for the market, longer term is that the seller is kept in the office 365 environment and you bring the insights to them, and you allow them to do as much of that work there and keeping them away from the actual CRM as a tool. So everybody has a different strategy here. It's kind of early in terms of how that's all going to play out, but I think we will see some interesting signs of that over the next 12 to 18 months. Sean Lane 19:54 You probably have heard of force management, the powerhouse sales company behind command of the message What you may not know is that they recently launched their online subscription platform a sender. As an operator, you can see the pain of stalled deals, a lack of pipeline and other signs that your team isn't really selling on balance. A sender can help center as articles, videos, discussions, live events, all coming from the force management team. But more importantly, it has a whole elite selling curriculum to help your teams sell on value, with courses like discovery strategy, achieving a collective Yes, creating mutual action plans, and a whole lot more. Check it out today, a sender.co/ops. Okay, back to Anthony. Before the break, Anthony was explaining the genesis of a new category of tools called revenue orchestration platforms. And as these platforms continue to expand and acquire new companies and capabilities, of course, the big elephant in the room with all of them is generative AI. I couldn't speak with Anthony without asking him what Gen AI is going to mean for all of these tools, both for the end users, as well as the operators working under the hood to manage these tools. Anthony McPartlin 21:09 Yeah, obviously, if you think about it from a seller perspective, or a frontline perspective, the primary focus is around productivity and insights by how do we make it easier for sellers to get through their daily workflow? How do we automate as much of that as possible, so they have more time to spend engaging with customers and delivering value as opposed to being caught up spending, what is still a very significant amount of their weekly time doing non value added activities, right. And that's something that we, we do sales activity studies with our customer base. And you know, that still kind of the average is around 28% of the sales time is spent updating CRM, things that are not related to directly engaging or preparing to engage with customers or prospects. So there's a big opportunity there for general AI to deliver more value there. And then the other part of it is around the ability to surface insights to the buyer, or to the seller, rather, in terms of helping to be to be more productive, more effective, around the selection of opportunities that they focus on the activities that they choose to do against those opportunities, how they carry those out, and then improving around all of that. And then I think from an operations perspective, it's about how do we facilitate that optimization, that improvement of all of these processes, whether it's the buying experience itself, on that sales cycle, or whether it's the related Internal Revenue processes, like forecasting, pipeline management, and making that process much easier as a board and in terms of of reducing that board and both to the seller, but also to the operations teams who you know, for today, for a lot of the customers that I speak to that's still a significant effort. And it's keeping operations teams locked into these kind of lower value tasks, that then perpetuates a perception of the operations team within the organization as a non strategic function. And ultimately, I think that's where all the operations leaders that I speak to are looking to try and get to is to kind of escape that, and really be seen as a strategic business partner for the organization. But to do that, they need a way to reduce the burden of some of the more menial tasks that are just a reality for a lot of operations teams. Sean Lane 23:45 I think that's incredibly well put. And it's a good takeaway for ops folks listening to say, look like, this is actually a new tool in your bag, right, you've got other things that you have done in the past to try to make that leap from support function to strategic partner. And there's a whole bunch of things that you've probably built into the way you work and the way you communicate and the way the rhythms of your business that you are leveraging to help you make that leap. But Gen AI might be the the most compelling tool you have now to free up your time to spend more time on the proactive analysis to spend more time on the proactive optimization that you always wish you had time to do. One of the things that I found interesting, as more Gen AI powered tools are popping up, maybe as like you said more adjacent to the revenue orchestration platforms, is there seems to be a bit of a split in terms of the go to market approach of these companies. Some seem to be going after those end users after those salespeople who want to reduce that 28% of non you know, selling activities and in terms of how they spend their time. And then the other group seems to be going directly at the ops folks so that they can leverage nei to design the The experience of those end users, again with the goal of reducing the 28%. But through a different approach, do you have a definite point of view there on kind of like the pros and cons of those, and which one you think is going to be the better outcome for folks? Anthony McPartlin 25:14 Yeah. So I think you're right, there's definitely a section of the market that's heavily focused on the frontline experience. And then there's that other section that leans more heavily into the ops experience or the leadership experience, right. And there's kind of pros and cons to those different approaches, right? You think about, if you're trying to sell further up the organization, there is a certain advantage to being able to speak to their concerns, right, and their requirements around governance, repeatability, consistency, etc. But it depends on the organization. And so for a lot of organizations, the first thing that they think about every day is their forecasts, their pipeline, the health of all those things. So speaking to those things, forest, there's certain advantage to that the challenge is, the dollars in terms of licenses is at the frontline level for these tech companies. So the ability to actually get a significant amount of your sales organization, using this platform, day to day is where the significant revenue is for tech companies, there's a balance there to be struck between choosing the right jumping off point for your engagement with customers as a tech provider, where you can actually garner the most revenue from right, so you can garner the most revenue from your actual frontline productivity. But that may not create differentiation for you. So you may need to start higher up to be able to do that. So it's it, it's a fine balancing act. I don't think a lot of these vendors have figured out yet, where that line is or where that balance is. I Sean Lane 27:03 think the other thing that might change about that I'm just thinking about kind of the assumptions that would lead you down one path or the other. I think the other thing that might change is to kind of the some of the pricing assumptions there, right? Because everything about that assumes a per seat model, where you make all that money on the front line based on the number of reps that you have on the team. And as the way we think about efficiency and ratios changes, like if all of a sudden 28% of somebody's time is no longer spent on non sales activities. Okay, guess what you need? 20% Less salespeople, right, like, and so the pricing might start to shift the way we think about that too. Right? Anthony McPartlin 27:43 I think so on that, like, if you think about that, that example I gave you around Gen AI, you think about today, you think about the the amount of CRM licenses that are being eaten up across organizations? How many of those what percentage of those licenses are used once a week? Once a month? Right. So I think there's opportunities there right for that profile of user that is intermittent and not really core a core day to day sales user to make the argument? Well, you know, there's probably more effective ways to be able to get them the information they need, then providing them with a very expensive CRM license. And so I think some of the providers out there, that's the their focus is, how do we soak that data out of the CRM and send it to those types of users in somewhere like teams or Outlook or anywhere else really, you know, terms of collaboration tools, that would then significantly reduce their CRM license costs. But it's, we'll have to see whether that plays out with that. Certainly, you know, one of the strategies that we're seeing out there. Sean Lane 28:49 My biggest takeaway from Anthony here is that we're going to have to challenge all of our previous assumptions. If you're not constantly challenging the way you think about the tools, you use that technology available to you, you're going to find yourself with stale solutions. Not to mention, if you're just selling one of these solutions, you have to be challenging your own go to market strategies, as well as tools in the revenue orchestration category, incorporate more AI driven solutions, seats might not be your best proxy for value anymore. Look, I get it, this stuff is hard. I bet many of you are listening right now on two or sometimes even three of the tools that we're talking about today. Consolidation is happening. You've got to consider future renewals, you have to think about internal politics and varying levels of adoption across different tools. And I bet you just have a favorite yourself. So how is Anthony advising the teams that he speaks with on how to handle such upheaval in their tech stacks, with tools that all of a sudden might do some similar things? Anthony McPartlin 29:56 So I think there's a couple things first of all, understand those differences, understand On the strengths and weaknesses in across the provider set, and hopefully what we're doing here in terms of some of the research that we're providing is, is helping people kind of parse their way through that and understand the market a little bit better. But I think the primary thing that everybody needs to do is to ensure that they're not being led by the tech, and they're being led by their business objectives forest, right? So start with what are the business objectives that your sales organization has to deliver against? What are the requirements that that drives and be really clear about what they are, where the prioritization is on that, what the organizational readiness is to actually deliver against those things, because that often is an enormous part of it, right? So you can you can look at CI as a tool. But in certain organizations, there's going to be a significant cultural shift to make that an effective tool and to deliver real value from it. That's where I see some significant differences between startup high growth companies and enterprise companies, it's there's really different needs and different requirements, if you're a high growth startup company, and I don't want to completely be generic here. But there is more flexibility, there is more independence, to be able to be opportunistic, as new technology comes out to try it out. Because you've got a smaller lift to make that happen. You've got maybe a little bit more independence from from the CRO or whoever, to try these different things, you may be looking for a you know more of a to leverage your spend and getting more influence with the vendor in terms of their roadmap or the customer service that they provide. Whereas you're also dealing by the way with with a younger typically a younger, Salesforce, right? You move into non traditional b2b, you're dealing with an older Salesforce, a longer sales cycle, more barriers to change. So all of those things have to be kind of way to up. And when you're thinking about these things, so I guess understand what what these technologies are, but be very clear about your business objectives, where your organization is, and their ability to absorb this change. And then making sure that this thing or these options fit with where your organization is not just in terms of of organizational readiness, but the scale of the organization, the scale of the ops team itself. Sean Lane 32:31 Before we go at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready. Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months, a Anthony McPartlin 32:42 lot of time I'm reading a lot of business heavy books, right? So it's part of the job right? But it's not something that it's kind of bedtime reading, but this one is, is it's a series of books and it's a funny book about a fictional character. So imagine a typical in America, you might say, a jock, right? A quarterback, college quote, quarterback right? But imagine that quarterback never really made it but drifted into the rest of his life with the same mindset fine. Except this guy is a would be out half a number 10 in rugby, but it's similar personality and it's about his disastrous life as he leaves college and goes and tries to become an adult but really completely fails to do so. So that's why I'm reading Arias read. Sean Lane 33:30 What's it called? Anthony McPartlin 33:30 It's the character's name is Ross O'Carroll Kelly. So I'll just bring it up here. But it's it's a huge kind of this is it here. It's called Camino Royale which is a play on the Camino pilgrimage. But so on this one, this particular Avenger human, his Ruby buddies go on on the Camino walk. And you can imagine all sorts of drink fueled hysterical behavior. That's amazing. Play, bro. intellectual stuff, Shawn. You know, Sean Lane 33:59 I'm the same way I like people ask me like, what's your favorite podcast? And it has absolutely nothing to do with work. Absolutely nothing. All right, here we go. favorite part about working in ops? Anthony McPartlin 34:09 I think it's it's the variety of stuff that we're covering winning operations, right. It is multi skilled, like I always call it the Swiss Army knife. You got technology, planning, analytics, measurement, compensation, organizational design, it's so multidisciplinary. Within the operations teams, you've got a range of different capabilities and personality types. I just think that, you know, as a career, there's a lot there. I mean, obviously, it's a challenging role, right, particularly in operations, leadership, there's a lot of pressure on there's a lot of constant change, but in terms of being at the forefront of where the organization is going, and having, hopefully, a significant amount of input in terms of that direction, or at least some level of it. Orleans. I think it's a really exciting to be involved Sean Lane 35:02 in Flipside least favorite part about working in ops? Anthony McPartlin 35:06 Well, it's the same stuff, isn't it? It's, it's that, how do you escape the vortex of day to day operational requirements to be able to step back and think about driving improvement, delivering more value, changing perceptions of the function across the organization, I think that's when I talk to a lot of our clients in operations. That's just the challenge. They're so busy digging holes left, right and center, that it's especially under the constraints that they face with, with resources, etc. That it's it's finding those opportunities to be able to be efficient and create some space for both themselves as leaders, but then also their team members and their employees, for them to develop them to the next stage that I mean, really, the sales organization needs that development to happen if if everybody is to is to grow, Sean Lane 36:01 someone who impacted you get into the job you have today. Yeah, so Anthony McPartlin 36:05 I think the person who kind of impacted me the most I mean, there was there's been quite a few. So I'll just pick one foot, the Alice or the research director, who led the sales operations service at serious decisions before it was acquired by Forrester identitarian. He's back in the wonderful world of operations himself. But he had a huge influence on me, because I was a customer of the service for four or five years, coming into a new operations team, where we were trying to build stuff from scratch, build the function from scratch, and having access to somebody like him through that process was really, really helpful. And then, when I actually moved into the role of analyst at Forrester, getting his support in terms of understanding, just move from being a practitioner, to actually supporting practitioners, and then developing research that really speaks to their needs. He's been really hugely influential. But I mean, I could speak about, you know, four or five others. That's Sean Lane 37:07 awesome. Actually, I remember seeing Dana speak a couple times in conferences when I was early in my ops career. And I think he was one of the first people who could talk about ops in a compelling way. There was a lot at the time that was just like, dry and not super compelling and didn't do a good job of articulating the value that we provide. And I think he really stood out as someone that did that very well. So that's awesome, that he's been that resource for you. Yeah, Anthony McPartlin 37:35 he continues to do that. I see. He's still doing a fair amount of that kind of advocacy for operations. And it's, I think that's important. All Sean Lane 37:43 right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday. Anthony McPartlin 37:47 Yeah. So I think the analysts role is a really interesting role. I love it. And I think, essentially, at the core of it, it's an ability to be curious, right? It's having the ability to do a couple of things. One is to enjoy writing and enjoy thinking about ideas like these are obviously the one of the great benefits of the role is that you have the opportunity, the time to step back from that day to day and think about these things in maybe a more systemic way, or holistic way that that's very difficult within operations. But enjoying that, that kind of capability and the form around building ideas, collaborating with other types of analysts and with customers to solve problems. If you're interested in that type of stuff. That kind of is the type of thing that turns you on, and you enjoy then trying to figure out how do I communicate that either on a one to one basis right on calls with customers, or in terms of in a presentation or in rapport? Then I think you're relatively well suited to the role. Sean Lane 38:53 Thanks so much to Anthony for joining us on this week's episode of operations. If you like what you heard today, make sure you are subscribe to our show, so you get a new episode in your feet every other Friday. Also, if you learn something from Anthony today or from any of our guests, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps more folks discover the show. Six star reviews only of course, also shout out to Tiger AI, our new sponsor on this episode. Thanks so much looking forward to partnering with you all. That's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.