When "Good Enough" is Good Enough at Early Stage Companies with Taft Love

Sean Lane 0:02 Today's episode is sponsored by the DevOps experts at full cast with me is their Head of Customer Success. Tyler Simon's Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does full castes go to market planning platform help Reb ops teams achieve these types of goals. Tyler Simons 0:18 Well, forecast lets you build better territory so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue. Sean Lane 0:32 That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today. And I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that? Tyler Simons 0:40 You must get rid of the spreadsheets. Because spreadsheets create lag and errors with forecast planning and updating happen automatically, all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go to market plan changes, which you know what they happen all the time forecast has your back. Sean Lane 1:07 Alright, you got me convinced? Where do I learn more about forecast? Our Tyler Simons 1:12 website forecast.io. Sean Lane 1:29 Hey, everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Shawn Lee, it's really tricky at an early stage company to know whether that new thing you're building that new process, that new report, that new piece of infrastructure is good enough? Am I just solving the problem that's right in front of my face right now? Or do I need a solution that can stand the test of time across multiple years worth of changes in the business? And well, it might seem like planning for systems and processes that can scale with the business is the right answer that I'm fishing for here. What I've learned is that that's not always the case. And that's not people being lazy, you're not looking around corners and effective way. It's just that sometimes, according to our guest today, good enough, is good enough. That guest is Taft love. Taft is unique because he's both the founder of iceberg DevOps, a revenue operations agency, and he's been the head of inside sales at Dropbox, since his company Doxon was acquired by them back in 2021. From his own experience in house at companies and from his exposure to so many other early stage companies through his consulting work at iceberg. Taft is a wealth of information about what early stage companies actually need. And what's just noise. In our conversation, he teaches me about why preparing for scale can actually get in the way of scaling. We talked about how to arrive at the MVP of the metrics you need to run your business and why data is always accurate, if not always trustworthy. To start, though, I needed Taff to to give us an idea of how much operators need to be putting in place to run early stage go to market motions. His answer too much too soon, is a Taft Love 3:24 losing bet. So there's this concept of premature optimization, this idea that you can do too much too early. And it can have pretty negative effects on your ability to build your business trying to make everything scale can get in the way of scaling. And it's counterintuitive, but I worked at startups where the first question in every meeting is does this scale? How do we scale this? And the answer should be do we know that it works? Like what are we scaling? Do we even know what it is really, let's just let's try it. And we can build process? Once we know this is a thing that should exist, preparing for scale and optimizing things takes time and money and resources. And if you do that, before, you've proven that something makes sense, like you're just driving in the wrong direction so fast. Sean Lane 4:11 And so what's the opposite of that? Because even if you don't know what's going to work, you need some sort of foundational structure in place. And so how do you know what's the just right version of that? Yeah, Taft Love 4:26 I mean, as with anything where balance is important, I don't really know the answer, but I can give you a framework. I think the opposite of this is equally bad, which is just total Wild West, there is no format or thought put in anything and you just do whatever feels right in the moment. I think a good middle ground here is things that you know, you need to do long term, of course build process around that, even if we don't know exactly what data we need to collect and opportunities. You know, when we have deals come in. We know there are a lot of reasons we want to know exactly what When the deal started, and when it ended, and when it passed through different stages, it's probably not premature optimization in your CRM as a like narrow example, to build some tracking first stages, you know, you're going to need that. Now, there are levels of complexity you can layer on that then become premature optimization that we see sometimes. But if it's something you know, a year from now, you're still going to be doing, of course, start thinking process where people get in trouble is they start trying to optimize every little thing, that may not even be the right thing to do. And also, when people try to replace this is tangentially related, but I see it in small startups a lot is they try to replace basic blocking and tackling with tech. And an example is we had a client a couple years ago, they came to me and said, okay, so I want you whenever a rep puts in an opportunity, if the close date is more than X days out, I want you to reduce the amount by this. And if their close date is within 30 days, I want you to put it 45 days out further and just trying to like build for scale. And to circumvent having to just do basic blocking and tackling and have a clean pipeline and teach the team to treat the CRM, like CRM and not a trash heap. And those are examples of things where I see people like, that's a combination of premature optimization and running in the wrong direction. Sean Lane 6:32 As always, it's about finding that delicate balance, calf is telling us you can't possibly optimize every part of your processes, when you're still a super early stage company. And you haven't even proven how your go to market will work or evolve. At the same time, you don't want a complete free for all, it's important to emphasize his point that preparing for scale can get in the way of actually scaling. This is where operators can get a bad reputation. If you're just putting in process for processes sake, you're probably running in the wrong direction at Taft is talking about what I like to think about at this stage of maturity is can we identify the key milestones of a fall and count them, these are the truly foundational pieces, then then you can build from there. And as you go through your funnel, tap says that you should look at it as if you're the customer going through the customer journey, not the sales team, which might be hard to do, depending on your previous experiences as an operator, if you're coming from a really mature company, or maybe you just lack the experience at this early stage, how do you start to attack this problem? So I asked Taft, where does he see the right, early Reb ops and right early sales leaders coming from in the work with his clients, Taft Love 7:49 we tend to be downstream of the decision to hire a leader, especially sales leaders, they'll often hire a VP of sales, and then bring us in to help that VP of Sales sort of make manifests their vision. And it's really not uncommon for this person, as you mentioned, to come from a big company, they come from an Oracle, a Cisco whatever. And they're very good at running sales orgs in terms of people management and managing at scale. But to me, it's a little bit like taking a truck driver and asking them to build a truck. It's like two different skill sets. They both involve trucks, but that's about it. And so there is a lot of forcing prioritization, which this doesn't, you don't have to be an ops agency for this to be an important skill set for you. But forcing prioritization setting boundaries, and these aren't dumb people, even if they're a little out of their depth from like, how do I build this thing, since like they didn't get to where they were at a big company by just being an idiot, they have an understanding of how businesses work, you have to be willing to challenge them and set boundaries and fencing, what isn't, isn't doable, so that then they can make smart decisions. Because they've come from a place where a there's six levels above where the sausage was made. And B they were a client of a multi 100 person operations, or they can do like anything they think of. And so you really have to sort of set those boundaries for them. And my experience has been when they say, Hey, we need CPQ and I want Clary put in and I want this and I want that and we say hey, look, I can do one of those things this quarter, because it's like me and Stacey, you got two people. That's what you're working with. I can get clarity in this quarter. Is that the most important thing? And also, what are you going to do with it? Why do you need it? What's the alternative? And as you start having these conversations, these very smart people will get in line with you. But if you don't set those boundaries, and you don't communicate that well, and you just say yes to everything. It's honestly your fault as the ops person for not laying out the structure in which they can work. Sean Lane 9:54 And while the first couple of versions of that are probably pretty uncomfortable and maybe a little awkward. I Feel like it also kind of helps both that leader and you kind of distill down what actually is important. And it also, I think, kind of forces you to defend and crystallize the why behind why that thing is gonna be the thing that happens, and why it's the most important, right? Because you can come up with the why. But why is it better than the other seven things that are inevitably going to pop up on Taft Love 10:24 the list? So 100% True, it's, it reminds me a little bit of the sales skill set, I was doing a sales training with a team the other day, and we were talking about how getting a prospect to prioritize the level of importance of these things they want is really valuable. And internally, it's, it's the same skill set, you're negotiating the use of your time and resources. And yeah, you're absolutely right. And they're probably not used to being told no, when they were running 1000 person sales are, but you know, you have to share reality with them. And it's very rarely been my experience that people handle that poorly. So Sean Lane 11:02 in addition to picking the right problems to work on and the right foundations to build, operators need to build the soft skills that they need to be able to effectively navigate and communicate in these tough situations. The other part that people take for granted here is that usually the person you're negotiating with, has a lot more perceived power in the organization, which is why it's important to come with an objective data driven point of view in these conversations. A single ops resource that's a team of one going up against the brand new VP of sales can be a tough mismatch. But it's not a situation that needs to be feared. Like Taff said, when done right, people react well to your conviction. So given all of TAFs advice, what actually are the specific things that early stage operators should be working on? If we want to avoid this pitfall of premature optimization? What are the alternatives? Taft Love 11:58 So here's how I have that conversation. Because that's a really hard thing, even with my guidance for a business to figure out and everything is really important all the time. So here's the framework I use to work backwards, that actually has been really valuable. There's sort of two parts to this, it's, Hey, let's sit in your customers shoes and go through their experience, and what are the gaps here that are really important? And then the other equally important is? What do you need to run your business? In terms of information? What information? Do you as a leader need to run your business? And what's the MVP? Of course, generally, they come up with a list of 60 things, and it's a bunch of questions. And then we have sort of a sub framework, which is okay, if this number goes up, how do you behave? That goes down? What are you going to do differently? How do changes in these numbers impact your decisions? And what you find is a lot of these numbers they go, I don't know, but it's important. Well, okay, then how is it important, if it doesn't impact your behavior, what makes this on the top of the list and overtime, they they sort of figure out that, okay, this is the threshold for actually tracking something. And then I have a document, I like to create this green, yellow, red. And out of all of these metrics, green are the ones that the data is in place, all I got to do is put the right filters in a report, yellow is we have the data or we can easily get the data, we just need to move it to the right place surface, it maybe we need to build a few roll ups to get this data in the right place. And it's a, you know, a couple hours of work to get to this metric. Red is we do not have the infrastructure to surface this today. So I then arrange our sort of MVP in this way. And now we have a roadmap with a shared understanding of where all these metrics sit. Because there's never in the history of ever been a VP of sales, who just was like, oh, okay, when I said, I can't get through this today, because they're like, oh, it's easy. It's a metric. It's easy. Just go get it. And so that's a framework that's helpful. And so when you take those two things, you can actually build an early roadmap. And so hopefully, this framework is a better answer than just like you need these four things. These are the questions you ask as an ops professional or as a CEO, who's building her sales team out herself or as a VP of sales, who's new and has like a Salesforce admin and no strategic ops function. These are the things you should start with. These are the questions you ask to get to that initial roadmap, your MVP operationally. And Sean Lane 14:33 I think, for either of those audiences that you're talking about, just acknowledging the fact that those yellow and red buckets even exist is a good step in the right direction, right? Because that's going to be your reality is that there are going to be things where you're not perfect or not ready for that level of consumption. And so let's pull the thread on on the yellow and the red for a second, right because I think that's probably where you're going to move on from like the basic math. milestones that I always talking about to be more the information needed to run your business, right, that are going to be maybe unique to your motion, your product, whatever. How do you start to then think about all right, what do I need to do to make the yellow green? What do I need to do? I even string together the plumbing that makes the red even available to me before I can even get it into the yellow and the green? Taft Love 15:25 Yeah, that's a good question. And an important thing here, I want to mention and answer your question. There has never been a time when I did this once. what always happens is they are 100%. Sure, this is the MVP, go do it iceberg. And then we throw it in the sheet, we bring it to them and more of them than they expect it to read. And we start thinking about ours. And we figure out like, hey, it's July. Now, it's actually going to be early September, before we have all this done. Even though you thought we could do it this week, that's just wrong. And then suddenly, like, well, actually, I can do without that. So the first step with yellow and red is use it as a forcing function for one more check against whether this is really your MVP. So there's this framework I use, I keep using the word framework, I'm saying that too much. But there's this framework I use for thinking about data, and it can be reapplied. Here, it's this idea that data is always accurate. It's not always trustworthy. And so unless there is a bug in the system, you're filtering against to get the dataset, your data is accurate. And so when you go run a report in Salesforce, and people say like, its data is wrong, no, it's accurate, it's not trustworthy. There's some reason it's not passing the sniff test. And so the things that must be true for data to be trustworthy are first, the filters in the report have to actually mean what you think they mean. And then below that, the structure of the data, the architecture has to actually work properly to surface the data in a in a manner that's trustworthy. Then below that, people have to be doing what is expected of them with that data, they have to be inputting it properly. And then below that, you have to be telling them the right thing to do. So there's architecture enablement, and rapport building. And so those are like the three buckets, you should think about when you have these red or yellow items. And you want to get them to green architecturally, what needs to change in terms of enablement? What behavior needs to change, and how do we reinforce it? And then the most simple one is how do we actually build the report to surface that? So this is actually where the name iceberg came from? Reporting is the tip of the iceberg. And I don't know how many times as a head of ops, I was told, like, hey, go run a report on this. And I, I'd say like, Hey, I actually I can't, because there are these other dependencies that just don't exist under the surface. I know, it seems simple. It's really not. And so that's sort of where this comes from. And so those are the buckets when you think about like, how do we get from red to green? There you go. Architecture enablement, and the actual reporting. And Sean Lane 17:59 honestly, the biggest thing I take away from that is that the lesson within that is applicable, regardless of whether you come back as green, yellow or red, right? Because like, the first thing you said was when you come back, they say, Oh, actually, like, This thing wasn't as important to me as I thought it was. And I think the best ops teams question that regardless of whether or not that data is in the green, right, it could be green, I could go off and build it for you. But like, at what point if you're, let's say, your infrastructure is in such a good place that everything is green, then you're just in a situation where you're a gopher to go and get that stuff, and you haven't had the conversation about whether or not that is the thing that they actually need. So when I hear you talking about that, I think, if you find yourself in the enviable spot of being in the green on more than you're not, you still can apply those same questions and those same skills, regardless of the situation, because like, everybody has the knee jerk reaction of like, oh, I need this thing. I'm gonna go ask ops for it. Right? And it's not about saying no, it's about figuring out why it's going to be important and helpful, and then what you're going to do differently with that information. Taft Love 19:07 It's funny, because we're talking about early stage sort of startup operations. There's this story I tell and I tell it to like new consultants, that iceberg and sales leaders who are curious about like how to work with an ops team. And it's not a real story, but like how I frame the relationship between often sales and ops, but also marketing and ops, is almost every early stage startup goes through this phase, where they hire a Salesforce administrator. Usually, that's often the first admin you hire, you unknowingly turn them into your head of ops. And so you assign a tactical resource, a strategic mandate, and then because they're often young or new, or for whatever totally appropriate reason lack the confidence to tell Will the big bad VP of Sales know, they end up being a point and shoot resource with a strategic mandate, they build a rat's nest. And then it gets worse. Because then what happens and you've probably seen this before is things start to break. But they don't know why they're breaking VP of Sales doesn't know why they're breaking sales team doesn't know why they're breaking. So then they become the hero by firefighting. When the fire they started without even realizing it. And startups will spend one or two years in this like, shit tornado of firefighting without realizing that the issue here is you don't have anybody slowing down the cycle. And so often, that's where iceberg comes in, and we step in and go, Oh, my God, everybody stopped, stop, no, we're doing, we're building nothing, we got to figure out like where the fire even exists. And so that happens over and over. Sean Lane 20:53 I mean, I love that story, you and I could do a whole episode just on that. But I think the thing that you're making me realize, too, is that story, that formula or sequence of events, rather, is why you end up with ops being viewed in a certain way, or why you end up with just like these burned out, Salesforce admins, or these burned out ops folks who are viewed as a support function and not as a strategic partner. Because if you don't have the luxury, which, again, to your point, most of these folks through no fault of their own, don't often have to be strategic and thoughtful and really, plan ahead at the beginning, that place is inevitable, right? And then it's really hard once it gets baked into the DNA of a company to reverse that, right. Like I talk to my team all the time about like, you have to manage the perception that your internal customers have of you and of the ops team. And that's not like in a polityki way that's in like a you have to prove value and for them to see you as a strategic partner. Otherwise, you're toast you're you're gonna get sucked into that point and shoot thing that you were mentioning before, over and over and over again. Taft Love 22:00 100% And it happens everywhere. It's like it was oldest startups that story. Sean Lane 22:07 This episode is sponsored by fool cast, the company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top, forecast automates common go to market activities like territory, rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations. With forecast say goodbye to go to market planning headaches, and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about forecast today by visiting bull cast.io. Okay, back to Taft. Before the break, Taft was giving us a framework for deciding what's important in your early stage company. And also some really important advice for avoiding a multi year mistake around an unproductive dynamic between operators and sales leaders. Taft is an amazing resource because he has seen very specific examples of the work that happens in early stage companies during both his time as a sales and operations leader himself. And through all of his clients that iceberg Reb ops, one specific area, he says that he sees early stage companies struggle with all the time is around strategic outbound prospecting. And like everything else that we've heard from Taft, he's got some very specific ideas of what this should look like and frameworks Taft Love 23:30 for us to follow. The very first thing that needs to happen here, because this is often skipped. And it leads to lots of problems down the line is a very simple conversation, which is where on the spectrum between appointment setting and strategic outbound program do we want to live? And there is no wrong answer here. If you're Yelp, you're closer to appointment setting. And this is mostly like fullcycle at setting appointments for themselves, you cannot and should not be deeply strategic when calling gas stations in Wisconsin, it just doesn't make sense. There were 1500 bucks each, you just gotta have a list and start calling. And similarly, if you're supporting a senior enterprise rapid SAP doing million dollar deals, call lists are not your friend. And so we have to do first is place yourself on here and a lot of companies are sort of in the middle companies tend to consider themselves further to the right than maybe their operations would indicate closer to the strategic outbound thing. So let's frame this conversation around strategic outbound. I don't think there's as much of a mystery around calling down lists and setting appointments. That's the thing you can outsource it's maybe not impossible, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody successfully outsource a strategic outbound program. So let's let's assume you're building that. Some basic assumptions here are you have an average year one deal size of maybe like 50k and a or something like that that's a sort of good floor for above this, yes, it makes sense to invest pretty heavily in sales getting new customers. And so one of the problems you run into in this world is, unlike on the other side of the spectrum, where activities are your funnel, you have 100 people you're calling each of them twice. 200 calls is 100. prospects, it looks very different on the other side. Similarly, on the low complexity end of the spectrum, your hardest workers are often your best performers. The people who are just like smoking 150 dials more than everybody else every week are probably your top performers. The further you go to the right, the less true that becomes, the more you end up with some really confusing data around like, this guy's making 200 calls a week and hadn't gotten a meeting this month. And she is like, I don't even know what the hell she's doing. But she got three meetings and half a million in pipeline last week, like what's going on. And so this is a place where you got to be a little more thoughtful about how you build it, how you measure it, how you run it, that it's just totally different. And people don't think about the spectrum. And they call it all outbound. And that's why I made the distinction between like appointment setting and strategic outbound prospecting. Sean Lane 26:25 TAFs distinction there makes total sense. I don't know about you. But I have totally been in this situation that he's describing where there's a person putting in a ton of activity and yielding nothing, and the person doing very little activity is yielding the most results. And I'll admit, I've certainly been guilty of looking at activity levels over the years and saying, Well, this is why this person isn't being successful. Running an SDR team or a sales team that's heavily reliant on outbound prospecting is one of the hardest things to do in a software business. So what does Taft find to be the common traits of companies doing that strategic flavor of outbound prospecting? Well, Taft Love 27:07 so the first thing I see in terms of people doing it well, is clearly defining what it means to go out bound? And I know that sounds silly, you're you're probably thinking like, well, you call somebody that doesn't know you, you're going out of town. But I actually like a little more specificity and a more prescriptive approach here. So you should define what is the minimum effort that places somebody in your outbound funnel? Because imagine you're prospecting into the fortune 500? Should we consider it an outbound effort? If you send one email each to three people? Like? I don't think so? I think that's a pretty easy one to say no to. And, of course, you have to decide for your company what the correct answer is. But I've always used a standard, like it's smart recruiters when I ran sales development there, you are beginning to prospect once you have five people who have received two touches from you, ah, they are now in your funnel. And if you haven't done that, you don't get credit for even having approached that company. Because these are, these are six and seven figure deals like that is bare ass minimum. And so once you make this definition, now, you can start asking the question, how many companies have you started approaching? Once you know how many companies people have started approaching, you have your denominator for your outbound conversion rate, which companies tend not to pay much attention to? If you go log into Outreach, I'm sure like, three quarters of the people listening here have outreach, you go log in outreach, and you go to the reporting section, and there's a nice funnel, and it's beautiful. It's got like, how many people have been sequenced? And how many of you call and how many have responded? And how many meetings have you gotten? We're not talking about companies there. And if you're selling into the fortune 1000, or whatever, and you have a small total addressable market, you actually need to know how many companies that means and especially if you're prospecting deep, and in a world where you have people taking slightly different approaches, like somebody's Rolodex selling, and they do the minimum five people per company, and then somebody doing true like cold, hard outbound dropping 30 People from this giant company into sequences and calling them that contact funnel becomes a lot less meaningful to you when you don't know how many companies are in it. And so I'll pause here any any clarification that might be helpful. I know I'm going fast. Sean Lane 29:31 No, no, this is this is great. And I think the thing I hear when you talk about knowing those companies, as opposed to the context is like, it's at bats, right? Like how many at bats do you actually have a shot at? Whatever your outcome may be? Right? Booking a meeting, getting that first demo, whatever you're looking to do like your denominator, regardless of how wide you go or deeper you go inside those companies does not change. Right like that's that to your cohort that you can pull something from and ultimately, like, when people think about that funnel, you were describing the conversion rates in that funnel I think are a little misleading, right? Taft Love 30:11 Yeah, absolutely. You we sell to companies and not people. So the conversion rate of people is yeah, you're right. It's absolutely misleading. It's perfectly reasonable. On the other side of the spectrum, where two calls is one person, and one person is a company. Great. You don't need to go any deeper than that. But on this side, yeah. And what I've seen is these companies, because I don't think a lot of people have adopted this paradigm, they don't think about the world in this way. They're still using the other end of the spectrums metrics to measure something completely different. This is an apples to oranges. This is hippos and light poles. This is like, so so different. Sean Lane 30:53 So let's say then I've got my definition, right? And I've said, Okay, five people, two touches each starts you in the company at bat count, right? Yep. Eventually, you're going to reach a point where you're kind of have to figure out what the next step is there, right? Because maybe there's people who are just doing that bare minimum of 10 touches to get them in the account, and they're not yielding. Or they're people who are doing quite well and yielding a bunch of meetings, how do you start to like, move from the quantity to the quality within that outbound motion to actually make sure that you can coach those teams that you've led to yield the outcome that you're looking for on that strategic outbound side of things? Taft Love 31:36 That's a good question. So once you have this funnel, you can answer the question, how many companies did we start approaching last week, month quarter, you can answer the question how many companies are in our funnel right now. And over time, you get a bunch of historical data. So you can start to say, hey, on average, how many companies do we need to put in our funnel to get one qualified sales opportunity? And now you can start breaking it down and saying, hey, when we get a qualified opportunity, what's the average number of people we've added to the funnel? And what's the average number of activities calls and gifts and in mails and emails we've sent, and then you can start to slice it by program by team by person. And as with any data out there, you're gonna struggle to get like perfectly clean answers. But what you will understand is, you can spot hotspots and say, Hey, Sarah has 13% conversion rate, every six or seven companies, she approaches she gets a meeting Holy shit. And Stephen, he's got a 2%. He's burned in 50 companies to get us one meeting. And now you can go start to dig in and compare and say, like, Hey, Sarah, how many? How many people? Is she adding every time she approaches? And how many people? Is he? The times when she was successful? What do these metrics look like? What about for him? So once you have this funnel, and some basic metrics tied to that funnel, you can start asking questions that in this world are much more more valuable to understand than just like, who made how many calls because I can tell you from tracking this for years now, you will get no clarity from looking at just how much effort people are putting in, take Sean Lane 33:22 a minute to let that sink in. If you're doing this brand of strategic outbound prospecting, you will not find a correlation between effort and outcomes. It's an easy lesson to forget when things aren't going well. But no matter how many times I make this mistake, the answer doesn't change. You will not find a correlation between prospecting effort and outcomes. Frustrating, right? So what instead should we look at? And based on everything that tapT has already taught us in this conversation, we have to ask, is the data we want to look at actually available to us? Is it red, yellow, or green from his exercise? Taft Love 34:05 So for this data, I've done this twice. I've done it two different ways. And I'll take you through the first and then the second one, which was successful. The first was at SmartRecruiters. We decided, Hey, we got to look at this through the lens of companies. How the hell do we do that? And as I started digging, I realized well, a sales teams data is like all basically all on the opportunity object, it's pretty easy. You can find out your win rate on the opportunity object, one object tells you so many things. without bound, you're spread across five objects. And so you've got a contact account, your two activity objects and your opportunity object, you have five objects that all this data is spread across and Salesforce for all it's good at is not very good at helping you understand how these objects in aggregate relate to each other. You can click from the activity to the associated contact to the associated Now, what you can't do is ask Salesforce without code or an app, hey, how many contacts have I called against this account, put the number in this field, it cannot do that out of the box. And so what we did was we went and found this, this tool called roll up helper passage technologies makes it, we built a bunch of roll ups. And it literally counts the number of records that meet certain filters. So how many times have we created an activity against this contact that has call as the type, this is how many times we've called them, and it puts a number in a box. And you have to do a bunch of these to roll up to get the concept of activation and date stamp, like when it was activated. And so we built a bunch of roll ups started running this program, and it worked really well for like a month, the roll up helper, the problem is, when you want it to answer a question about activities, it checks every activity in the entire sales force, and then puts the numbers in the fields. And so an outbound team like SmartRecruiters, with like a dozen outbound reps dialing and emailing all day, it didn't take long for like one of these roll ups to take 567 10 days to run. So now my data is weeks and months old, literally a few months into it. And so I decided this was a problem we're solving, it's probably nobody's paying attention to which maybe it means it's not really a problem, but I don't think so it has really helped me in building outbound programs to have this data. And so I went and built it. So the two choices that actually work are one, if you have a data warehouse that you can dump this data into, and somebody who can write you the SQL queries, you can do it that way. You don't have to spend money, you don't have to pay me to get this. The other way is a purpose built app that you can pay me to get and install in Salesforce and start using. So you have two paths here. But there is no other reasonably doable path in Salesforce, unfortunately, because Salesforce was built before modern prospecting and how we think about marketing and selling, as evidenced by the fact that lead exists, it was built before the current go to market strategies existed, I guess. Yeah. And Sean Lane 37:14 I think it's one of those things where as an ops team, you can kind of throw up your hands a little bit and say, Panteley, how is it something that someone hasn't solved before? Or why is this thing that I need so hard? And so I think, whether it's through your version through the data warehouse version, like just knowing that that's the formula to do it, I've faced really similar challenges. Even just thinking about the opportunity, right, like with the opportunity, when you think about, you know, particularly the contacts and events stuff you're talking about, you know, Salesforce and even related tools, you know, even the gongs of the world like don't do a good job of saying, Look, I know my win rate goes up by a significant amount after X number of calls, I know my win rate goes up by a significant amount after why number of contacts are involved in those calls. And I know it goes up when I've got a VP or and above. And like the steps from those statements to being able to just filter yes or no. And whether or not I have those ingredients in my deals is such a long journey. And it shouldn't be. But like, that's the reality of what we need to convey when we're having these conversations with folks of like, we know what good looks like now we need to go out and figure out a way to instrument whether things are in that yes or no category for us to be able to ultimately run the business using that information. That's Taft Love 38:36 100%. Right. And specific to sort of this outbound data. I've actually taken us in a slightly different direction here. But there have been a few interesting things that have come of this that are sort of DevOps focused. And one is, it has become easier to build outbound prospecting programs that get traction when you have marketing involved. And once you have a clear signal, a clear flag that like sales is approaching this account, becomes really easy to say, hey, marketing, tie this field back to Marketo. And when this date changes to now, I want you to start supporting this rep because this change means that they're going outbound. And so on top of like having the data you need, I guess you have a scalpel versus a hammer when sales and marketing are working together. Because the thing I've done for years before is sales and marketing get together. They agree on some filters for what we're going after this quarter or a year. And we get 2000 accounts and we agree we're going after all of them. And then what do we do we drop them in a Google spreadsheet, and we give everybody access and reps are supposed to go in and start saying when they've begun prospecting, and then fast forward 72 hours and it's been 24 hours since anyone logged into the sheet and it dies on the vine and marketing goes and screw it, we'll just we'll just blanket all of these, we'll add them all to the drip emails. And so this is an aside, but like even outside of sales, development and the data and all that kind of nerdy stuff, what I've found is there are some strategic things you couldn't do before thinking in terms of companies that now you can. Yeah, Sean Lane 40:20 and I mean, I think the macro theme there is that that far right side of the spectrum, has become so evolved, and the systems we use and have been using for the last whatever, 1015 years to do prospecting, aren't ready to handle that, right. And so we need to come up with new ways to handle that in a way from an ops perspective that will support the best versions of what the right hand of the spectrum will look like. 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. So Taft Love 41:08 I went back and read the Little Red Book of Selling. I believe Gitomer is the author. And this is not ops related or anything, but it's it's that's what I've read. It's, it takes me back to like, the basics of what being good at sales is all about. And it's a philosophy book as much as anything else. And it boils down to be an expert, be helpful and have a mindset of plenty. So awesome book. Love it. Sean Lane 41:33 My favorite part about working in ops. Oh, Taft Love 41:36 man, I'm going to be actually honest here. This is the wrong answer. When I'm talking about strategy and being strategic. I really like solving weird problems that other people struggle with. I really like getting into the weeds. And it's also the thing that makes a lot of ops people not good ops people. So I shouldn't say it out loud. But that's, that's my favorite part. Yeah, Sean Lane 41:59 I completely agree. Like it's one of those things where you want the people on your team to be the ones who want to solve the problem. But yeah, in a vacuum can be also a little bit of a dangerous trait. All right, Flipside least favorite part about working in OPS, Taft Love 42:13 creating the eating your vegetables, ops, from my perspective, is creating documentation and enablement. I love teaching. I hate memorializing what I'm teaching. And so that's the thing I have to just like, it's eating my vegetables, I have to force myself to do Sean Lane 42:31 someone who impacted us getting to the job you have today. Taft Love 42:34 Okay, this is going to be a bit of a weird one. I hope it's okay, if I take us down a weird path here. Back when I was a back when I was a cop, I spent weeks and weeks and weeks coming up with this proposal for getting a grant that I thought would help us solve this big problem in our community. We were having tons of break ins in the small area and I spent weeks putting this thing together pored over it, and finally submitted it to my boss who submitted it to his boss who submitted it to our captain never heard anything. Months later, I'm in the elevator with him. And I was like, Hey, captain, whatever happened with that, and he was like, Oh, buddy, that you did a good job. But turns out, I was working on the same thing around the time you were so I went ahead and submitted mine, but like good work. And he submitted it, he got a big award. He was in the newspaper, he got a plaque from the city, we got like a million dollar grant off of it. And I never saw anything from it again. And this isn't a sob story. This was like, This motivated me to not be that kind of boss that made such a big impact on me and like weirdly a positive way. And so it's the good to great mentality of you don't need credit, you just need to be effective. Just give the people who work for you all the credit for everything that's going on. And honestly, that has transformed my career more than any good work I've done is just hiring great people giving them the credit and it somehow benefits me in the end always. Sean Lane 44:05 That is an amazing story. I'm so glad you went down that path. All right, last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday you just gave a little bit there but give us one more now. Taft Love 44:16 If you work under me then just kill me. But short of that, I'd say my job specifically become a generalist. Say yes to everything when you're in your 20s and early 30s. And don't try to blaze a specific path. Flow man go with where opportunities take you and become good at lots of things and you'll do even better than Sean Lane 44:49 thanks so much to Taft for joining us on this week's episode of operations. If you liked what you heard, make sure you're subscribe to our show. So you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. All So have you learned something from tax day I know I learned a ton. Make sure you leave us a review so we know what you're learning. Leave us a six star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Today's episode is sponsored by fool cast your go to market planning platform. If you've ever spent hours or days building territory and quota plans only to have them be out of date. The second the reps hit the street, you need to check out forecast. With forecast you set intelligent rule based policies that automate all of the time consuming manual tasks that hit Reb ops teams throughout the year. with virtually no effort operations will always seamlessly align with your plan. Learn more about full cast today by visiting full cast.io