Improving Productivity and Creating Repeatable Processes With Jeff Ignacio and Laura Fu

And, um, my mission is to help revenue teams scale and accelerate and operate, um, at maximum efficiency. So what I think is interesting there is you have, Productivity in your job title. So, for example, in my job title, I have the word growth, but you can grow, you know, inefficiently or efficiently. So I'm actually curious, how did productivity come into your job title? And then what did that mean exactly for helping your sales team? What a great question.

Um, I think about productivity as, um, helping our sales team. Again, operate at maximum efficiency, right? So it's to be as productive as possible. And, uh, that means that they're equipped with all of the right tools and they're really efficient in terms of both how they go to market, how they execute deals, um, how they close business, how they qualify out deals. So that's how I think about, um, you know, productivity. So when we think about.

You know, I put myself in the position of a sales rep when I'm designing systems or processes. I personally like to use user stories. So it's a simple Madlib. It's as a X, I want to Y so I can accomplish, you know, W, right? So as a SDR, I want to Show up to work, have my list curated so I can quickly and efficiently reach as many contacts as possible. Is there a framework or set of metrics that you use to work backwards from in terms of measuring productivity for different sales roles? Um, yes.

So I would say, for example, um, As an AE, I want to generate as much pipeline as possible so that I can effectively qualify and convert those leads into close one business. You caught on very quickly there, by the way. So is it just sales reps that you've been supporting or is it sales development reps, pre sales? Like tell me about the entire sales team. Great question. So primarily I work with um, AEs because that's usually where we, you know, start our focus.

But, um, my, my experience has been, um, with supporting the entire ecosystem. And I really think about go to market as, um, a team sport, right? And so that is, um, the whole customer engagement from top of the funnel. From SDRs and not it's not just SDRs, right? It's also the marketing team. It's a partnership team and then it's how we run through the sales cycle including the AEs, the um, um, the SEs, the pre sales consultants, right?

And sometimes during the sales cycle, we also need the help of the SDRs because we might need to get in touch with multiple stakeholders. Um, that we, you know, don't have enough information from and then all the way through the post sales, um, portion of it, which is, you know, customer success and customer experience implementations, et cetera, because that's really where our next opportunity comes from, right? The CS side of it. That's wonderful.

So productivity, I think, can be completed with just sales productivity, but you're talking about. Steel threading the entire customer experience with all parties and all hands who are servicing or supporting The customer right from marketing generating awareness to developing interest to the sales team all the way to the CS organization What's a metric that you've? Worked on, worked on and centered on, uh, you know, I'll give you an example.

In my experience, it was calls per day to targeted ICP or targeted persona for the SDR team, right? Cause my SDR team in the past had been, you know, young 20 somethings, you know, First job out of school, business acumen may not be as high. I give them like a one cheater on who our ICP and who our persona is, but they, they don't have enough like cycles in the business experience to really know, you know, why they're calling a specific individual.

And so I have to always gauge and test that our newest SDRs are actually calling to the right persona. So it's not just number of calls. It's actually calls to the right people. So I'm curious about a metric that you've been working on in focus. Yeah. Um, can I give two? Oh, totally. Let's do it. Okay. Awesome. So I think if we had to boil down the entire like auto market or revenue rev ops and do like two metrics, it would be one pipeline coverage and two net retention rate.

Okay, so let's talk about pipeline coverage. Pipeline coverage basically covers everything from a top of the funnel through where we close business, right? It's basically telling us, Hey, how much pipeline do we have? And are we effectively closing that pipeline? So are we being productive and and efficient about the pipeline? And, you know, I like to see the general rule of thumb is three, right?

So between 3 to 5, a coverage ratio of between 3 to 5, which means we end up closing, you know, a third or fifth of our business, right? Tells us that, um, of all of the leads that were coming up on coming in of all of the, um, work that the SDRs, the marketing team, the partnerships are generating, um, you know, a third of it is qualified and that's great.

And then it also tells us that as we're executing the sales cycle, um, The presales consultants, the, you know, the AEs, the value consultants, everybody working together. We're doing the right job of, like, being rigorous about closing business and, um, and executing the sales cycle in a scalable and repeatable way so that the conversion rates, um, you know, are maintained at, at, like, industry standards with a benchmark. So. We're doing a good job of managing the pipeline. That's metric one.

Metric two is N. R. R. Right? N. R. R. Helps us measure whether our clients are whether our customers are coming back, whether they're getting value from the platform and whether or not they're going to be repeated customers and in most businesses that I, you know, have been with in my last roles, right? A majority of New dollars to the business actually came from existing customers. So existing customers are our best, um, prospects basically.

And so I think the NRR metric tells us a number of things. It tells us whether we're delivering on the value that we sold them. That's one. And I think the second thing that it tells us too, is. Hey, did we do a good deal? Right? So we might be really good at, um, you know, maybe we've got a good relationship with the customer in that that first pipeline coverage metric.

But then the second metrics and are really tells us whether we did a good deal and whether the customer is going to be, you know, happy and a long term customer with us. Those are all good points. So when I think about pipeline coverage, 3x is the heuristic that we use.

Gives you a sense of, and this is unweighted pipeline coverage on a dollar basis that you should be winning at roughly a third, but what's still missing is, you know, the progression, the deal velocity, which is of the existing pipeline, how much of it will close and by when and at what size and by what percentage, because that will dictate whether your pipeline coverage is correct or not.

You might need a little bit less if you have incredible brand equity and things just close at a higher percentage. Okay. If we're also lucky, in a demand constrained environment like we are today, the win rates are a little bit higher, a little bit lower, and the pipeline generation is something that we keep a keen eye on.

The NRR metric's really interesting, because I can imagine that, yes, we might be winning at, 25 to 30 points, 30%, but then the NRR for certain categories, certain verticals is actually less than a hundred percent. That may not be something that we want because that sacrifices next year's growth, right? So if they're going to churn and upsell up to flat a hundred percent, that means that segment is not growing. It puts more pressure on next year's growth.

So I think one thing to think through is where are you not only winning for acquisition. But where are you winning in terms of repeated and loyal customers in terms of as measured by NRR? So I love that. So beyond the numbers, we, you and I, before we connected, wanted to talk about how do we inspire reps? And I think that goes to like management, leadership, culture, different aspects outside of what you see on the paper. How do you think about inspiring reps?

Like what can revenue operations do in order to work with leadership to, you know, motivate reps? Yeah. Actually, Jeff, let's go back to that point around the metric, too. I was going to see that, um, you know, your, your point around whether the customers come back and, and whether we're delivering value like that is the definition of revenue productivity, right? That's us being efficient. And so that's why I think productivity is, you know, the, the headline for, um, for RevOps.

It's, it's really how we make our teams productive. Um, um, And, you know, we also talked a little bit about, like, the coverage ratios and, um, and, uh, you know, what we, what we might expect. And you mentioned the unweighted number and closing it at, at, um, at, at a third, right? One thing that I've been really successful at is actually starting to measure pipeline. There are two criteria, right? The first one is actually. From the start of the quarter through the end of the quarter.

So it's not just like all time pipeline. It's just quarter of a quarter. How much coverage do we need when we start the second thing? I think it's more important when we measure pipeline. We're measuring it from a certain stage in the entire sales cycle, not just from stage 1 or stage 0. And the stage that I. Mostly measure. The qualified pipeline is what we call visible opportunity. It's a visible opportunity when it passes a certain stage.

And this stage is defined by a milestone in the sales cycle called the new business meeting. The new business meeting. It's not necessarily the first meeting. In fact, it's usually not the first meeting. It's usually a meeting where we're getting two signals from the customer. One, they have a problem that they'd like to solve. And that the solution that we have as a vendor is a potential solution that they've agreed to evaluate.

So they're essentially, um, they're essentially at this point, Agreeing to enter a sales campaign with us. And that's when we start measuring coverage ratios because it's not just like from the very beginning. It's like after the customer has agreed to evaluate and I think that's really important because you asked me about the next point, which is how to inspire our reps, right? And we still right now live mostly in a demand generation world.

We are consistently going out and educating customers and a lot of new technology that's coming out these days. Most of us work in companies that maybe don't have that name brand out there and we're solving problems that customers don't even know that they might have. Right? So a lot of the front part of that sales site cycle is really spent uncovering Pain, and I wouldn't even say it's uncovering. I think it's educating.

It's educating the customer about the pain that they might have, and getting them to realize that, hey, this is something that if we solved, it's going to materially change the outcome of our business, and that's when we enter into a sales campaign and start measuring, you know, pipeline. Right? And so what is one of the best ways that I've seen, um, Uh, that I've that I've seen, uh, help to inspire our reps to be productive, and I just go back to this.

If we can show the reps that other people, their peers have done it before, and that they've been successful, they're going to come back. And they're gonna want, they're, they're gonna feel like they can do it themselves. So we, so how to inspire them is make them feel like they can do it because other people, their peers have done it before. I always think of, you know, there's this concept of 3x leverage rule, and it used to be applied to the top rep. It was someone who could make two for one.

Essentially, they can make double their base salary with just their incentive. And that was always the person, they may not, Walk into the office with like a Rolex and drive up with a Ferrari, but a sales rep would see that and go, wow, someone in our building, someone in our office is able to achieve, uh, that kind of success internally. They're not necessarily a unicorn. They worked their way to get there. I feel like I can get there as well. Right. So, you know, having that.

Load star that, that, that North Star rep, uh, internally or series of reps, that person is always ins inspiring. The second piece is, uh, I always feel like an environment of learning growth. Right? And as a result of that growth and the applica application of effort, the byproduct is, uh, obviously great rewards and, and hopefully a successful career in the long term. How do you then develop, you know, incentives or structures in place?

You know, to not only, you know, work intrinsic motivation, but also provide extrinsic motivation to the reps. Um, yeah, so I think it depends on, What the focus, what the key focus is, um, of the business at that particular point. And it, it just happens that I think, um, the key thing for, um, the last couple of organizations I've had was really in that first metric, the building pipeline metric, right?

And so building pipeline was the rigor and the muscle that we had hoped to, um, instill in our reps. Um, so have you heard Jeff of the phrase like We measure what we treasure. I always have heard another, uh, you manage what you measure, uh, or expect what you inspect, uh, kind of two variants of that, but I love the rhyming of measuring treasure. Yeah. Um, so like, because we are treasuring the pipeline, right.

What, what I've also found is that we haven't spent enough time looking at forward looking pipeline and Showing the reps that, Hey, this is pipeline that really matters. So one thing that I've really talked about quite a lot is this concept of a PG race or PG, uh, leaderboard where every week, right? The first thing that the reps see is an email. It's a leaderboard of where they stand in terms of how much pipeline they've created.

It's very common for us to share leaderboards for reps that have closed business and, um, you know, show them, okay, here's where you stand, like quarter over quarter. You're, you know, here's what. Your likelihood of getting the president's club. But one thing that we haven't done, I think a lot of, I haven't seen a lot of it is showing the reps, Hey, how much pipeline have you created in the last week? How many new discovery meetings did you do to create those pipe, uh, create that pipe?

Um, and in those races that I've run, which are basically ongoing, ongoing leaderboards, ongoing tables, ongoing competitions, we've given the reps, um, you know, a bonus for creating the most, having the most like PG activity, for example, quarter over quarter. I love that a little bit fun. Uh, I remember when I was a sales rep, we had a whiteboard and the manager would always come in and just wipe it clean. All right. Day one, no one, everyone starts off from the same place. Good luck.

And then we, uh, hopefully by Wednesday, you'd know where your trajectory is. So super exciting. So we talked about inspiring reps. incentives. Now reps need to operate with data, right? It's not just here's like a list and go pick up the phone and start dialing. I'm curious how you think about supporting them with the appropriate infrastructure so that they can, uh, you know, be effective in their own jobs.

Yeah, you know, I think one thing that reps struggle with today is there's actually so much data. It's not like it's not really a lack of data, but there's maybe like just a lot of it. And it's all over the place. Um, and I think what we can do as you know, Rev Ops leaders and sales leaders is help the reps just narrowed down on the key metrics that really matter to them. Right?

Um, and if we're talking about, for example, um, sales being a numbers game, then what we should be focusing them on is. activities, right? Are they doing enough activity? We go back to the pipeline metric since that is an overall pipeline. Um, you know, since, since pipeline coverage and, and making the number is, is, is the most important thing.

And then I would say the last thing that, um, we can help them is helping them understand which ones of their customers Are the best customers to call on to, and I'd say that data is probably not necessarily coming in on a real time basis. Um, the organizations that I've worked with before have all been named account models where, you know, all the reps have had like a, uh, a small, a smaller book. So all of all of these accounts are potentially like the best accounts, right?

But it's also just identifying which of these best accounts are more likely to. Be the ones that, um, are exhibiting the buying signals are the ones that, um, you know, have interacted a lot with the website, the webinars. Um, and so, you know, as we talk about, like, for example, revenue attribution, for example, I love to lean into like the, the influence model versus the source model, because I, I think that. Revenue comes like leads come from a multiple, multiple different places.

Like for, for customers, especially in the demand generation environment, they, they, they are made aware by multiple touches across the entire ecosystem. I think it was interesting if you use the analogy, if you wait on top of the mountain and then every person who shows up and arrives at the summit is also someone who is a customer close when, and you ask them, can you tell me which trailhead you started from. And then did you follow the same direction as everybody else?

You'll find that almost everyone probably started from a different trail head, took a different trail. They might've arrived at certain like same vistas, but you know, the journey before that was a slightly different from each person and it's just a unique, right? You ask the lead, how did you hear about us? And they might tell you, well, I don't remember, but if I go back and you go back in your notes, you find out they became aware of you because of a campaign you ran two years ago.

Or they were a previous employer and they brought you in to that company. So you get to get these, you know, awesome data points, but then the trend, the pattern is, you know, there's no one's almost the same as anyone else. They're all unique. Fingerprints or snowflakes in their own way, but you got to find those patterns and those trends and I do agree I personally love the influence model.

It puts more stress on the operations team to develop like a multi touch attribution But in reality, it's not about what shape model you use. It's Just looking at the data, making sense of it, looking at it in different ways. That's why I think multiple models can make the most sense. And then start to develop some narrative, some trend. And that allows you to say, you know, these are all important channels.

How we prioritize them, how we allocate resources across them might differ based on what we're seeing in terms of pattern changes. Um, but does it mean that we're, you know, we're going to over index 100 percent to one channel just because we're using a, just a last touch model or a first touch model, which I think that leads to, that leads to extreme type of thinking in terms of resource allocation. So we talked about tools for the marketing sales and customer success organization.

I'm curious, what tools have you supported and believe are critical to the overall revenue productivity. I think that you need a consolidated plaque that shows you and has the ability to show you, um, everything across the entire sales scale. Journey, um, of the customer all the way from, you know, funnel management, outbound, outbound contact through the renewal rates of the customer.

Um, in the past, uh, you know, I've used Clary for this and, um, there are multiple, uh, you know, other solutions out there, but I think that's, that's the most important thing, like having a sales engagement platform that allows you to manage your revenue across your entire sales funnel, super important.

And then, um, the other, uh, tools that I think are really important are, um, something to help you manage all of your assets and content for your reps so that they're not spending a bunch of time looking for assets that are, you know, that are out there wasting time, right? That's minimizing their productivity. And then, uh, another one would be around lead management and lead flow and making sure that, um, the leads that are coming in are. Qualified in our router to the right reps.

So if we categorize those a little bit, so some sort of top of funnel enrichment, lead scoring engine, right hand at the right time, um, you could include routing there. The second is if you need to grab and go have the right resources at the right time, uh, knowledge repo or knowledge base, um, and then surrounding that with an enablement organization.

And then lastly, a command center, something that no matter where you are in the organization and which part of the funnel you support, you can go into it, get what you need and see exactly how you contribute to the overall life cycle. I think that's great. So I asked this last question to everyone who's on the show. I'm curious to hear about a personal or a professional moment of change or impact. That someone's had on you or you've had on others that particularly comes to mind.

Thanks for asking that question So I think you know, you probably are familiar with the medpick framework, right and I had the dream privilege of working with dick dunkel who was the founder of medpick from PTC And I worked really closely with him um In sales productivity, um, at sprinkler. And I was able to like learn directly, um, you know, from him basically what this metric framework really meant.

And I think like that was a moment of, of change and inspiration for me, because it just opened up a lot of my, it opened up my eyes, um, you know, 10 years ago, right on, on like, Hey, these are the, these are the things that really matter in a sales cycle. So, um, Dick, thank you for that experience. Now, for those of you who are listening and want to connect with you, where can folks connect with you and learn more about you and, uh, from your experience? Laura, um, LinkedIn is a great place.

Always ready to receive a DM or please just connect with me on my profile. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Laura. Appreciate it.