Benchmarking in B2B SaaS - Beyond the Numbers with Scott Sutton, VP RevOps ZoomInfo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOps Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Scott Sutton, Vice President of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo. Today, we will be covering three main topic areas with Scott. First, the role of revenue operations at ZoomInfo. Second, the performance management framework and the key components that Scott and the team uses at ZoomInfo. And third, how to use benchmarking to zoom past your competitors. Scott, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Scott Sutton** (1:10)
Awesome. Thanks Ray. I really appreciate you having me. Yeah. So I'm Scott Sutton. I'm the VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo. And I went through about 10 years in the automotive industry, came over to ZoomInfo at the time when Discover Org was managing the acquisition and been hooked on SaaS and driving revenue processes ever since. It's been a wild ride and always really interested to hear other perspectives on revenue operations and help move people forward, give them new ideas and learn from folks like yourself. So glad to be on here.

**Ray Rike** (1:42)
Well, thanks for your time today, Scott. And when I saw that you had spent or invested, I should say, 10 years of your career in the automotive industry at Daimler, and specifically the Freight Lineage Division. You had a series of roles from supply chain to data analytics. So my first question is, how did your experience in the automotive industry inform your perspective on revenue operations at a B2B tech company?

**Scott Sutton** (2:07)
Yeah, I think it's a great question. One I get fairly often is, how did you come from a car manufacturer and being kind of the heart of SAS?
When I was studying in school, I floored around, I was in science, I did different things with data. The common thread at the end was solving problems, was leveraging technology. I'm a big technology nerd. I love the newest and the latest and greatest. I'm always looking to find a more efficient way to do things. So at Daimler, I worked in supply chain, I went IT procurement. I was trying to buy the best tools and source the best applications and talent for our organization. And then as I kind of went through that organization, I realized I wanted to lean more and more into kind of the digital transformation side of the business. And at a point I realized that I was going to have to take a big step away from a large kind of old school company and a smaller software company to make that investment even more real. And Daimler was a great company. He taught me a lot about how to run a business professionally that I use today, but I'm really happy to be where I'm at and be in the heart of the SaaS movement and all the things that come along with it.

**Ray Rike** (3:15)
Let me double click on this because early in my career, I led the automotive industry vertical for a division of GE. And one of the things I fell in love with was the process and operations orientation, learning things like just-in-time inventory management, even Kanban, which is a famous Japanese way to increase inventory turns. So I have found when I joined the Silicon Valley kind of B2B SaaS industry, operations were almost an afterthought or a second thought. It was all about development and sales and marketing. Tell me a little bit about when you joined ZoomInfo, where was their kind of orientation towards operations? And then did you leverage a lot of your operational experience from Daimler and bring that to ZoomInfo? Or was that culture already in existence?

**Scott Sutton** (4:01)
I think there was a combination. So ZoomInfo is potentially the most data-driven company I've ever seen. Part of it is that they are a data company and they have a lot of access and a lot of aptitude in that area. What I brought that I think was new was an ability to run a project and design a process like a manufacturing facility, but to leverage really smart mentors and people around me who had domain expertise. I worked a lot with Chris Hayes, now our president and COO, who's brilliant in the area of digital selling. And he and I together, you know, we would design processes and digital solutions to problems, much like you would design a truck plant. You would lay out, what are my tag times? How long should it take to do a process? Do I have a streamlined process? And if you've read the goal or the Phoenix project, thinking about theory of constraints and managing your bottlenecks and removing them from your process, a lot of queue theory and line balancing, a lot of that that I studied and eventually taught at a university level has come back now. And I use that in designing SDR processes, that's the LAE processes. How do we route up demos? What's the most efficient sales cycle? And it's now become really imbedded. And that's one of the biggest things that's exciting is this pervasive continuous improvement culture we've created. And a lot of the toolkit that we brought over is now being more widely deployed.