Revenue Operations - What, Why and How to Measure Business Impact - Jason Reichl, Go Nimbly

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Welcome to today's edition of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Jason Reichl, CEO of Go Nimbly, the leader in revenue operations for companies, including Twilio, Zendesk, PagerDuty, as well as many, many other B2B SaaS companies. Welcome to the show, Jason.

**Jason Reichl** (0:19)
Hey, thanks for having me. How are you?

**Ray Rike** (0:21)
I'm doing great. And I'm really excited to have you here because I know we're both very passionate about revenue operations and the impact it has on companies, especially SaaS companies. So what I wanted to do for the audience was first just give you a minute to introduce yourself and Go Nimbly.

**Jason Reichl** (0:37)
Sure. So I am Jason Reichl, like you said, I'm the CEO of Go Nimbly and co-founder of the organization. And I spent time both on consulting organizations through transformation, digital transformation, working with people on sales, CRM, sales operations work. And then I spent a good number of years in product SaaS based role. So I was the VP of product at a couple Unicorn organizations during my tenure. And while I was the head of product at some of these organizations, I realized that a lot of B2B SaaS companies didn't know how to operate their revenue team. And by that I mean specifically their sales, marketing, customer success teams. Those teams were not really operating in a way that I thought was efficient and in a way that I thought was about the customer.
And in reality, all they were was kind of just demoing the product. And I saw a lot of great product companies fail because the revenue team didn't know how to make a connection to the people they were selling to, to the actual individuals buying. And so I decided with some partners to start Go Nimbly, which is a revenue operations consultancy. Back in the day, we called it the Unified Business Stack Consultancy. And then Revenue Operations has kind of taken hold as how we brand ourselves and we help organizations break down silos internally on their revenue teams and help them scale to where they're trying to go. Sometimes it's to IPO, sometimes it's to Series C, Series D, and so forth.

**Ray Rike** (2:00)
Well, based upon some of the companies that you help run their revenue operations, you got to be very proud. In fact, I believe I saw where someone with over $2.5 billion of ARR that you help manage revenue operations functions for?

**Jason Reichl** (2:13)
Absolutely. I think we can say this safely. We are the largest single operator of revenue in Silicon Valley, maybe the world, as far as it relates to these really highly innovative organizations. We've seen it all, and it's really unique. One unique thing about Go Nimbly is we're more like an advertising firm. These companies use us in a subscription based model. So we really lean in on learning about their business and being part of their organization. We're not a consultancy that just comes in and makes some recommendations and leaves. We actually help manage and do the work, either through augmentation or being their actual operators, depending on the size of the organization.

**Ray Rike** (2:49)
Well, let's get right into it then. So one of the recent research studies that we conducted was, how has revenue growth been impacted over the last six months by the COVID-19 pandemic? And one of the things that we've seen is AOR growth was forecasted to be about 40% overall for the B2B SaaS industry. We're now down to 20%. And in fact, in first half of the year, it was only a 7% year-over-year growth. The percentage of growth delivered by new name customer AOR is down almost 300% from last year. And cap ratio, which measures the efficiency of customer acquisition, that cost is up 20% for every dollar of new AOR. So, and you've got your job cut out for you in the second half of the year. Before we talk about how you're going to help companies return to growth, can you tell me what, how you define revenue operations? And what are the primary roles and responsibilities of a revenue operations professional?

**Jason Reichl** (3:50)
Sure. So, I think of your revenue team split into a yin and yang situation. The part that I call your go to market team is your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. They're the ones that are interfacing with your customers on a daily basis either through mass emailing, nurturing, field work, sales calls, all of that stuff. And then you have your revenue operations team who are the operators who basically help make the processes work, make the tools work, enable those folks, and drive insights through your data in order to operate that side of the business effectively. That whole team I combine into one unit I call the revenue team. So, if you hear me call the revenue team, I'm talking about your go to market people and your revenue operations people. If we're talking about the operators themselves, I'm talking about the revenue operators, I may just end up shorting that to operators. I am not talking about your business operators. I am not talking about your developers. I am not talking about that side of your business. We consider that product part of the business, and that is not where we focus when we talk about revenue operations. So, we're not talking about facilities per se, when we talk about operators who manage revenue. We're talking about the sales process, the customer buying experience, all of those things that need to be operated in order to deliver a world class selling organization essentially. So, that's how I define those two elements. And then, the kind of primary responsibilities within that is at the top of this wheel, you may have a CRO or someone who kind of manages both sides of that business, both the go-to-market and revenue operations side. And then, within revenue operations, you have a team of generalists who are unified, who are prioritizing all of the work across the go-to-market team based on the impact that it will have to the buying experience of the customer.