Revenue Team Communities - with Jared Robin, RevGenius

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Jared Robin, co-founder of RevGenius. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Jared. RevGenius, the story behind the vision. How will RevGenius members measure the value of being a member of their community? And what are the metrics and KPIs that will define success for RevGenius? Jared, please take a moment to give a brief background and overview of what led you to being a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Jared Robin** (1:10)
Hey, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. So a little background on how we got here today. I started RevGenius with my partner, Galem Gramei, five months ago, give or take a little bit. And we found a problem or what we perceive to be a problem or a challenge in salespeople and revenue people's lives and created a community around it to address it. And there's more story behind that, but that's a simple part of it. We executed relentlessly at it, grew quite fast, and we're excited about the future and excited to be here today to talk about it.

**Ray Wright** (1:43)
Well, we're going to get into that story behind RevGenius in just a minute. But Jared, you have a very eclectic background from University of Sydney in Australia to Penn State, Nittany Alliance, to FedEx, to founding RevGenius, and not to mention your model opportunity in front of a white DeLorean. Tell us what led you to founding RevGenius.

**Jared Robin** (2:05)
Yeah, that's a great question. So in regards to founding RevGenius and that whole pathway to it, super eclectic, I was always entrepreneurial since high school, built my first business plan, although didn't build a business from it. Got a bit more practical post-college where I went to work at FedEx. My supply chain background from Penn State led me there. Now, the reason why I majored in supply chain was because I asked which major could set me up to be an entrepreneur the most, the best chance. But of course, fear, practicality, and wanting to get out of my house after school led me to take a job with a Fortune Manager company, phenomenal company, FedEx. Worked there for seven years, but still was pining for that entrepreneurial journey. Left FedEx, part of some early stage startup companies with varying levels of success, learned quite a bit.
What led me ultimately to RevGenius, frankly, Covid set the play a little bit. I was jobless and asked myself a simple question, what opportunity is there? In every downturn or every downtime, there's always an opportunity, what is it? It didn't feel like it was from getting the next job, and I saw an opportunity that wasn't being addressed with the community that we founded. Saw, frankly, a lot of events happening, webinars, etc. It was quite fragmented. It was coming from different companies, different sales trainers, different sales agencies, different communities, etc. There was no unifying place. The first vision was to create something like Eventbrite for everything, and it eventually evolved into RevGenius because along the way, we created a LinkedIn group of people that we were essentially just giving a Google sheet to of all the events. Galem and myself trying to execute the original vision and realized people were more involved, committed, and wanting to be around each other than the events. We doubled down on that into RevGenius.

**Ray Wright** (3:57)
Well, Necessity is the mother of many inventions, right? I mean, in 2008 and 2009, companies like Slack, Twilio, and Uber, they were all founded during the last few sessions. So it makes total sense to me. But you know what's interesting, Jared, there are so many B2B sales communities that have been founded over the last couple of years. You're looking at Sales Hacker and then Bravado and Modern Sales Pros, Revenue Collective. What's different about RevGenius?

**Jared Robin** (4:26)
Yeah, this is an awesome question, and this is something that led me to found RevGenius, frankly, because every single community you listed, I was a part of. And I think that tells the better story of the niche there. And how we looked at the landscape was that there was some communities, there were some clubs, and there was a vibe of exclusivity or non-inclusiveness or inaccessibility for a majority of them. We didn't see any that felt truly open and truly accessible to everybody, from an SDR to a CRO, and also that was part of a broader revenue picture with marketing people and RevOps folks, especially in a climate where every single title could lead to that CRO today. It's not the VP of Sales always getting promoted to the CRO, it could be the VP of Marketing, it could be the VP of Ops. So trying to look at this holistically and also empathizing with people in the revenue space, it seemed like it was lacking from other places, or maybe not lacking, but not being doubled down on. And in the revenue space as a professional, these are some of the most stressful jobs. You're responsible for the bottom and top lines of growth, depending on your position, your company's goals, and you're often feet to the fire. So a lot of times people weren't getting the empathy at their companies that they needed.