RevOps - as a canary in the coal mine - with Jordan Henderson, ringDNA

**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 talked 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 That Measure Up Podcast. Today, we're joined by Jordan Henderson, Director, Revenue Operations, that Ring DNA. Today, we will be covering three main topics. First, revenue operations, a canary in a coal mine. Second, turning insights into foresights, the strategic versus tactical role of RevOps. And third, RevOps automation. Are we there yet? Jordan, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics of Measure Up podcast.

**Jordan Henderson** (1:09)
Yeah, thank you. So I feel like there's two versions of my story. One of them is very long and one of them is much more succinct. So we'll go with the latter today. So I'm actually a licensed attorney. I worked at a law firm for a few years after graduating law school. Ultimately took the opportunity to jump into tech and work my way up to managing a sales team and have worked managing marketing teams over the years until recently in the sort of boom of revenue operations where people sort of realized the work that I was doing was exactly what revenue operations is now and have been doing that for about a year and a half here at RingDNA. And then more recently, I connected with you and have been listening to some of your other podcasts and was really excited to have the opportunity to join you today.

**Ray Rike** (1:45)
Well, we're kind of making the next three to four podcasts a theme around revenue operations. So I thought, who better than Jordan? Because I love reading some of your commentary on LinkedIn and you specifically wrote a post that caught my attention because it said, a canary in the coal mine. Can you share your thoughts behind that post as it relates to the function of revenue operations?

**Jordan Henderson** (2:08)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. It actually works two ways. And that's sort of why I love the analogy of a canary in a coal mine for revenue operations, because in revenue operations, you're a problem solver in a lot of ways. You're a strategic problem solver, but you don't always know what the problems are. And one way to do that very successfully to identify problems is to have canaries in your coal mine, right? You have sales team members, you have marketing team members, you have people like that, who are always going to be closer to what's happening on the front end of your business, on the go-to-market side, and are the people that you need to tell you what those problems are so that you can strategically solve them. They're your canaries that are chirping when something is wrong on the front lines, right? And that's one way that I sort of referenced canary in a coal mine, and in a very, very important way, in creating people that have enough trust in you as a revenue operations leader to bring you those problems. Very, very important part of the job. The other way is that RevOps itself is a bit of a canary in a coal mine, meaning that you are often the person that people are bringing problems to, and your executive leadership team, your leadership team in general, they might not be aware of those problems, and you have to be the person that is raising those up and escalating them and shouting from the rooftops about things that are going wrong. And just having the comfort to do that and the trust that you can do that, and that your, essentially, your miner, your coal mine, your executives are going to follow you, believe you, and then bring you in to help you strategically solve those problems is sort of the other way that I think that that analogy works in revenue operations.

**Ray Rike** (3:28)
And for those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of canary in a coal mine, back in the days of mining, right, especially coal mining, they would actually bring canaries down into the mine. And if the gas levels got too high, the canary would die, so they would stop singing, right, Jordan?

**Jordan Henderson** (3:45)
That is essentially it. It's fascinating. It sounds so morbid when you say it. But if you read the old miners' diaries and journals about this sort of thing, they were basically pets. They loved these canaries. Some of them had them for 20, 30 years. They would keep these birds alive for a long time. And so it was a trusted colleague that helped them stay safe and helped them identify problems in advance enough to save their lives, essentially. And in this analogy, it's obviously you're using it to save your business.