RevOps as a Strategic Revenue Planning Partner - with Toni Hohlbein, Growblocks

**Ray Reich** (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 It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Toni Hohlbein, the founder and CEO of Growblocks. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Toni. First, the primary responsibilities of revenue operations. Number two, the primary measurements of revenue operations. And three, how to make revenue operations a strategic revenue growth accelerator. Toni, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Toni Hohlbein** (1:08)
Wonderful. Thank you, Ray, for having me on the show. Well, I spent the last 10, 11 years in B2B SaaS. Really grew up through a FP&A revenue ops function back then when it actually wasn't called revenue operations yet. And actually then made it to all the way to CRO. So it was basically the CRO owning all the different parts of the revenue engine, all marketing, all sales, all CS and revenue operations. And was it actually successful for two companies leading to two exits. So one like 150 million, the other one was like 200 million exit. And I've been obviously extremely lucky to be part of those organizations. And I learned, I think, a bunch of things there. And I found a lot of things that are potentially sometimes wrong when scaling those organizations and scaling those revenue engines. And I think one of the things that my co-founders and I realized is kind of wrong is there's a lot of attention on financial planning and budgets and so forth. But the kind of the big flaw around all of those budgets is that they are really, really good at talking about how money is being spent, but are really weak on figuring out how money is made. And we at Growblocks, we're basically fixing that right now.

**Ray Reich** (2:17)
Well, your journey is kind of unique for most of my guests on the show. FP&A, Revenue Operations, CRO, and now a Founder and CEO of your own B2B SaaS company, right?

**Toni Hohlbein** (2:29)
That's it, that's it, yeah.

**Ray Reich** (2:30)
So, you're a great person then to ask this question, and that is, RevOps versus FP&A, what's the primary difference when it comes to the planning responsibility?

**Toni Hohlbein** (2:43)
Yeah, I think FP&A, I mean, it's in the name, right? Planning is in the name and planning is not in the RevOps name. I think planning is still anchored with FP&A and probably most and or all organizations that we're talking to. I think the main difference is that Revenue Operations brings a lot of understanding on the revenue side, a lot of understanding that sometimes simply is lacking for FP&A and is really able to support some of the planning pieces, especially around revenue. I'm not talking about the cost side or balance sheet and P&L and taxes and lunch and stuff like that. It's really trying to figure out how are we going to create that revenue line item that the whole budget is being built upon?
Are we going to be able to get to that revenue growth that we promised the board? And how specifically are we going to get there? And in my experience, revenue operations, simply due to the fact of them understanding the revenue side much, much deeper, has like tremendous value add on the planning side. So that's where I see the difference sometimes. And I think revenue operations identifies a bit more with actually the revenue growth that comes out of it. FP&A, that's a planning function. Hey, the revenue should go in this direction, but revenue operations is living with those commercial leaders and living and dying also by the quarter. And I think that is sometimes a little bit of a difference.

**Ray Reich** (3:58)
It's interesting. I look at FP&A, often looking at historical performance data, right? To build a forward-looking plan, and they may use some capacity modeling to help build that forward-looking plan. But revenue operations, if done properly, has surfaced all the current and real-time data that best predicts what's gonna happen next quarter and second quarter. Does that kind of resonate with you, Toni?

**Toni Hohlbein** (4:20)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think some of those methods are the same. You look at past trends and historic data, and then model it forward. But you obviously overlay that also with how are each of these micro pieces being created? How are those opportunities being created? How are they coming out of leads and marketing, and piecing the whole funnel together, really end-to-end traffic to churn, the whole revenue engine? And usually, this is where I think FP&A and finance kind of stops, is the revenue line item, how many costs do we have? So how many customers do we then need? And how many opportunities is that? And that is just not the level of detail and the forward-looking approach that revenue operations can bring to the table. Just think about the responsibility that they have in terms of the tooling and the data across go-to-market and using that effectively for forward-looking planning. I think this is still a piece of the puzzle that in many companies is kind of not used and undervalued.