How to Find Success in 90 Days

Brad Smith (Sonar) (00:00):

And here we are.  so always, so anti-climatic to start the webinar.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (00:08):

Yeah,

Brad Smith (Sonar) (00:09):

 too good. Well, welcome, everyone. Jumping in right now. We’ll give everybody a few minutes to get situated, but excited for this one, Asia. I promise we’ll see. We’ll see if we can keep solving, our lead routing issue maybe throughout the conversation.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (00:26):

Yeah. That’s why there are tools for this because what Salesforce natively is,

Brad Smith (Sonar) (00:32):

I know love it. I love that we’ve had you know, so many folks, like, as we’re just sitting here, like, well, we got extra time. Can we solve a Salesforce problem in the making, of course, we can.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (00:45):

Yeah. Right. I figured I’d ask

Brad Smith (Sonar) (00:49):

. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m excited about this one. We still have some folks sort of trickling in, so we’ll give it another minute or two, but excited for shops. Talk episode, number two, especially for this cast of characters, Nic. If I can do it in time, I’ll see if I can find, my wig, my Nic wig from the last episode that we had John, but it’s fun around this office somewhere. Yeah. Somebody legitimately in our office was wearing it the other day. And I was like sitting in a conference room and I see somebody walk by with the Nic from briq hat on. I was like, okay, that’s what we’re doing these days. So,

Brad Smith (Sonar) (01:27):

Oh, well, we’ve got folks on we’ll go ahead and kick everything off. I know we have a jampacked agenda, so for anybody to join a little bit late, we’ll obviously record this and every, I can watch it from the jump, but excited for Shoptalk episode number two of this year. It’s crazy to think that we’re already in February and already moving this quick, but we have a rockstar set of guests to date to talk about how do we find success in the first 90 days? First and foremost, we always like to give a big shout-out to our sponsors. We love working with a Salesforce team for their continued support and success in doing all things w ops and all things shops talk. We wouldn’t be here without them and be able to have this platform to have a great conversation about so as always, we appreciate that.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (02:09):

And without further ado, man, we’ll jump right in. Cause as I said, we have a lot to talk about. I think the coolest thing about this topic is the timing in which we’re having it. Everybody is starting to a certain degree and some new roles, and new responsibilities. So whether you’re in rev op and you’re changing a little bit of your narrative for your roles and responsibilities, or you’re starting a brand company super important to find success early, what do those first 90 days look like? And we’re gonna unpack all of that. But before we do that, love has love to have all of our guests introduce themselves. So Asia I’ll turn it over to you and then we’ll go to Nic and let Jonathan bring us home. But Asia, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (02:48):

Hi, I’m Asia Corbett. I am the head of revenue and community operations for rev genius, which is another community. It’s a revenue community of sales, marketing, customer success, and rev op folks across the globe. I think it’s at 20,000 members maybe now, which is really cool. And so I’ve been in operations for the last six, seven years a combination of biz ops and rev op, and I’m really excited to, you know, continue to be an advocate for all the rev op people out there, whether you’ve been in, in ops for a long time or you are just getting into it.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (03:28):

I love it. I love it. Nic, you’ve been on before, but we’re gonna let you introduce yourself just for everybody who hasn’t mentioned it yet.

Nic Swider (Briq) (03:36):

Yeah, well, I think, I don’t know, is this Shoptalk or is this a sonar

Brad Smith (Sonar) (03:40):

Webinars shop stock, but you’ve been on, you’ve been on webinars with me. We kind Mel them all

Nic Swider (Briq) (03:44):

Together.  Hey guys, I’m Nic. I run rev ops at briq, which is a construction tech company out of California. Two and a half years ago, I was an SDR and then I moved into ops and I wish I had any sort of guideline at that time. So I’m happy to be part of this conversation and hopefully, we can help some people out.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (04:09):

I love it. Nic’s also rocking his Wiz ops sweatshirt.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (04:18):

I love it. I love it. Last but not least. Jonathan, tell us a little about yourself.

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (04:23):

Yeah. Great to meet everybody. My name’s Jonathan Morgan. I head up revenue operations and also marketing at AchieveIt, which is a primarily B2B SAS company and more of the planning and execution space. So I’ve had an extremely winding career to get me into the position of the officer. I am now, you know, doing anything from sales to consulting to customer engagement. In my experience, IOP into op is just the first opposition, and trying to figure it out on my own. So looking back, I wish I had this sort of conversation back then. Hopefully, we can help some people out that may be in the same position that we were previously.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (05:02):

I love it. I think the one thing that I know the four of us can agree on is a lot of folks that are on the call too. The ops journey certainly isn’t linear. A lot of folks start from a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of different places and it continues to evolve. I think that’s what we also enjoy about it. It’s a little bit of the unknown of what’s around the next corner. And, you know, I think we’re all comfortable being uncomfortable in that regard, but excited to unpack this today. As I said, there are a lot of people that are starting new jobs right now, and they’re in these first 90 days or are at least potentially interviewing for a new job that they’re about to jump into. And I think we all agree that it’s so important to set yourself up for success, as well as how you track that success.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (05:42):

So we’re gonna unpack that through a couple of different questions today, as always for folks that have joined please don’t be a stranger jump into the chat. I’ve gotta pull up on my computer right here. So if there are any questions that come up along the way, we would love to answer them, but we’ll take this step by step. We’ll take the first 30 days, then we’ll go from 31 to 60 and 60 to 90 and a little bit beyond, but starting that first month, we know it’s important. You, what should you really focus on in that first month of a new rev op role to set yourself off for success agent that we’re gonna let you take the mic first and kick us off.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (06:16):

Yeah, so really this is kind of standard anywhere when you start a new job. And I think it also applies even if you’re going into rev, op is learning the business and the company and meeting people general like HR, onboarding things, making relationships with your go-to-market teams and, and learning everyone’s name and learning there, you know, what their day to day looks like. Cuz 30 days is a short period of time. So you wanna get like that base foundation of knowledge of just like, what is the company doing before anything else?

Brad Smith (Sonar) (06:54):

Absolutely. I think the biggest thing is kind of knowing your landscape and being aware of who the key players are. I hope that nobody goes too fast in the paint and starts pulling out different automations or different sorts of integrations in the first 30 days. But, we’ll get to when that’s appropriate, but Nic you know, I’d love to hear on the first 30 days, what’s your focus and what, what, what was going through your mind during that journey?

Nic Swider (Briq) (07:17):

I, I kind of have to piggyback off of Asia here, but I think a big thing, a big part of those conversations and those meeting people is to build trust and like make sure that your person that the rest of the go-to market leaders can trust with issues that they and their teams are running into. And I’d say like, if they’re not throwing massive projects at you, like trying to do one thing for everybody so that they can, you can start having that conversation, that back and forth and understand how you work together.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (07:48):

I completely agree. Yeah. Building that trust and rapport is gonna be there and cause some of those quick wins for everybody’s important. Jonathan, same question. What are your thoughts?

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (07:58):

Yeah, I’ll give one similar answer and one different answer. The similar one is as Nic said, when you’re meeting with those leaders, try to identify one easy-to-solve pain point and do the self-pain point you can implement right away to help build that trust. But outside of that, I think one of them, probably the misnumber of rev op is, you know, it’s all about aligning your go-to-market teams. That’s true. But at the end of the day, you’re trying to align around the customer journey, the customer experience. And so you can’t really do an effective job of that unless you really do understand the customers and the prospects that you’re working with. So as much as possible in that first month, join sales calls, join customer calls, figure out what the day-to-day issues are that your product and your company are solving for because that’s just gonna help accelerate your learnings. And you actually go into the process and the system side, I think personally, that’s something that made my transition easier because I was coming immediately out of a role where I spent two years with our customers every single day. So I had that down cold and it was now just picking up the op skill

Brad Smith (Sonar) (09:00):

For sure. I, I think it’s important. And honestly, sometimes it goes unnoticed or, or I dunno if it’s paid to us, understand your business while the skill set that we all have of yes. We’re Salesforce experts. Yes. We know how to orchestrate data and move things around from system to system. That’s great. If you don’t take enough time in that first 30 days to understand what your business is doing, you’re really not gonna be able to optimize those outcome outcomes for those outcomes later on, because you don’t even know all the key moving parts to what’s happening. The one thing I’ve thought about is I’ve told folks who are either customers of ours or folks in the community as they’re starting, it’s really easy in those first 30 days to say a lot of yeses, you Nic, to your point you want everybody to get a lot of quick wins.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (09:47):

Like you want a win all the way across the leadership team, like go scratch their back or get them that you know, that hit, but it’s also very important to not over-index on. Yes. Because one of the biggest skills that every rev op person has to do is be able to say no and say it eloquently, but firmly sometimes. So it’s a balancing act for sure because you wanna build rapport and trust and get some wins for folks, but you also want to set expectations for the long haul. So moving out of day zero through 30 and into 31 through 60, you’re hoping everybody’s a little more grounded. And again, hopefully, know the key players Asia, to your point of who does what and where and how we really understand everything. But I think day 31 through 60 is a lot different. Jonathan, what do you think your focus points are there the in the second 30 days?

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (10:35):

Yeah. You understand the business, you probably understand what you’re up against. So there’s undoubtedly a better way to say this, but figure out what skeletons are in that closet and how, how deep that thing goes. You know, you go to find the documentation and realize there’s no documentation. So, you know, you figure out where do we even start you know, really beginning to UN uncover the whole customer experience and all the processes that touch it to figure out, you know, as I even think about building a plan to take this on, where should I even start? What are the things that are immediate issues versus longer-term issues, quick fixes, longer fixes, and just understanding what you’re up against from the get, go

Brad Smith (Sonar) (11:17):

Agree. Yeah. If you don’t, if you’re not able to index on all that and find it it’s gonna rear its ugly head at some point, whether it be those first 60 days or, you know, the back two or three years of, of being there. So finding it quickly is super important. Nic, what are your thoughts?

Nic Swider (Briq) (11:35):

So my, my big thing for month two is kind of to start working more with your end-users and discovering those pain points on the people who are actually using Salesforce, outreach, SalesLoft, go, whatever tools that you’re using at the time see what their pain points are and start addressing those. If there’s not a system for making requests, get that going, whether it’s just a Google form going into slack or a spreadsheet or whatever up to, you know, JIRA, if you’re at a huge company that wants to pay for you to have JIRA, just to take requests any, anything to start collecting those points of feedback in solving those, I think is a good time to get going on that.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (12:17):

Yeah, I completely agree. I think that mantra will also continue through, you know, the next couple of months too, not even the first 90 days, but just always being highly connected with those end users. Look at the other day, that’s who we’re building these solutions for just to make those jobs easier. So having that connection there, is key Asia, same question month two. What would your focus be?

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (12:37):

Yeah, so I have two things. One is di I agree a hundred percent with Nic. You have to have a system that takes requests because what I’ve found is every place I go or like, Asia, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And I get slacks and I get emails. And when we were in the office, people would come by my desk. So you wanna have a place to collect all that and centralize it. So you don’t go crazy and you can also use that to show later, like, look at how much, like look at all of these requests I’m getting. And then the second thing is what I like to call a process audit. And I also wish it was something that I had formalized for myself more early on in my career. But basically, this is a deeper dive into all of your go-to-market processes, everything that supports your customer’s journey. So like lead scoring is doing lead scoring, pop it on the Google sheet lead routing. What does that look like? Pop it on the Google sheet. And I like to segment it by functional groups, so sales, marketing, customer success, and you can start to see where there are gaps. And then you can use that later to build documentation if there is none to Jonathan’s point because that has happened as well. 

Brad Smith (Sonar) (13:52):

Oh yeah. Well, it is so key. Like having that process documentation in line. I think the thing that we know it’s a challenge in the first 60 days, but I think the thing that we’ve all probably agreed on that I know in different aspects is that it continues to be a challenge. So setting that expectation up first in the first couple of months of, yes, we’re gonna document this process once, so we know what it looks like as I’ve just started, but two we’re gonna constantly be going back to that. We very much suggest that that to a ton of our customers, like make sure as you’re making changes, update that previous documentation, whatever system you’re using, go for it, but you have to keep that as a live living entity, the thing that I reflect on a lot for month two, and again, to rewind month one was, you know, you wanna say, yes, a good mix of yes and no.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (14:39):

I’ve always told folks on month, or two, start asking why at that point, you’ve built hopefully enough trust and rapport that people know you can get these things done, but that second month is a really great place for you to start inserting yourself as to, Hey, why, why are you requesting that change? Why do you need that new picklist value? Or why do you need that check box? Or why do we need to automate that process? What business outcome, the fact that you can really start to ask why is gonna be a, a big indicator to the rest of the business as to your critical thinking for taking that request in and not just saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And inundate yourself with the long list of updates you gotta make. So you know, when you, when you think about this back third, I guess the third month or the last 90 days of this journey you know, we hope that by that point you’re grounded, you’ve met everybody, you’ve got some documentation in place. You figured that piece out. What would you say is one of the biggest priorities in that, that last 30 days, Nic, we’ll start with you.

Nic Swider (Briq) (15:36):

So I’d say it’s, and, and this could vary when, when it starts, all of these really could. But I’d say it’s time to try to start being prescriptive, even if it’s with little things. I find a lot that I’ll get asked for dashboards or to track a certain metric that’s important to the sales leaders. And every time I get those, I just start adding them to my own dashboard. These like key things, that I look at every day and start bringing those things up. Cuz sometimes, even though you were asked for it, nobody will actually ever look at that dashboard again, but obviously, it’s important cuz they ask for it. So start bringing those up and start kind of trying to move the business from an operational perspective. That’s where a lot of value from the role is gonna come.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (16:21):

I agree. I think the thing that I take and reflect on there is you’re getting a lot of those requests and I think at that point you’ve got a good enough hold of what’s going on in the business. You can probably start to predict or, or prescribe why they’re asking that question. And so if, if they’re asking something easy, you can go ahead and start thinking one or two or three steps ahead and say, my guess is, you’re asking for that dashboard because you’re trying to track this. Here’s another way to look at that. And here’s my 2 cents on what I think, you know, that process looks like or how that data’s being perceived. That’s ultimately like answering that bigger. Why for a lot of folks is a, a big piece to it. So Jonathan, on the last 30 days as you’re, you’re getting squared away, what comes to mind that you’re focusing on,

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (17:01):

Yeah, this is heavy. It depends. But it mostly depends on what happened in a month, one or two for your situation. And the biggest thing comes down to, you know, before you pass, go and collect your $200 and, and start executing things, take, make sure you work out a foundation, a plan for what are all the things that you need to think about and need to be implemented, not just short term, but long term, because as both Nic and a just said in, in month two, if you don’t set that plan and communicate that plan, you’re just gonna become that yes person or the ticket request person and the slack person. And that’s all your job’s gonna be boiled down to. To build that foundation and figure out what are those key things that you do immediately, whether it’s, you know, fixing a process, creating some missing insights or

Brad Smith (Sonar) (17:48):

Whatever, that, that first thing may be completely agreed upon. Yeah, it’s essentially it is so foundational in those first 90 days, but that last, you know, that last 30 days of it really sets you up for the success on the rest of the way Asia on that third month, what comes to mind and what’s your focus area.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (18:06):

Yeah. So I actually wanna go back to something that you said really quickly about asking why and why that is so important, especially in rev op because you know, the way that I think about rev op is, is a person or function or team that is really stewarding these processes across the entire customer journey. So when someone asks you, Hey, can you add this field to my page layout? Right? And when you’re in rev op, and you’re asking why you’re thinking about all of the upstream and downstream impacts that have versus being, you know, just in sales op where you’re kind of just thinking usually about sales processes and sales things and not necessarily, Hey, how is it gonna affect support? Is it gonna affect support? Under really, really getting down to the core of like why that’s important. And so I just wanted to touch on that, cuz it’s also happened to me in my career.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (19:01):

A lot of these things have happened, so I’m like, oh, I wish, you know, it’s good, it’s a good time to share this with everyone. But, in month three, I think, you know, really taking a look at the existing dashboards and reports that the teams are using and understanding the definitions of what they’re reporting on so that you can, like Nic said, start to be more prescriptive. And then the other thing in month three, that you can start doing you won’t have fully-fledged out is to Jonathan’s point building out your plan and what I like to call a roadmap, a very simple one again, you can do in Google sheets, but it’s like, all right, what kinds of things am I seeing? That’s gonna come up in the next quarter, in the next quarter and the next quarter, similar to the way a product team runs, right? They have their, projects and, and a backlog. And that way it keeps you again organized. And it’s something you can show also to the teams like, Hey, this is kind of the plan, and here’s what I’m working on.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (20:01):

Absolutely. I think so much of that kind of boils down to the expectation setting. And I remember even on the shop talk episode last year, where we had our, our good friend, a big, big wops guy talking about some of the methodologies and plays that we can take from product and engineering and bake them into the red op world, I think too often. And we talked about saying no before, right? I don’t even have the luxury or authority to go to our sonar engineering team and say, Hey team, I need you to fix this one thing next 30 minutes. Right. They’re like, no, we’ll add that to the next sprint. And we’ll get that out in the next couple of weeks probably. But we have to backlog that we have to groom it, plan it, you know, get it into the development.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (20:46):

I think one thing, a lot of folks forget on the rev offside is not everything happens overnight. Yes. There’s a lot of interpretation sometimes that says, oh, Hey, you’re just the rev off person, click the button a few times and, and build my solution. Right? Like, no, it’s a little more intense than that. A little more detailed. So setting up that, that roadmap and framework for them to be able to see like, yes, here’s the long list of things I’m working on. Here’s where the priority list is, here’s the expected time it takes to build it again, it’s just more awareness than anything else. So those first 90 days go by quickly obviously. And the way that we even just talked about it, we covered a lot of it. Pretty fast, one thing that we worked on with this group, and a couple of folks already on the call have it, but Sarah will share it in the chat now is a lot of this content that we’ve already put together in a 30, 60, 90-day plan.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (21:32):

So be sure to check that out. We’ll also be able to send that out as a follow-up to the meeting. So any questions again, please pop them into the chat. We are very happy to start answering them. We do have one more question and I think it’s pretty important for everybody to notice and understand what some pitfalls might be as you’re going through those first 90 days. It’s not always rainbows and butterflies. There are pitfalls. There are things that we stub our toe on. So Asia will start with you when you think of, you know, going through that journey, what are some of those pitfalls to watch out for that we can help our listeners avoid?

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (22:04):

Yeah, for me, when I, a role I went into, I started doing work right away because I knew Salesforce and I was like, I know how easy it is to add a field to a page later, or I need to track something, let me just create this new field. And I couldn’t do anything else because I was bogged down with all of those. Hey Asia, can you just fix this for me? Hey Asia, can you just do this? Why can’t I move my opportunity stage? And then I’m like up to my neck and not to say that they’re like useless things, but yeah, I wasn’t able to do my process audit or my systems audits because I wanted to be helpful and we want to be helpful, but I started working like literally the second week. I’m like, oh yeah, I’ll just, I’ll just fix that really quickly.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (22:52):

So it’s a balance, but I, I would say like use that time. I’m learning, I’m new. I’m trying to understand how our things are working in the first couple of months. Cuz you can, you can use that and say I’ll get to that. I’ll get to you that and start creating your documentation right away. Like a couple have said because it’s going to help you. I went into a system. This was like after I started and I made my, some of my boss and I put together a data dictionary, again, another Google sheet, manual thing, but I almost overwrote some field mappings because I’m like, oh yeah,  I, when I started this, I knew the fields that were mapped, but somebody had changed them. And I went back to my data dictionary. I’m like, oh, these are the ones that are mapped. And so, you know, what can happen when you overwrite stuff? And you’ve changed field mappings, which causes errors in all other systems. So start your documentation early. The earlier the

Brad Smith (Sonar) (23:59):

I, so I feel like that emoji right now, like write it down, but it’s so true. Like we, I tell everybody on our team, no matter what role it is, everybody wants to run fast. Everybody wants to go run a hundred miles an hour. I will perfectly accept 90 miles an hour. And I’d rather you sacrifice that last 10% or the last 10 miles of speed, write it down, and pay it forward to the next person on your team. So completely agree, Jonathan you have any major pitfalls that stick out in the journey of this first 90 days?

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (24:31):

Yeah. It’s, it’s, you know, not thinking too short term, you know, make sure you think about what you’re gonna need in, in the future as well. And of course, that’s big in planning and makes sure you’re planning out those priorities, but it’s also thinking about what information are you gonna need in the future? What does your scaling look like? So that you’re not, you know, patch something with a bandaid when really you should go ahead and spend that extra time up front to fix it, or, you know, a year and a half from now, you’re gonna wanna understand the stage conversion rate. But if you wait till then to implement that process, you’re not gonna have that data. So, you know, figure out what are those things early on that you’re gonna need 6, 12, 18 months from now and make sure you, you make some space for that early on,

Brad Smith (Sonar) (25:14):

Completely agree. Tech debt’s real and it’s real in the rev op world. And by hook or crook, if you don’t pay your debt off early, you’re gonna, you’re paid probably a lot more and a premium on it later on. So if fix ’em along the way to let things build up and fester that way I totally agree. Nic, bring us home. What are some of the pitfalls that you’ve seen in that first 90-day journey?

Nic Swider (Briq) (25:37):

I, I feel so called out by all the documentation comments, cause it’s like my favorite thing to do. 

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (25:44):

It’s not fun.

Nic Swider (Briq) (25:45):

 it’s yeah. It’s, it’s not fun. It’s not nearly as fun as automating something to document what you did and how it works, but it is super, super important. It’s something I’m working on all the time, getting better at. But another kind of comment. That’s a little bit in line with what both Jonathan and Asia have mentioned especially as you’re getting little requests, Hey, we just need this field. Hey, I just need a report on these little things that you’re like, oh, I could do this in 30 seconds. Like, yeah, let’s just do it real quick. Sometimes they’re already solved. So just like take 30 seconds to check first. And see, we might already have a field for tracking the contract start date and you forgot to put it on the page layout or something. Right. Just, just take the time to make sure you’re not doubling up work for yourself now and tracking data in two different places, and just losing track of what you’ve already worked on or what somebody who came you may have already worked on. It’s really easy to just like do tickets, especially if you’re taking tickets, but yeah, sometimes you don’t even have to do the work, so,

Brad Smith (Sonar) (26:53):

Oh yeah. Yeah. I think so much that that comes down to the intentionality. It’s very easy in our roles to get reactive and to just get into ticket overload and, oh man, here’s this request, here’s this request, here’s this request it’s so important to take a step back. Am I actually proactively working on the goals that we were set for in our team, by my leaders? If we’re not, you know, tickets are important and fixing things obviously is a very important piece, but just make sure you’re always north star to what the goals are that you have for your group. So but you have a couple of questions come in. So we’re gonna try to run through ’em very fast first and very easy one. I’m focused on growing my ops team. How can I help guide new team members through their first 90 days? I think the easy one there is listening to the content and a lot of what we’ve all written down, but from a managerial perspective setting somebody up for success in their first 90 days, I’ll I won’t call anybody out. I let somebody speak up on what they think is a good way from a manager’s perspective.

Nic Swider (Briq) (27:54):

I, I actually think especially our month, one advice of like getting to know stakeholders is really almost extra important. This is something that I’ve struggled with as my team, as we’ve grown is that for the first year it was just me, right? And so now when I bring people on, I have to make sure that everybody who’s used to coming to me for everything knows that there’s somebody El a there’s somebody else doing a lot of work and what, like what things they should go to them for. And so just introducing your new hires to those stakeholders and saying like, Hey, this is what this person’s gonna be responsible for. If you ask me to do anything, I’m gonna ask you to ask them like, to, to make sure that they’re known and they’re not just somebody in the background like plugging away doing tickets, I think is really, really important. 

Brad Smith (Sonar) (28:48):

Absolutely

Nic Swider (Briq) (28:49):

Really. It’s really easy if you’re the only person, to stay the only person.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (28:54):

Oh yeah. Well, I think this actually aligns very very well to one other question and we’ll answer this and then we’ll, I know we’re at the top of time, we’re getting really close, so we’ll get one last rapid-fire in and we’ll call today. But inside of those key people, Nic, that you’re talking about, somebody asks if it would be interesting to hear if any of the individuals are included folks from billing teams or from finance as those key players you need to learn. I think I see three nodding heads of yes, absolutely. Absolutely.  I was gonna say, yes, you if there are any if there’s anybody in a company you wanna be best friends with finance is a really good one to make sure you’re in good graces with them. Obviously, you want money to come, into the business the right way. And rev op has a lot to control on that. So I think that was a, a unanimous yes. Please bring billing and finance in.  go ahead, John. Yeah.

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (29:42):

And I, and I’ll add, I wasn’t as, as close to finance and billing early on in my ops role, because all the attention was coming from sales and marketing. And so it was like, all right, let me just like handle all this, like the more urgent things. But ended up having to do a lot more work later on with finance that had I known earlier, I probably could simplify a lot of the processes and streamline them together versus like patching things and working backward through that process. So yes, now yes. Back then. No, 

Brad Smith (Sonar) (30:14):

Well, I think it’s super important. I think that’s part of the learning journey and that’s why we’d like to have folks on to help again, hopefully, mitigate some of those pitfalls I might run into. So I know we’re about a minute and over, so well, we’ll get to the one and only rapid-fire that I always love to ask. Y’all probably already all know it and know to expect it, but we have so many folks from our community on here for the first time who there’s starting their journey, right? During that first 90 days as a reflection point on your ops career, what advice would you give somebody as they are now tackling this journey? Just overall, what’s one thing that you would like them to take into consideration Asia. I’ll, I’ll start with you and then go Nic and then Jonathan to wrap us up.

Asia Corbett (RevGenius) (30:57):

 I would say invest in your process and project management skills. That has been the thing that has helped me in my career more than knowing Salesforce more than knowing any systems is that because when you have to juggle multiple stakeholders, multiple priorities, deadlines projects, thinking about processes, end the end, like those things have helped me much more than knowing Salesforce has. Salesforce is important, your tools are important, but that is a foundation. The process is a foundation. So I mean, YouTube, Google CLA like courses, if you can take the people you can learn from that’s, I, I would say like learn and invest in those things.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (31:42):

I couldn’t agree more and continue to learn. I think so many people have to realize, like, that this is a learning environment. You don’t get to take everything you’ve learned from the past and just start using it. Now you have to keep learning it into the future. So I completely agree. Nic, what Sage advice would you give for folks that are starting, their rev ops career?

Nic Swider (Briq) (32:01):

Ask more questions? Ask lots of questions. There’s no such thing as too many. Especially if you’re starting working from home, like a lot of people are right now. It’s really easy to miscommunicate things with stakeholders where they’ll say, Hey, I need X, Y, Z, and you interpreted it as Y X, Z. And it’s just a little bit different, but it’s enough different. Then, you have to like restart everything when you realize that you messed up the first time. So, my favorite thing to do when people ask me for something is to ask like 15 clarifying questions.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (32:38):

 yep. Good, ask why take that? Yeah. Take that out of the old product playbook for sure. Jonathan brings us home. What advice do you have for folks early in their career or starting their journey?

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (32:51):

Yeah, I’d say just embrace the fact that there’s a ton of stuff you do not know. And, and you have to accept that and, and be okay with that. Especially if you’re early in your career, but even as you continue, I can’t even tell you the number of things I’ve done 30 times. And I still go to Google when I have to do it again, cuz I don’t necessarily remember exactly how to do it. And I think that that’s, you know, the importance of community and having other people to bounce problems and, and questions off of. But alongside that, you know, keep an open mind because I think one trap of like being an op for a while is you go company to company thinking the same playbook would work when it probably won’t there are elements of it. But I think the best obstacles are, are good problem solvers who know that they don’t know the answer, but they know how to find the answer. So just accepting that early on is key

Brad Smith (Sonar) (33:40):

It’s so important. I’ll tell you this. One of my personal hiring strategies is we’re hiring across any position is anybody that can embrace the ability to say the words. I don’t know, cuz the reality is we, we, we all don’t know everything. That’s why we’re here doing the jobs that we have. We’re solving problems that nobody else has probably solved before. And it’s perfectly fine to embrace the fact that you don’t know, as long as you also know how to go find the solution to it. And I think that goes down to asking a ton of questions, Nic of course you always wanna make sure that you can ask why a lot. And of course Asia, we, we think about process documentation and write it down. There’s no way you’re gonna be able to remember it all. So get it written down some format, some fashion as we go, we’re already five minutes over and that just shows you how much fun we have, and time flies when we’re having fun.

Brad Smith (Sonar) (34:28):

We will let everybody get back today. I know a couple of folks probably already had a drop to get to their next meeting, but as always Asia, Nic, and Jonathan, thank you. Has enough to jump in, and share your thoughts for everybody to join. You’ll get a copy of the ebook that we have, the 30, 60, and 90 roadmaps for you and Kent. Thank y’all for putting all the content together and Sarah for helping us orchestrate all of it as we continue. But parting words, Asia, Nic, and Jonathan, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And hope everybody has a great rest of their day. Hi everyone.

Jonathan Morgan (AchieveIt) (34:59):

Thanks, everyone.