(888) 815-0802The Best Strategies for Putting out RevOps Fires, with Darren Fay [Episode 1145]
Sometimes your career evolves into something you never would have expected. In this compelling episode, join Alastair and Howard as they delve into the fascinating journey of Darren Fay, who transitioned from firefighting to Director of Revenue Operations & Intelligence at Instructure. Together, they discuss the urgent need for data governance in the face of burgeoning AI technologies and the pivotal role of revenue operations in the management of this data. From Darren’s insights into strategic approaches to RevOps to a deep dive into the role of dashboards and data in driving behavior change, this episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to navigate the intersection of technology, data, and business.
Podcast Transcript:
00:00:00:15 – 00:00:25:04
Speaker
We do a pipeline pulse is what we call it, but it’s more of like an intelligence meeting. We get in that meeting and we go in and we address those areas. You’re going to have to get on this call and talk about something, you better know what you’re talking about before you start talking. Yeah.
00:00:25:06 – 00:00:52:21
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody, to this week’s Sales Strategy and Enablement podcast. I’m Alastair Woolcock, CSRO here at Revenue.io, joined today with my co-host Howard Brown, the godfather of all things revenue science. Oh boy. I’m thrilled to have with us today, Darren Fay. Darren is Director Revenue Operation Intelligence at Instructure and also our first former fireman on the podcast.
00:00:52:23 – 00:01:15:18
Speaker
Darren, how are you doing? Great to have you with us today. Doing good. Thanks for having me. So it begs the opening question, how did you go from fireman to the crazy world of robots? My money’s a little bit of a motivator, as it should be. My wife and I moved to Utah to live in a more safe neighborhood.
00:01:15:19 – 00:01:39:05
Speaker
Now, when we decided we wanted to start having kids, you know, and moving to Utah, they don’t really invest in firefighter salaries like they do in California. And so the pay isn’t quite manageable to live, you know, the way we wanted to live. So got back into sales and, you know, did what I did prior to firefighting and that led back into my passions for like running revenue operations.
00:01:39:05 – 00:02:01:19
Speaker
And at the time, it wasn’t called revenue operations. It was just running a solid sales team right there. And then slowly you had more operations support, more sales, and then it’s kind of morphed into, you know, revenue operations over time. Well, we’re we’re thrilled you made the lead back because you’ve been pioneering with the revolves roundtable community that you’ve been part of leading a building.
00:02:01:19 – 00:02:37:13
Speaker
You certainly you’re in the front and center. It appears every single week, combined with different grab ups, leaders across the industry. And we were really drawn to some of your article that you’ve been publishing around the governance, the maintenance side. And really, Darren, I think for Howard and I, there’s a lot of interest in that area more than normal due to all the buzz these days of generative technologies, and that’s resulting in a lot more data moving a lot more places and also can be a real multiplier of what’s good and what’s bad.
00:02:37:17 – 00:02:58:04
Speaker
I think we’re living in this recursive models now and you know, this world is about to change and the governance and data maintenance side of that from a from a robots perspective, I think is front and center but all cause what do you think And let’s and let’s get you and Howard thinking on this. Yeah you know what’s got me thinking recently?
00:02:58:04 – 00:03:17:00
Speaker
What caused me to write the initial article was, you know, dealing with some of my own pains, right? Going through looking at data. When you come into an organization, you’re always going to have some type of inherited data, right? There’s always years worth of data somebody else has managed or buried and there’s years worth of something that you may or may not fully understand.
00:03:17:02 – 00:03:39:13
Speaker
Then it’s immediately your responsibility to make sure that data is trustworthy. And in a lot of cases, people just go business as usual and report out on those things, trusting that things are being maintained. Right. And and going through some of these motions of research and evaluating the best options to make sure that things get managed, it’s around, you know, segmenting and understanding your responsibilities and having documentation of what those processes are.
00:03:39:15 – 00:04:10:11
Speaker
You know, data governance is a big word right now, right? You have you have data governance, which encompasses such a large scope of things. You have everything from, you know, compliance to security management, data quality to architecture. You know, there’s just a full gamut of things that that covers. And it’s it’s a very large process. But when you get down to revenue operations and what you can impact from that, it led me down this rabbit hole of understanding, hey, how can we operationalize this in a way that’s scalable for an organization to manage?
00:04:10:11 – 00:04:33:14
Speaker
And it covers all the areas that that that we can cover. And, you know, some organizations they may have a segmentation of an I.T group, they may have an enterprise systems group, they may have a revenue operations group and understanding where roles start and stop what that scoping practice looks like. I think a big problem that people have and running operations that I’ve gotten quite passionate about is the scoping practice of adding something into a system.
00:04:33:20 – 00:04:50:22
Speaker
Before you go add something, can you solve it another way before adding additional tech tests? And if you can, let’s do that. If you can’t, let’s go through the process and evaluate it and find the least impactful way of impacting the organization and making sure you have a management process in place to say, when is it going to be?
00:04:51:00 – 00:05:13:04
Speaker
Who’s going to manage, who’s the steward of it, what is the operational process that has to take place? When is it going to be audited? What is going to be reevaluated to see if it’s still being used or is it something it should be replaced? Is it a short term solution or a long term solution? And it’s become quite apparent to me that it’s something that people are starting to now pay more attention to than they historically have, just due to the fact that age is becoming more prevalent.
00:05:13:06 – 00:05:35:20
Speaker
I want to dig in a little bit because what you’re talking about is really a strategy and a strategic sort of initiative to a rev ops and an organization. A lot of times organizations had no strategy and have no strategy and I hate to use the analogy, but in your as a rev ops leader, you’re a firefighter, right?
00:05:35:20 – 00:06:02:18
Speaker
You’re constantly fighting fires that are coming up around you. How do you make time to think about strategy to really align the organization when you have these constant wants and needs from every part of the organization? How do you essentially step back and say, okay, we’re going to focus on the strategy to reduce the fire fight? You know, right now I’m really big on this slow down to speed up mindset, right?
00:06:02:23 – 00:06:22:10
Speaker
And it’s about, you know, if I go create a field for somebody tomorrow and I just go do it in the system, what that field could do is look at the step down, look to go out a value to a field. And I think on the surface quite innocent right now. But yeah, the downstream implications of that are, well, now you’ve created that.
00:06:22:10 – 00:06:42:22
Speaker
So now you have to go do the work to update always opportunities or, or, or records to make sure they are accurately reflected. Then you have a downstream impact of reports that could be looking at it. Yes. Now you’ve just created hours of work for yourself and then additional data integrity issues and so one of the things I rolled out with my team that I’m really passionate about is like a prioritization.
00:06:43:00 – 00:07:00:17
Speaker
And so you start by listening to the issues say, hey, listen, this is the priority we have. Get as much insight as you can from the person, ask for clarity. So understand what’s driving it, what’s going on with it, Why is it important? What is it referencing and then the next step is debating it. So let’s talk about why my thing is important.
00:07:00:17 – 00:07:18:11
Speaker
Let’s talk about why your things are important. Let’s talk about what the impact on the businesses and which is the right avenue to go forward with. And then from there, you decide. So you decide on which route you’re going to take. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s important to align and persuade the other stakeholders why you decided to take this motion.
00:07:18:13 – 00:07:41:09
Speaker
And then from there you go execute on your project and then you learn from those experiences and you reevaluate, Hey, what did I learn? What can I put into the process? And then the next step is just repeating that process because it’s never done. So somebody could bring that same project back up to you. And the important part is to go through that motion every time so that you’re always, constantly maintaining the most high priority focus on the things that are driving the business the most.
00:07:41:14 – 00:08:04:22
Speaker
I love the structured approach. I feel like every organization can use that template. Yeah, absolutely. Now I want to add though, and get your thoughts here, Darren. Often when I talk to various leaders and you think about sales ops, we think about what people are trying to drive in an organization. You’ll often find that the need for data, the need for governance, the need for the structure is there.
00:08:05:03 – 00:08:39:16
Speaker
But what do people actually build to give the insight? They love to build dashboards, but right now, I’m just to put you both on the spot here. Just give me your your wrap idea. How many how many dashboards do you think an average enterprise sales team has today? Over 100. Easily, Yeah. When you think. Yeah, I an enterprise organization, I’d say over 200 and I’d say they probably used well dash flips right like 12 individual that let’s so let’s let’s go with let’s go with the low number.
00:08:39:21 – 00:09:10:20
Speaker
Okay And let’s just say you know Well there why she needs it 12 of the 100 plus they have you realize every time a sales rep or ops person looks at the dashboard, the average amount of time they spend on it is 6 minutes. Doesn’t sound bad, but we just agreed on the low side they’re going to use well, that’s 72 minutes a day staring at a dashboard, 72 minutes not selling every single day on an eight hour workday.
00:09:10:23 – 00:09:45:12
Speaker
Yeah, and that’s the low side number. And then you sit there and go and look at sales ops and general and rebel leaders and you say, well, I don’t know what’s dashboards have been helping somebody. They actually driving an action, a behavior change. But we telling the rapidly leads so a do but is understanding something they should do and you realize that prioritization of helping somebody make a business decision making a sales decision only accounts for 30% of all those dashboards, 76% of the time.
00:09:45:14 – 00:10:07:20
Speaker
It’s just about how you did against your goals yesterday. So we’re losing in more than an hour a day of people booking a stop the tell them what they did yesterday and has know how on making decision making going forwards. And so as I think of governance, I think of these structures and I think at the data it’s all me getting bigger and bigger and about to give recursive and generate.
00:10:07:22 – 00:10:30:12
Speaker
How on earth do we drive action out of that? Because if you don’t make somebody stare at this stuff, what do we need to do to make it useful? So I certainly will weigh in. I well, first of all, I don’t know many sales reps that stare at dashboards for a long. You may want them to do it for some reason, but you know, they’re probably not going to do it.
00:10:30:17 – 00:10:54:03
Speaker
But boy, sales leader, sales managers, ops people, there’s a lot of people that stare at those things all day long. And to your point, I almost think about it in the way that Darren talks about even changing a field. What is the objective of this dashboard? What is the objective of the report and what insights are you trying to derive?
00:10:54:05 – 00:11:30:20
Speaker
Are you trying to drive change behavior or are you looking for visibility? Who is the stakeholder? And is a dashboard really the right way to solve for it? I argue in most cases it’s absolutely not the I. Where should we as sellers, as managers, where should we be focused not staring at a screen and or dashboard, but it’s what are the insights that I need to drive change behavior to drive change within the organization to to know what I need to do next.
00:11:30:20 – 00:11:55:21
Speaker
It’s the insights that come from the data used to be the thin. Give me insights now Insights while cool. Give me what’s going to what do I do next? Drive my next behavior. It’s one thing to get insights, but how do I change behavior based on those insights? Prescribe something. Tell me what I should do next based on this data that that to me is where we’re going.
00:11:55:23 – 00:12:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, I’m going to agree with you. I think when I think of dashboards, I think of them in two ways. I think of the you have a core dashboard which highlight core KPIs that define success across the company strategy, right? And then you look at driver dashboards, which I look at as those driver metrics that are showing trend lines are showing symptoms of your ability or inability to be able to achieve those core metrics.
00:12:21:09 – 00:12:51:11
Speaker
Right? And so what I like to have is you have a core dashboard, a record area where quick insights are we there, are we not? Right. And then you have your GPS, which is your driver metrics where you’re looking at that those primarily would be led by, you know, an intelligence team. And in often cases, I think it’s almost better for the intelligence team to do that research and then circle it up to the leaders because there’s so many you know, you pull a thread and it comes out to something completely different.
00:12:51:13 – 00:13:11:06
Speaker
You know, my my coverage is low while you’re missing your target. Okay, great. Well, your coverage is low. Well, why is your coverage low while your win rates down by your pipeline, generations dot up. It’s, you know, one of these two areas and then well, why is that? Is your deal size going down? Is it that the products you’re adding you’re adding fewer products than you historically had?
00:13:11:08 – 00:13:34:23
Speaker
And there’s just this cascading effect It can understand, okay, what are we seeing? And then taking that information to say, this is what we’re seeing, Let’s talk about what we can do to remedy it. One of the things that we’ve had some good success with that I’ve really loved is we do a pipeline pulse is what we call it, but it’s more of like an intelligence meeting where we’ll send out an email and we have all of the insights on it that led to our conclusions.
00:13:35:01 – 00:13:51:22
Speaker
And then at the top we have top three things. So these are the three things that we’ve identified as areas of concern or things we want to work on. And then we set up a meeting afterward with all the key stakeholders that can help mitigate that. And we go in and we address those areas based off of, Hey, please review the information prior.
00:13:51:22 – 00:14:17:01
Speaker
So you’re all up to date so we can have a meaningful discussion and we’ll get in that meeting. One of the things I hate to do is get on a meeting and just read out metrics. So if we can get on a meeting and you’ve already looked at the metrics so we can just have a strategic conversation to solve the company problems with all the bright minds in the room, I find you have people not going to check on dashboards almost saying, Hey, listen, I’ll go check and see if I’m there or not yet, but if I’m not there, then it’s going to require them to go look in a different dashboard and, you know,
00:14:17:01 – 00:14:35:01
Speaker
understand their symptoms. I love that idea. I by the way, how often do you do that? So we do it monthly. Yeah, it’s a monthly cadence. Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a great suggestion to be listening in and define email. Good way to do it. Yep. To pull together. I’ll see you do afterwards. But a pretty good uptake there.
00:14:35:02 – 00:14:52:22
Speaker
Yeah. I think we’ll be sent email out and you have a strategic meeting afterwards. There’s a sense of accountability right? You’re going to have to get on this call and talk about some things that are shocking about before you start talking. So, you know, we find that they may check at real quick before, but as long as we put the service up that information prior to the meeting, we have a really meaningful conversation which has been enjoyable.
00:14:53:01 – 00:15:19:19
Speaker
And Darren, how do you deal with the idea like I’m not that structure of flow there. Do you ever encounter where you have conflict over the data or the insights across the different domains? Right, Because obviously the charter ops often involves marketing customer success out of the sales areas. It’s a pretty big charter. And when you think about that, to use an analogy, you know, we used to have shadow it.
00:15:20:00 – 00:15:38:14
Speaker
If you were a CIO, right, it’s a big thing. People running up and doing a bunch of things, you know, How are you dealing with that and what are you hearing? The REVOLTS Roundtable community, these things, things of those nature, how you bring it all together. So we have consistency in that reporting and we can debate the insight from from a common truth.
00:15:38:16 – 00:15:57:07
Speaker
You know, one of the ways we’ve mitigated that is segmenting it out. You know, I run the sales portion of the operations and intelligence side of the business. I used to also have marketing. We have somebody who’s over that now. And we have two aspects where we’re using a singular data model for all things that encompass this type of reporting.
00:15:57:07 – 00:16:19:12
Speaker
Right? And so we are all going to use the same reporting structure from this. You may have a different model or a different dataset for, let’s say, campaign little attributes, like if you’re looking at a more granular piece of data that’s driving those sales level metrics, including like pipeline and sales customer lifecycle. If we’re getting, you know, further into the cycle, we’re looking at like renewals or customer success.
00:16:19:12 – 00:16:40:14
Speaker
You know, I think a lot of those are just based on defining the owners of those KPIs, right? So if I’m going to report out on nonrenewable bookings, that’s going to be me regardless of who my stakeholder is, because that person is the steward of that type of data reporting. So making sure you keep that in alignment, I do think it’s also a great practice to do to across systems teams.
00:16:40:16 – 00:16:58:06
Speaker
If you have a Salesforce admin and you have somebody who’s working on it, but you have a team in a marketing team who’s also in Salesforce, I love to have object owners. So you have a camp. This person owns the responsibility for this campaign object. Anything that happens, it’s his responsibility to go say, Let’s go look at the impact across the entire organization.
00:16:58:09 – 00:17:29:01
Speaker
Yes, good for you. That is needed everywhere. I love that. Yeah. Because otherwise it’s just conflict, right? Everybody’s pounding it. Nobody owns it. It’s always there’s always problems. So do you have people that literally own every object across? Yeah, I’m we’re in the process of doing some of those areas right now, which I’m excited about. I’ve been mapping quite a bit out there and I think the, you know, just an understanding that as a revenue operations department, we do have we were we are stewards of the entire revenue organization, right?
00:17:29:01 – 00:17:50:19
Speaker
So you should care about your colleagues and where their interests lie. And so when you’re going through this account level reporting, this is an example. If I have somebody from six who wants to go and put something into practice, just me being aware of that and being able to circle around that, it also unlocks the ability for me to fully understand this process and how it can be leveraged across the organization.
00:17:50:19 – 00:18:07:12
Speaker
Yeah, and then you are in duplicative work. You don’t have additional tech debt coming in when you should. It could have been solved because this person knows this object very well. So I think it’s unrealistic nowadays with the larger organization to say you have a single ad man who covers everything. I think object related ownership is important. I actually love it.
00:18:07:12 – 00:18:34:08
Speaker
I really love it because I can’t tell you how many organizations because we bring in a tool and it’s suddenly conflict is. Yeah, if there were people who owned different pieces of it, you’d have an owner. If you have no owner, nobody takes responsibility. Nobody’s accountable for it. Things just get tossed in there. Obviously, you have conflict. I want to keep up to date on how this exercise is.
00:18:34:09 – 00:18:52:20
Speaker
Yeah, because I haven’t heard of many people just saying you own the campaign object. Like, that’s. That’s actually brilliant. Yeah. I think it comes down to me like the data governance piece where you’re looking at data management practices, who’s going to own the documentation of this, who’s going to own the change management of this thing happens on the the larger scale of things.
00:18:52:20 – 00:19:12:15
Speaker
And they say, Hey, this field needs to be leveraged for x y report. Okay, that’s the usage of this. If anything changes, we are reevaluating it at this date. Somebody wants to go make an edit to it. Now you’re going to go reevaluate that scope and that person understands that this is a this is an individual process. Every field without an object is, Yep, I got your next blog post.
00:19:12:15 – 00:19:30:12
Speaker
You got to do it on this. Yeah. For an object and ownership. Yeah, it is a good call. I mean it’s a good call that you’re doing is not all that I’m telling you to blog post. No I It’s always difficult to find new things to write about. You see things you’re dealing with in revenue operations. And it’s like the whole reason I started the wrap up roundtable was more around.
00:19:30:12 – 00:19:51:23
Speaker
I came from, you know, being a fireman, got to sales and rev ops and having the resources. I’ve been really fortunate to be surrounded by such great individuals, the revenue operations community. But for the people who don’t have that, I wanted to give like some free access to it. So, you know, I pay for my own pocket. It’s like a forum level thing and I make sure I put up blog posts to share things that interest me that I see come up.
00:19:51:23 – 00:20:09:01
Speaker
And I welcome people. I talk to people. If anybody wants to put something up and write something, I’m happy to put it out there just because I think it’s important to share knowledge across, you know, the different pain points. We’re all experiencing open source program upstairs and we love it. Yeah, yeah. But we are running up against our time here on that.
00:20:09:01 – 00:20:30:17
Speaker
I would say the breakthrough for me, I think just as giddy is Howard, when you talk to our heads of remotes on ownership of the campaign object side, I think I really do think that’s one more time to go public. Usually brilliant pieces of by staring that I’ve heard in recent times. Absolutely a lot that it’s brilliant. Final word is yours.
00:20:30:17 – 00:20:57:06
Speaker
Tell everyone how they can go connect with you and share their insights on the Red Cross roundtable, the community, the chapter. Yeah, definitely. You can just search by name. Darren Faye on LinkedIn. It’ll come up. And then if you want to check out the Rev Ops roundtable, it’s just WW W dot rev ops roundtable dot com. Awesome. Thanks for joining us please like and subscribe and for those listening in, don’t forget to call in with your questions.
00:20:57:06 – 00:21:12:07
Speaker
You can reach us at (323) 540-4777. That’s (323) 540-4777. Darren, we’d love to have you back on a future episode and we will see you all again soon. Thanks so much. Thank you.
