Welcome to Rattle’s brand-new revenue news roundup, RevOps After Dark.
This is a weekly piece (posted after-hours, so you can actually read it), which aims to quickly, directly, and relatively playfully look out for the concerns of Revenue teams, disposing of the non-essentials and helping you improve all facets of your teams' operations.
Let's get to-
Wait! Why make this?
Um. Inquisitive! A poorly timed but also fair question.
After the initial fanfare that resulted from of our monthly newsletter (sign up for that in our footer below), The Rattler, we realized Revenue Operations, particularly, isn’t getting much love in the big wide world of business news.
And just as with Rattle’s product, we're here to fill a major gap in the revenue tech space to provide actionable, timely information that gets teams working faster, smarter, more collaboratively, and ultimately, with delight.
(It's actually super on-brand of us, we know.)
Below, you can see we've broken down the news for ease of digestion, but are always are here for your feedback. (In fact, that's why we broke them down this way to begin with — reader feedback from our newsletter).
Alright that's it.
Our email is hello@gorattle.com if you've got any more guidance to give.
New Tools & Features
🪣 MS Teams’ Task Tool: A Drop in the Bucket?
This week, Microsoft announced it’s spicing up their oft-ignored Tasks app in Teams with a new feature: "Tasks in My Area." (No, it’s not replacing”‘Hot Singles”… as far as we know). In November, users will be able to filter tasks into specific “buckets” like sales, marketing, or admin. What's a bucket? Well, it’s something you hold stuff in. If you're a sales rep, for example, you can filter tasks to see only your sales-related duties. It's all about focusing on what's relevant to you. Will it catch on? Maybe!
🤖 Agentic AI: Scary Close (Also Just... Scary)
While there are still plenty of (legitimate) concerns around the safety, privacy, and accuracy of generative/evaluative A.I. (enough to make SMB and ENT use pretty much out of the question) (for now) we found this one-man project — which connects Hubspot, Slack and Stripe — both charming and fairly illustrative of the way that process will evolve. Short and sweet Tweet-Demo:
🛞 The SQL Wheel Gets the Grease
File under L for LOVE TO DEATH: The Supabase SQL editor, fueled by AI, revolutionizes SQL writing by allowing users to craft queries without knowing SQL itself. Not even sure what you don't know? Even better. It intelligently grasps what you're attempting to query and provides tailored suggestions exclusive to your database. They're not paying me here. I just really dislike writing SQL. :) More deets here.
Fresh Thoughts & Facts
💩 B.S. Thought Leadership: Doesn’t Work (And More)
Bospar’s recent report on the Value of Thought Leadership has a lot of great insights into Thought Leadership in general, but we particularly appreciated this hot little nugget: “The primary reason thought leadership fails to meet its objectives is because it’s biased as the result of a sample size that is too small and therefore not representative of the population being surveyed or the company has produced research that is obviously biased.” Or to put it another way: B.S. is clearly B.S. (Read the full report here)
😈 The Path to Hell is Paved in Good Intent…-level Databases
“Get your grubby paws off those prospect-level intent databases now. If you're in the EU, targeting customers in the EU, or so much as breathing in the direction of the EU with your GTM strategy, you can't use them.” Anastasiia Binns, Head of RevOps at N.Rich offers a great take on abiding by GDPR, and we’re sure you’ll find, her meme game is as strong as ever.
📣 A Little RevOps Peptalk
“The revenue operations department is a team of ultimate enablers," says Gabe Naviasky, Head of Sales, Marketing and RevOps at Fitgrid, who goes on to challenge the common perception of Revenue Operations as restrictive or reactive, instead presenting the role as a vital growth team and enabling the Revenue team to thrive. Obv, we agree.
🪨 A Revenue Rock/A Hard Place
“Always make your intentions behind decisions clear.” Tonni Bennet, VP of Sales over at Daily smartly hit home the challenging role of frontline managers in Sales (pst: not unlike RevOps, they’re caught between the demands of the sellers and senior leadership), and offers her take on managing it all.
💪 Bring Out the Big Guns, Baby!
“There is overwhelming evidence that getting senior leadership from your company and your buyer involved in the sales cycle increases both the chances of a successful, timely transaction and the accompanying implementation.” Bob Spina, VP of Sales at ON24, emphasizes the importance of involving leadership in the sales cycle, arguing that aligning with a prospect's business goals and strategic initiatives, rather than focusing on product features, can lead to meaningful differentiation.
This Week’s Great Watch
“You need to understand the machine learning stuff and the AI stuff, not because you’re going to become an AI engineer or an AI scientist, but because that is now going to be a critical table stakes for you to understand how business works.” Harvard Business Review editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down to argue that basically the title of this solid watch: “AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI.” (Skip to 2:06 to get through the commercials). Check It Out Here.
Ad-Hoc Talkin’ Shop (Random news)
😬 Alright Alright Alright — Or Not Really
Salesforce reportedly spent a cool (and we do really emphasize cool — like sunglasses emoji cool) $10 million to lasso Perpetual-Man-About-Town Matthew McConaughey as a spokesperson. This, while employees faced layoffs, cost-cutting, and other austerity measures shortly thereafter. According to Business Insider, recently leaked messages from the inside SFDC indicate employees are feeling, well... “It’d be a lot cooler if they didn’t” spend the money on the A-lister. (Paywall) (And watch the most recent, kinda weirdo commercial here)
🤑 Simon Says: Cha-Ching!
Simon Data Inc., a startup focusing on analytics and marketing automation, raised $54 million in a Series D funding round. The platform, which is built on Snowflake Architecture, aggregates customer information into one repository, allowing for enhanced analysis and targeted marketing. With built-in machine learning, it can forecast purchasing behaviors and customer churn, as well as automate emails and in-app promotions.
👾 Beam Me Up? Or Out? Or… Uh… Elsewhere?
Tech bosses are now apparently using literal holograms to be in multiple places at once. The technology, developed by the likes of Hypervsn (which NGL has a Blade Runner like website and unironically uses the word "Phygital", allows people to live-stream themselves with a “digital avatar.” Begging the question of how long until your C suite blasts you with a “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi! You’re my only hope!” Slack at 3 a.m.
Watch the video below.
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And that's it for this week!
We'll be back next Thursday night with more news, tips, and more.
Thanks for reading — and remember, you always can reach out to us at hello@gorattle.com for any questions, comments, concerns, or detailed recountings you have about those inevitable robo-squirrel nightmares.
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