Welcome to RevOps After Dark, where we get straight to the revenue-team/revenue-process news that you (hopefully, probably) care about, with a dash of that special Rattle-brand Delight!
This week, we're covering: A.I. over-saturation, A.E. under-maturation, and E.U. anti-disinformation.
Before all that, though, we’d like to start this week's edition with a new thing we’re calling, “Your Moment of Zen.”
Wait — sorry I’m being told the past is suing us. (Apparently, 2006 has some great lawyers.)
Alright. Well, how about we just kick things off with a quote to help soothe that well-known, well-documented RevOps-brand anxiety?
Patience and fortitude conquer all things. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wow... that was shockingly sincere?
Okay, okay let’s not get too mushy.
Let’s talk Ops.
Tools & Software News
It's the middle of August 2023 and do you know where your A.I. is?
The GenAI hype bubble has continued to receive plenty of nice, warm, pine-scented air and this past week blew harder than most into the straw(?). Anyway, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a big breath ourselves.
Let’s look at the new tools and features coming out (and try our best to temper some of the hype).
🤖👋 AI capability outpacing our ability to implement? Big yes
Despite the massive potential of generative AI, many companies are STRUGGLING. A recent survey by S&P Global revealed that while 70% of companies have at least one AI project underway, about 31% are still stuck in the pilot stage. Issues like data disorganization, security concerns, and computing resource constraints were tapped as top challenges, with half of leaders believing they might need at least five year to fully integrate AI into their workflows. Which is problematic because in five years we’ll all probably be in the bad part of the Matrix.
☎️ First name? Bob. Last name? WehadalaunchitsaGPT
A new LLM, DialpadGPT, was recently released to enter the fray with the express purpose of “automating tasks and improving customer service, sales, and recruiting experiences for businesses of all sizes.” The folks at Dialpad say they’ve trained their model on 5 billion minutes of proprietary conversational data, or… exactly the length a Sunday call with my parents feels. You can find more about this effort here. Not sure why they’re calling it “Ai” and not AI, but it looks pretty cool (and stresses adherence to some of the Angry and Old Gods of Compliance, like HIPAA.)
💨 In SaaS world, the winds of change are also a-blowin' — and they're spicy-pricey
According to the folks at Vertice a QUITE NOTICEABLE 12% rise in SaaS prices has been observed over the past year. Not just end users, but even SaaS vendors are strategically revising their pricing to protect those dainty profit margins. The most vexing part of the trend? Vendors with complex and less transparent pricing structures are more prone to bigger annual hikes. Could be why, when it comes to pricing, buyers vastly prefer full transparency. (Full disclosure, we learned about this story from the RevOps Coop Newsletter! They're doing some fun stuff over there!)
🤗 A very, very, very, very, very, very big group hug?
One day after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff prematurely announced it, Hugging Face — the French-American company that develops tools for building apps using machine learning — has now confirmed a $235 million funding round. Participants included basically everybody in a good gaming rig: Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Sound Ventures, and Salesforce's venture arm participated, raising the AI startup's valuation to a two-armed, maybe-too-long-embrace-from-Jeff-Bezos-himself $4 billion.
Strategy & Tactics
🧈 I Can’t Believe It’s Not BDR!
Friend of the brand and Insight Partners’ revenue guru, Jeremey Donovan, asked a pretty pointed question this week: Are reps missing quotas due to AEs' lack of skill in outbound prospecting? (Gulp)
One of the more interesting and thought-provoking responses came from current Gradient Works CEO and former SVP of Revenue at Cision, Hayes Davis. His take? “Building a BDR team supporting reps 1:2 with tiny meeting quotas on a middling ACV business ain't gonna work when money costs money.” But revenue teams who decide to outright remove BDR teams and push AEs to fill the gap without proper support face tremendous challenges. His post, here, gives some great tactical advice on how to face those challenges. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a team of BDRs to run away from.
🧠 11 thoughts, 11 months (couldn't have waited a full year, huh?)
Darrell Alfonso, Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations at Indeed.com and apparent impatient poster, recently shared a great list (see below) of the 11 things he’s learned from 11 months of MOps leadership. We're giving him guff but our favorite has gotta be #7.
👻 Who you gonna drip? Ghostbusters!
Kyle Coleman, SVP of Marketing at Clari, gave a pretty dope little primer of how he reduced his team's no-show rate by 83% (from 12% no-shows, to 2%). Basically, run a value-based email drip campaign! After a meeting is booked, have the rep schedule a few emails that include stuff that he knows his prospect would care about (and presumably learn from). Be sure to add a line why the content is valuable and remind the person of the meeting. (Psst: It works because it’s simple.)
This Week’s Watch
As revenue lives get more and more complicated, and the world around us gets more and more chaotic, this charming (and short) TED Talk from a simpler time (2013) about the limitations of working memory, from the educational psychologist Peter Doolittle, seems to be all-the-more important.
If you wanna skip the video because you already saw this and your working memory still works, ya know... 10 years later, great! But if you’re wondering what you can do to encourage your own team to remember more things, and therefore multitask better, with fewer hiccups and/or mistakes, here are some tips:
• Stay Present: As you listen to those quarterly presentations or client pitches, engage in real-time. Ask questions, challenge assumptions.
• Practice: A Lot: Repetition is your friend. Review, discuss, and reiterate.
• Visualize: Create mental images. Think of sales targets as climbing mountains or crossing rivers.
And the best part? This doesn't just apply to their work, but everybody's work, too. (Wow, another moment of sincerity? What's wrong with us this week?!)
The Ad-hoc
😬 Move along job-having folks, nothing to fear here
A recent survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers of top US executives found that about 75% of executives think their workforce fears technological unemployment. Most leaders, for their part, are worried about the expenses of tech adaptation, with nearly 90% concerned about deriving "tangible value" from the tech. Despite these worries, the survey shows 50% of executives intend to incorporate GenAI in the next year or so. (Gotta go out swinging.) You can read it here.
🤠 This disinformation-filled internet ain't big enough for the both of us, Pardner
Starting Friday, major digital companies will face stringent EU rules on online content, referred to as the Digital Services Act. This legislation, targeting the perceived "online Wild West," mandates companies to strictly monitor digital content, guarding against disinformation and hate speech, with hefty fines for non-compliance. With potential fines up to 6% of a company's global revenue or a ban for DSA violations, the EU is sure signaling one thing: they’re not “all hat and no cattle.”
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And that's it for this week!
We'll be back next Thursday night with more news, more tips, and uh... more!
Thanks for reading — and remember, you always can reach out to us at hello@gorattle.com for any questions, comments, concerns, or mean-spirited arguments as to why you think Thoreau was a better writer than Emerson. Which, fair point.
