Welcome to the world of #RevOps After Dark, where we get straight to the revenue news you (hopefully, probably) wanna know, adding in just a jingle of that Rattle-brand tingle.
🔌 Quick plug: We're looking for a few more submits to our State of #RevOps 2024 survey! Do it so we can stop asking! Link here.
This week!
- Salesforce bought itself a holiday present in Spiff;
- The Vibe-cession has pivoted — back to vibin' 😎; and
-The importance of getting your sales process right (pst: It's important).
Now, let's get to business.
Business, Tools & Software News
💰 Salesforce Rolls a Spiff, Creates Career Marketplace
Yup, them Salesforce folks are at it again. This week, the "#1 AI CRM" — as they're calling themselves now in their press release now (🥴) — gobbled up the sales commission automation tool Spiff, who lit up at the news. Of course, this isn't just a random or unexpected foray into "becoming one"; these two have been flirting on AppExchange for years — Salesforce Ventures, even, was already batting their long (fake) eyelashes at Spiff with past hefty investments. Also, while we're here: "the #1 AI CRM" also rolled out their Trailblazer Career Marketplace this week, connecting job-seekers with big-name employers like IBM and Deloitte (which probably deserves its own story but we're not a "#1 AI CRM'-only newsletter okay).
Other business-y news includes:
🎨 Portrait of the Artist As a Jilted Innovator: Adobe's plan to acquire Figma for $20 billion has been called off due to regulatory challenges in Europe.
🦄 Wake Up Babe, New Unicorn Just Dropped: Tamara, a buy now, pay later platform (gulp) in Saudi Arabia, raised $340 million, valuing the fintech at $1 billion.
😩 Not Another 2020's Security Breach: This week, Telecom giant Xfinity disclosed a major security breach affecting about 36 million, urging customers to change passwords, enable multi-factor authentication, and stop using "password123" as your password for the love of all that is holy.
🕊️ Economic Clouds Part, Good Vibes Shine Through
While we never really did get that big, bad recession (🐺) that so many experts had promised (shucks), we definitely did get some "downer vibes." The good news: American consumer confidence is rising — faster than expected, too. The consumer confidence index hit nearly 111 points in December.
While that's not exactly "It's a Christmas Miracle, Charlie Brown!"-type numbers (125 is considered "moderately optimistic"), it is a good deal higher than what analysts expected (~100). In a double-whammy of unexpected goodness: fears of an actual recession dropped to their lowest level this year. Maybe folks need to lay off the eggnog, or maybe...we're actually through the worst of it after all.
🤖 Your Weekly "A.I. in Revenue" Breakdown
🥾 Left! Left! Left! Prompt-Left! — "A.I. Bootcamps" are quickly becoming a must-have for workers and companies alike, as both the tech and education sectors are evolving to meet those needs with stuff like "A.I. MBA"s . (Even well established, highly lauded programs like the MIT Sloan business school has updated its education online courses to include genAI).
🚨 Alert Your Creatives! — Google's generative AI for video, Videopoet, does look pretty incredible.
💁♀️ GenAI's Next Top Model — We also found this lovely (seemingly legitimately impartial) breakdown about what model suits what business purposes!
Strategy & Tactic News
🚀 The first step to greatness: Get a handle on your process!
Defining a tight sales process? Yeah... that's a foundational step for RevOps. And nobody argues why that is better than our friend (and maybe we're his friend by now too) Eddie Reynolds. According to his awesome post from a few days ago, without it, various aspects — like deal closures, sales pipeline reliability, marketing ROI, and metrics — will suffer significantly. And there's a perfectly great explanation why.
🎉 How about just fun to end out the year?
In a post that really should've gotten more love (thank you, LI algo), RevOps guru Natalie Furness, asked her community what y'all think the #1 RevOps Trend of 2024 will be, but to give only wrong answers. (So clearly, nobody was foolish enough to say Rattle 🦖 💅). Now, we encourage you friends to jump in to the fray with your iconic dry-witty sense of humor. The comments there are already pretty hilarious, if you ask us. 😉
A Good Read
🤔 Reddit content: At least 15% is corporate bots
File this one under S for "Seems %@#!ing low," but according to this reframed story (Medium membership required) revisiting research from years past, at least 15% of all of the content on Reddit is generated by corporate bots that are hellbent on manipulating public opinion. (As one commenter said, "And another 40% are government bots.") Given the pervasiveness of this phenomenon — particularly in light of improving gen A.I. — it does beg the question(s) of how long a website like Reddit can stay viable as they work to maintain consumer trust (that the people they're hearing "YTA" from are actually people).
The Ad Hoc
🦕 We made up with the brontosaurus company
They may be slow. They may be lumbering. They may have terrible taste in food, possess the highest body-mass-to-brain ratio in the history of the world, and the smell? Did we even mention that? It's... ungodly.
Wait... what was I saying?
Oh yeah, we're getting along with the team at Commsor now. And there's even video evidence to boot.
***
And that's it for this whole year! Wow, has it been a wild one!
We'll be back in 2024, ready and rip-rarin' to roll to relieve our RevOps human friends take over the world! 🦖🚀
Thanks for your support and remember you can always reach out to us at hello@gorattle.com for any questions, concerns, or cease and desist letters.
