Welcome to the world of RevOps After Dark, where we get straight to the revenue-team/revenue-process news you (hopefully, probably) wanna know, adding in just a dash of that Rattle-brand sass.
This week, we’re covering:
- Forrester's (pressing) A.I. recommendations
- Your SDRs top three goalifications
- Just some chess-match salary negotiations
Let’s talk Ops!
Tools & Software News
😎 SimpleClosure finds math hack to exist forever and ever
For those of you out there with a side-hustle LLC that just needs to finally be put out of its misery: may we introduce you to this delightful startup — SimpleClosure. They help failed startups get through the horrific morass of shutting your doors, nailing your shutters, and getting the hell out of Dodge.
The SimpleClosure team landed a cool $1.5M in seed funding in less than 24 hours this past week. And we can see exactly why. Think of it: if they fail they'll just use their own platform, thus giving them money again, and saving their business in an impossible-failure loop. It's simple math, people. (here)
🚒 Forrester: AHHH! FIRE!! RUN!!!
At Forrester's yearly Technology & Innovation North America event in ATX, CEO George Colony (no, not George Clooney) pleaded with us all to immediately stop, drop, and open up shop on adopting a generative A.I. strategy: "We’ve rarely ever told our clients, ‘You should move forward with a technology,’ we typically tell our clients, ‘Wait, let’s let the vendor environment rationalize. Let’s let other companies make some mistakes. Let’s watch this technology as it develops,'" Colony said. "But I will tell you in the case of generative artificial intelligence, we are not giving you that advice. We are saying you must do this now." He added that A.I.'s capability for real-time data interactions particularly might mean the "death of the web." Which in Forrester-speak is basically screaming, "TIME TO PANIC!"
🤖 If only A.I. could save me from reading A.I. updates
If you've got a high tolerance for humongous hype, here's a shortlist of new A.I. tools that've dropped in just the past week from the big guys. (The lil guys are too many to include here — sorry lil guys).
• Hubspot had lots of new A.I. stuff at Inbound.
• Anthropic dropped a paid version of Claude.
• Salesforce had lots of new A.I. stuff at Dreamforce. 💀 Tangent: This SFDC admin Redditor was HILARIOUSLY NOT IMPRESSED.
• Fiverr launched this A.I.-can-be-nice-with-humans campaign because of course they did:
Strategy & Tactics
🎯 Nailed it: "Things RevOps Doesn't Want to Hear"
I know we're already breaking a rule of not hyping somebody two weeks in a row but Jeff Ignacio's post here was a company-wide favorite. Are your reps overlooking crucial details in sales meetings, relying solely on specific tools without understanding any broader context, or taking shortcuts in your processes that completely undermine the point of process altogether? Wow, it sounds like we all have the same job. Personal favorite line: "I read about this cool thing called PLG. Let's go after it!" 💀
🧞 Three Wishes for SDRs: KPI Edition
If you had to give your SDRs three core metrics to be successful... what would you pick?
Brandon Baker, formerly of Sendoso, argues that Conversation Rate, Meeting Rate, and Meetings Accepted Rate are the ways to go. Among many tactical considerations, that means focusing on conversational techniques that ask surface-level questions to engage prospects, rather than being all pushy-pushy for meetings from the jump. (Somebody tell 99.9999% of InMail SDRs this please?) Baker had some other great ground-level tips to push along to your SDRs, and you can find them here.
🥰 Hey, you're not a cog
We're just gonna leave this right here. No jokes. Just some seriously sincere major kudos to Filippo Piras for the reminder we needed to hear:
A Good Watch
♟️ Salary Negotiation Battle
Sorry, just had to share this one.
The Ad-hoc
🧇 SFDC CEO: Get Back to the Office! (Or Actually Ya Know What? It's Cool) (Or Wait...) (Nah, You're Fine)
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during the pandemic: "We just don't need as much real estate anymore because our employees learned how, during the pandemic, to work from home."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff a few months ago: "[New employees] do better if they're in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained. If they're at home and not going through that process, we don't think they're as successful."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff this past week: "I'm a remote worker. I've always been a remote worker my whole life. I don't work well in an office, it just doesn't work with my personality... For my people that's my message. They need to mix in person and remote together. Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have lots of people who are extremely productive at home."
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And that's it for this week!
We'll be back next Thursday night with more news, tips, and maybe even some snarky Reddit posts from disgruntled Salesforce admins (Linking again here for good measure).
Thanks for reading — and remember, you always can reach out to us at hello@gorattle.com for any questions, comments, concerns, or anti-A.I.-news venting sessions.
