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 spritz of that Rattle-brand mist.
This week, a special aside: Here's a picture of few of our lovely sellers hanging out at SaaStr! We’ve got a picture with the… King of the Ocean? God of the Sea? Uh… the mascot of Poseidon (full disclosure: they aren’t really aren’t “in our space,” but we just felt a spiritual sort of connection with them, ya know?) (Love you guys!) (Next year we’re bringin’ the dino costume!)
If you’re here at SaaStr and just wanna say hi: please do!
Alright onto the show.
This week, we’re covering:
- Hubspot’s A.I.-fication
- Sellers feeling RevOps-fication
- Marketing’s oversaturation-fication
Let’s talk Ops!
Tools & Software News
🦾 Zoom’s companion is everybody’s buddy for now
Making up for lost street cred after a data privacy slash PR fiasco a mere few weeks ago, everybody’s favorite COVID-19-perpetual-stopgap-video-meeting solution, Zoom, has sweetened the pot, bestowing their new A.I. tool on all paying customers. Here’s the hype video, complete with Gen Z-inspired music. (I think that’s what they’re listening to these days?)
🦿 Hubspot drops more A.I. on the world at Inbound
While the jury's still very much out on the efficacy of their A.I. tool, Chatspot, Hubspot’s still going going hard for the Year of the LLM, this time for SMBs. At their own version of Dreamforce — Inbound — this week the Boston-based company unveiled that they’ve pumped their general offering, as well as their Sales Hub, full of A.I. VP of Product, Christopher Miller, explained to VentureBeat that the reason behind the move was this: “SMBs generally don’t have the time and resources to properly research and implement emerging technology. That’s where HubSpot comes in, as a platform that our customers trust to help them grow better.” Which… is a weird thing to say publicly — and also a good example of why we should let the communications team handle the media stuff. 😅
🤑 New Cool Tool: Streamlined
Anybody in B2B knows that payments can be a real b… bear. Uh… bear, I said. Invoicing and A/R are manual nightmares. Payment options and terms don’t have a lot of wiggle room. And getting accounting synced up with invoicing? That often outright sucks. Streamlined — which was dropped on Producthunt only this morning — seems really interesting NGL. (Again, nobody paid us to sound like an ad here, we just like the product and think it's neat and can't sound excited about it without kinda seeming like a shill).
Strategy & Tactics
🦄 Oh you’ll get your RevOps, one way or the other
A former SFDC-selling superstar himself, Eddie Reynolds took to LinkedIn this week to share his journey as the first Account Executive in a startup without RevOps. Spoiler alert: While initially expecting a smooth process, he instead found himself spending the vast majority of his time on RevOps-related tasks. Lesson: Specialized roles make for more efficiency. Lesson #2: More efficiency means more revenue. Lesson #3: Revenue teams need RevOps earlier than you think. It’s a tale of woe — and lessons. Mostly lessons. (here)
🥰 There’s a Single Source of Truth in all of us?
Friend of the brand ( 💅) Caterina Torres had an insightful post this week on the nature of what we all call “A Single Source of Truth.” She argues it actually should mean more than just gathering data; it's about combining info from all teams and having everyone on the same page. The same definitions. The same documentation. You don’t have a SSoT if you don’t have those. (here)
💸 The Predictive Revenue Model is dead (and it wants to eat your brainssss)
Move over, Predictable Revenue Model, according to Blueprint founder Jordan Crawford, there's a new sheriff in town. If you want to break out the crystal ball (and don’t mind mixed metaphors) you need to first become a customer whisperer. The first step of Jordan’s six-step plan? that you need to start by interviewing them. (Ew, gross). The rest is pretty tolerable advice, though. (here)
A Good Listen
😅 CPA’s gotten bad (and it’s gonna get worse)
So apparently, cost per acquisition has gone up 108% — *gulp*. Could be because channels are beyond saturated and there are simply more marketers per capita than there ever have been before. (Or could be all this AI making stuff *shakes fist*)
This week’s Hubspot Podcast delved into the problem and the two dudes — who are quite charming by the way — pointed to a novel solution: using very focused efforts around B2B creators, building your own owned properties, and focusing on audience development. Also hard agree on “trousers” being a better word than “pants.”
Have a listen here. (You can skip to the 1:20 mark to bypass the ads).
The Ad-hoc
🕺 Unce unce unce and so forth (… team-building?)
Somebody here (stop looking at me) found this ridiculous team-based beat-making app and the entire revenue team made a jam — one so bad and disjointed that we’re not even going to share it. (Yes, that bad.) But you and your team might have a more natural sense of rhythm and might have some fun with it.
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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 esoteric mythology quibbles about whoever the dad is in The Little Mermaid.
