The Distributed Truth Podcast

In this episode of the Distributed Truth Podcast, Evan Dunn is joined by Sebastien van Heyningen, a seller turned RevOps expert and the founder of Central Metric. Central Metric helps B2B SaaS companies increase revenue efficiently through building scalable systems.

Sebastien van Heyningen discusses the importance of focusing on the buyer journey in a holistic manner and the challenges companies face in achieving this. He emphasizes the need for a consensus on the buyer journey and the importance of understanding the steps that buyers actually take. Sebastien also highlights the limitations of the concept of a single source of truth and the need for each team to have its own truth-filled operating system. He suggests tracing the best buyer journey that has been delivered and combining it with the existing true north to create an automated and easy-to-follow version. Sebastien also advises companies to ask their clients and gather insights from various sources to understand the steps buyers need to take.

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In this episode of the Distributed Truth Podcast, Jackie discusses the challenges of operationalizing the revenue engine of B2B SaaS companies. She highlights the fragmented customer data problem and the need for better approaches to unified customer data. Jackie also shares her insights on the link between investing in unified customer data and revenue growth.

Jacki Leahy is the founder of Active The Magic, blazing new trails as a RevOps advisor and vision operationalizer. Previously, Jacki worked at a variety of tech startups, and before that, she was a Manhattan real estate agent and a kindergarten teacher.

Jacki shares her real-world learnings from working with nearly 100 different B2B SaaS organizations on their customer journey and go-to-Market strategy. She sees a shift in the center of gravity toward the "right side of the bowtie," toward long-term, sustainable growth. But the "fundamental misalignment of the data architecture of Postgres and Salesforce" and lack of investment mean that customer-facing teams do not have the tools they need to understand user behavior. And for SaaS to succeed, this needs to change.

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Rebecca gets practical about how founders can reimagine their tech stack to optimize for revenue-driving activities. Rebecca brings her own experience as a founder, as well as background working with Fortune 500 companies, to deliver timely recommendations for managing their tech and data investments. In order to eliminate silos and reduce bloat in the tech stack, leaders need to reverse engineer how their customers interact with their teams and technology, and prioritize the investments that most directly attach to revenue.

Rebecca Clyde is the co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai. The company’s genAI Chat Cloud enables conversations between businesses and their customers that are engaging, personalized and insightful.

Ms. Clyde is an accomplished business leader with unique expertise in marketing automation and company building. Prior to Botco.ai, Clyde founded Ideas Collide, an Inc. 5000 digital agency now in its 15th year serving Fortune 500 companies. She was previously a digital strategist at Intel and holds an MBA from Arizona State University.

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Jeff has built a high-performing CS operations team at GitLab supporting hundreds of customer success and support managers. Jeff gets very detailed about how GitLab developed its customer 360 program, how they developed product usage data insights for CS, as well as how vital it is for this information to be distributed across sales and CS together.

Jeff Beaumont leads customer success operations and programs at GitLab. Jeff has worked in SaaS for over ten years, before which he was a CPA.

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Cat joins The Distributed Truth to discuss one of the most overlooked-yet-important parts of Revenue Operations: documenting the flow of customer data across GTM tools. According to Cat, the ability to track leads to customers to renewals is “very rare” in B2B orgs of any size. We talk diagrams, nightmare scenario “spiderwebs of insanity” and Cat’s unflagging appetite for simplifying and optimizing the tech stack. And if you want to know how to sell to a Revenue Ops leader like Cat, make sure your CS team prioritizes their needs and feedback.

Caterina Torres is a Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Weights & Biases, previously at Supermove and Zoom. With a background spanning from sales data management to marketing systems, Cat brings a level-headed view of the importance of customer data strategy to Go-To-Market efficiency.

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Connor discusses the biggest problems facing GTM - and they all have to do with data across GTM systems. In fact, according to Aptitude8’s research, the #1 implementation challenge for CRMs is data migration and data management. Listen to Connor’s expert insights about the history of the Lead Object, the importance of data models to your business model, and the need for centralized data management owned by RevOps teams.

Connor Jeffers is the founder and CEO of Aptitude8 and Hapily and is basically a Jedi of making HubSpot work for companies of all stages and sizes. Connor has spent his career in marketing and revenue operations leadership, as well as startup incubation.

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Jomar joins us to explore the intriguing intersection of revenue operations and cybersecurity, specifically as it relates to data. A seasoned expert in both fields, Jomar sheds light on how cybersecurity principles can be leveraged when unifying data from the myriad systems in the modern stack to optimize RevOps. We also discuss real-world applications of the bowtie funnel, double diamond model, and multi-dimensional swim lanes in solving complex operational problems.

Jomar Ebalida is a seasoned digital transformation practitioner with over a decade of experience in scaling unicorn companies and transforming enterprise revenue technology stacks. As the head of revenue technology for a global law firm, Jomar leads digital transformation efforts while also serving as a RevOps coach, conducting revenue technology audits, and advising on marketing and revenue strategy. Jomar is the author of “Rethinking RevOps”.

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Scott joins us to discuss the problem of human input in B2B sales, how to encourage adoption of CRM and keep organizations aligned on the value of meaningful shared data about their pipeline and growth. Scott is acutely aware of the relationship between systems and people, and how few people really feel the need to maintain accurate systems, particularly at the leadership level.

Scott Marker is a seasoned sales and marketing strategist. He has worked for 30 years with startups at various stages, such as Simplex, helping them adopt CRM and sales tech to improve how they leverage data to scale their business relationships. Scott is also a professor at Boise State, and author of Broken: How to Fix B2B Sales, Drive Profitable Growth & Win.

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Tim joins us to talk about the human impact of tech and data issues. It’s a hard one to pin down, but he came ready with a great analogy (a CRM is a car…) and we discuss how to create lasting behavioral change in teams and organizations through data pipelines that bring real value. Tim’s advice to the tech-buying executive: build a relationship with your internal technical expert. Tim’s advice to the operations pro who needs new tech: build a relationship with your executive counterpart. And plenty more.

Tim Lockie is the Founder and CEO of The Human Stack, co-host of the Why IT Matters podcast, and uses he/him pronouns. His history with the nonprofit world and technology seems to be intertwined. Tim has 20 years of organization experience as a volunteer, youth worker, camp counselor, music instructor, foster parent, getaway driver for teens in danger, board member, finance director, bookkeeper, recruiter, and community administrator…the list goes on. He has seen system deficiencies range from missed opportunities to damaged relationships in these capacities. Tim believes that Digital Transformation is affordable and scalable with nonprofits of all sizes and is obsessed with The Human Stack. You can hear more from him and his co-host Tracy Kronzak on the Why IT Matters podcast.

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Join us with Rick Vargas, a veteran Marketing Ops and Revenue Ops leader and strategic consultant, as he discusses the fundamental link between unified data and more intelligent automations and analytics. Learn why breaking down data siloes and operating with unified data is a must-have given macroeconomic conditions - regardless of industry. Rick will also share real-world examples and offer advice on where organizations should get started if they need more intelligent process automation.

Rick Vargas is a highly experienced operations professional, technologist, and consultant, with stints at D&B, Capgemini, and Solomon Consulting Group. Rick now leads business innovation and development within Cognizant’s Digital Operations Intelligent Automation Automation practice, covering communications, media, and technology.

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Christopher Dunagan is a highly experienced marketing technology revenue operations professional, with stints at Oracle, Microsoft, Hitachi Consulting and, most recently, Aurora Solar. Chris currently consults with growth-stage companies and helps them scale without the wheels falling off. Find Chris at revopsroad.com.

Chris joins Evan to discuss the shift to focus on go-to-market efficiency, and how customer experience mapping to a data model is vital to a unified sales, marketing, and CS group. Chris dives into how to calculate net revenue retention and why it’s so difficult to pull data from multiple systems. Chris brings seasoned wisdom to what is generally treated as a new function - a global, executive revenue operations function.

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Nate Sooter runs Business Analytics, and generally all things data, at Insightly. He began back in Customer Success at Rosetta Stone, then spent time in sales ops and analyst roles at Funko and Merkle, before eventually leading BI Operations at SmartSheet. Nate brings a sharp perspective to the conversation of who owns which aspects of customer data, especially given he works very closely with Sales Operations in his current role.

Nate joins us to share his real-world experience operating as a bridge between data, analytics, and revenue operations. As Nate reports to the CRO in his current role, we tease out the relationship between Go-To-Market and Product organizations regarding customer data programs. Listen for some useful distinctions between operational and analytical data, the importance of data modeling as a fundamental practice, and the tension between growth and data governance, only here in The Distributed Truth.

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Welcome to another episode and today, Evan welcomes Bryan Plaster from Intelligage.io.

The buyer journey is a complex process that involves many stages, from the initial awareness of a problem to the final purchase decision. Each stage requires a different approach and understanding of the customer's needs and preferences.

Intelligage.io is a tool that can help businesses navigate through the entire buyer journey and provide a better customer experience, and Bryan will be walking us through its details, in this latest episode of The Distributed Truth.

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James McArthur is the Director of RevOps at Nue.io, and previously ran RevOps at LeafLink and Go Nimbly. Prior to revenue operations, he spent a decade in sales, and he shows his ability to advocate for RevOps as a strategic contributor in this episode.

James joins Evan to discuss how RevOps teams and leaders can develop data ownership and data competency, where he takes us on a wild ride of great analogies. James brings detailed recommendations for how to get started with data models, and mapping the customer journey to the systems, so make sure you stay tuned until the end of this latest episode of The Distributed Truth.

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In this episode of The Distributed Truth, Evan welcomes Michael Boyd, who is the Head of Customer Success at Vanta. Previously, Michael ran Customer Success at SecurityScorecard, Tanium, and Pythian. Michael has spent over 20 years in enterprise B2B post-sales delivery roles.

This week Michael Boyd brings a concise, useful perspective into how Customer Success teams can truly become central to their organizations’ performance. “Time-to-first-value” as a metric can deliver a unifying momentum, and reflect real adoption among a customer base so the entire company can celebrate meaningful success.

Evan and Michael discuss rising interest in CS operations, particularly around data, thanks to product-led growth and the focus on efficient revenue creation, particularly via interest from VCs in net dollar retention.

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Evan Dunn welcomes Joe Reis today, as they talk about the role of a data scientist and data teams. Joe is the CEO of Ternary Data and Best Selling Co-author of Fundamentals of Data Engineering. He will be sharing his personal experience working with data teams and will be discussing really in-depth details such as what a data scientist is, its value in marketing, the problems and challenges with data teams, and many more, in this latest episode of The Distributed Truth podcast.

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We welcome to the show Richard Makara, CEO and Co-Founder of reconfigured.io, a data product that helps people edit SQL for improved data models and better data quality.

In this episode, Richard articulates a crucial concept for understanding why so many software teams struggle with customer data issues: the gap in objectives and knowledge between product teams, who usually own data teams and tech, and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams. One is tasked with engagement and has room for deep, even esoteric, analysis, while the other is tasked with revenue and must execute rapidly at all costs. The alignment issues that arise from this disjointed mechanism are devastating to efficiency and growth.

As a 2X exited CRO, Toni Hohlbein has what it takes to talk about RevOps in today’s episode. He is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Growblocks. Toni and Evan discuss the growing RevOps job title and the increasing popularity of RevOps. Toni believes that RevOps has been gaining popularity due to the focus on efficiency in business operations, and the truth of whether it truly brings efficiency to the table or not. Toni will also be delving into the evolutions of sales, planning & forecasting of revenue, what efficiencies are created in RevOps, and a whole lot more in this latest episode of The Distributed Truth.

Welcome to another episode and today, we welcome Andy Mowat, CEO and Co-Founder of Gated, a new approach to solving email overload. Before this, Andy ran business operations and GTM operations at Upwork, Box, and CultureAmp. In this episode, we dig deep into the rising tide of RevOps, and how RevOps leaders can take ownership of the customer data layer beneath their Go-To-Market stack. Learn more about Andy in this latest episode of The Distributed Truth.

In this episode of The Distributed Truth, Pedram Navid shares his passion for data leaders to deliver value to the business. We talk about the problem of SQL in GTM teams, the need to cross-collaborate with business users of analytics and data, and what a new era of consolidated, all-in-one data platforms could mean for B2B software teams. Tune in to learn what data engineers, architects and analysts can do today to help the business grow.

In this episode, we discuss the purpose behind the podcast and what drove us to join the horde of new podcast creators. We aim to bring together RevOps experts, GTM leadership and data gurus, in order to outline what it looks like for a new wave of customer data leaders to develop more efficient approaches to GTM.