Three Metrics from a Finance and Planning Perspective

Matt: Hello everyone, and a special welcome to Brandon Bussey, a friend of mine and, uh, um, somebody that has a lot of experience we're excited to have him as part of the Revenue Maverick program.

I am Matt Durazzani, I'm your host, and I'm a Revenue Maverick advisor. So today for the audience, I will love to introduce you to Brandon for a moment. He is a partner at Unicorn Revenue Operations. Brandon brings over 15 years of experience to the table. Most recently, he was SVP of Revenue Operations at Entrata and prior to that he was at companies like Lucid and Qualtrics. In his career he also developed a depth for finance and finance metrics, and because of that, uh, he was able to learn from great organizations like Amazon, Concur and Washington Mutual.
You can say that he has seen several models of success to run revenue operations from small organizations like Lucid that are growing at a high rate as well as large enterprise as the ones we mentioned. So, we're very excited to have him on the call today and learn from what he has to share with us in the community today.So Brandon, welcome and excited to have you here. 

Brandon: Thanks, Matt. Excited to be part of the program and chat with you today. 

Matt: Um, so today, um, we would love to kind of turn it over to you, allowing you to, um, kind of give us a little bit of a sense of how you're look in at revenue operations holistically. I know you prepared something for that, and then share with us three metrics that stood out to you that you felt it will be worthwhile sharing with the rest of the community. So, without any further ado, I'll turn it over to you, Brandon, and, and we'll go from there. 

Brandon: Cool. Well, thanks Matt. As Matt mentioned, I came up through finance, um, but really spent a lot of my career as an analyst and  in analytics. And so as a result, it's been kind of bred into me this, this idea of presenting data and looking at metrics and really the value of using data to tell a story, right?

And so whenever I'm looking at, um, evaluating a business, an organization, I kind of follow these kind of three questions, right? It's like, what did we do? What will we do and will it continue? Right? I mean, at the bottom you can kind of see like. Thinking about what are our key results for the, you know, the past or, you know, whether it's a quarter, a month, um, a year based on the cadence that we look at it.
Um, and then kind of short-term predictability, which is what we will do. Um, short-term can be anywhere from like next month throughout the rest of the year. Um, and then long-term scalability, it's like, are we gonna be able to continue, um, to be able to do these things right. And so I put a couple examples of some of the key metrics that I look at within some of these buckets.
Um, they tend to be, at least in this example, a little bit more sales focused.  but you know, depending on your role, you may, if you're focusing more on kind of post-sale like customer success, um, you, you'll, you'll find the appropriate metrics that align to your business need. Um, so before I jump into my first metric, I've watched a lot of the presentations and I wanted to try and kind of highlight, um, a little bit, uh, of a different angle, right?
Given that I kind of came up through finance and planning, I wanted to focus on some of those metrics, um, that I've looked at that have become really useful. And candidly, I don't see a lot of emphasis, um, in the market on some of these. So with that, I will jump to the next slide.
This first one is rep productivity. Um, I've seen companies use it, um, but it really should be pretty central to your planning, to your, um, evaluation process. And so what it is, and it's pretty simple. It's literally your, you know, whether say you're looking at, for this case we're looking at by quarter, um, you can do it by month, you can do it by quarter.
I recommend, by year predominantly. Uh, I would not recommend doing it by month unless you have just like such a really short sales cycle just cuz it can get, um, it'll introduce a lot of noise to the data, but you basically look at the bookings or whatever you're tracking, um, with your sales team divided by the number of active reps during that period. Um, and then that gets you like, on average, what are your reps doing? I like this metric cuz it just cuts out the fluff, right? Um, you know, you wanna introduce efficiency in some of those types of things later, but start here, it's like, what are my reps producing, um, per each individual, right?
And so I've got some sample data here. And I think it's also important to cut this by your, you know, divisions, your segments, however you look at the business, right? Because the metric is really interesting. Um, but as a whole, it's really useful when you're starting to compare, you know, segments, business units, um, and, and then overtime is also really important, right?
Um, it helps you build plans and do those types of things. So in this case, I've got, you know, three segments here, enterprise, mid-Market, and SMB. And you can generally see how they trend. Um, obviously our enterprise team is doing really great at $2 million. Um, And, but then what I think it's really important here is let's pretend we're doing an annual planning process here.
Um, we're coming in and we've built the enterprise. I'm gonna use Enterprise since they're just kind of at the top and they kind of look like they have an anomaly here. Um, if we've built our plan for next year and I kind of run it through this model, I can quickly see we've got, um, some un- founded optimism in our model. Right? Um, and that you see this like dotted line really start to spike up. Whereas yes, there is a slight upward trend, but we've built a model that unless there's good data driven reasons to expect a massive jump in rep productivity, like we've got a problem in our model.
Um, And then you can kind of see like SMB and the dark blue line at the bottom has a similar problem, whereas the orange mid-market has a little bit of a dip, and that may be justified, right? Um, the thing I love about these models is the goal is this becomes a two second look, right? Hey, everything's kind of in line.
We're not seeing major jumps or, or drops. Um, if you see a, you know, a major jump, you're gonna want to dive in and double click and understand what drove that. Um, but they really help you identify, um, problems that you may be running into, into the future. I always love this like for, um, like, maybe not this chart, but at least using this framework when, um, I don't know how many sales leaders will come up and say, let's just say let's take the enterprise leader say he came up to me or she came up to me and said, Brandon, I want to hire a dedicated ADR team, one-to-one for these people, this is what it's gonna cost, right? And I think it's gonna help us, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna say, that's great, but what is it gonna do to this number, right? Like, is it gonna help us produce more, um, per rep?
of course they're gonna say yes, right? But then, then I can come and say, well, are you willing to commit to that and actually take on a bigger quota as a result of that? Right? Because like, I can't commit to additional costs without something in return. Right. And that, that, like, I obviously would be much more diplomatic about it, but I think it's an interesting way to frame this of, hey, is it gonna move the needle on this if it's not gonna help our reps book more, like why are we doing it?
Right? Um, and, and there's other reasons too. So I'm not saying that's the only reason, but it's definitely, um, really beneficial to kind of run these things through the model and say, is it gonna move these numbers, yes or no? If the answer's no, then like, It's gonna be a uphill battle for you to convince me that we need to invest in some of these things.
So I'll pause there. Yeah. For Matt. Matt, I can see you itching to kind of ask some questions here. 

Matt: I appreciate you sharing this one. One of the thoughts that came to my mind is as you work with, for instance, with, uh, marketing teams, for instance, right? That's, uh, very often or partnerships, but, uh, Usually marketing owns probably the biggest percentage of wanting to add new pipe.
As you look at that, uh, booking projections as you get deals into the pipeline, the more you create that top of the funnel, sometimes some people may wonder, Hey, how's that impact in the projection, the long term? Um, you know, how, how does that change the model? And, up to what point is the spike good or bad if we are doing a lot of upfront build, 

Brandon: An upward spike is great. Right? It's just really uncommon because if you think about it, let's just take your example of, you know, marketing does a big push, drives a bunch of leads, well, it's gotta go through the whole process. Your reps, are they gonna qualify it? how are the ratios gonna stay the same? Um, are you hiring? There's so many variables that lead all the way down to the bottom of the funnel that then, um, runs into this that can impact this and uh, and, and not necessarily come directly to fruition. Right? this is a hard metric to adjust, right? Um, and hard to really influence quickly, right?
over time, it's really important. And candidly, this should also be the bread and butter of your enablement team. They should be looking at. Um, are their efforts starting to drive this up because this is what ultimately drives efficiency, drives your ability to scale, right? Because if you see a declining rep productivity, think about what you gotta do to go hit your growth numbers.
Okay, well, you've now gotta exponentially grow your headcount. you could raise quotas I guess, but no one's gonna hit it, it is a hard metric to dramatically, like you just don't see a lot of spikes. if you're looking at it on a quarterly basis, you might see a few, spike and drops.
That could be, you know, determined by some big deals or, you know, a, a, a seasonality in some of those types of things. Um, but generally, like it's, it's a hard metric to really dramatically increase or even, you know, decrease means things are, the wheels are falling off. 

Matt: Uh, would it be fair to, uh, kind of, uh, one of the takeaways that you mentioned is, uh, this is really beneficial as you try to do cost planning, uh, of either reduction or, uh, adding additional team members to a team to measure whether or not, uh, It will provide an impact.

Brandon: Yeah. And, and along those lines, like this is really just truly looking at, you know, bookings over the number of heads. One of the follow on metrics that I always pair with this is like adding an efficiency because that also starts to, um, dispel, uh, Some of the, um, myths per se, like good examples. Let's just, let's just say we were looking at our enterprise line here versus our mid-market team, and this is actually pretty common.
Let's say our enterprise team has dedicated sales engineers, has dedicated ADRs, and you start lumping those costs in right now they're the heroes cuz they're doing 2 million a piece. But when you start lumping in the costs, they actually might be less efficient than their mid-market teams.
Now that might be okay and there may be reasons, but at least you now know and can have the conversations that relate to those things. Um, and, and that's another lens that's really important to look at with these. Um, and also I think like, I, I introduced this in the benefits. I talk about this rep elasticity.
I mean, we're all familiar with pricing elasticity. It's basically the same thing. It's like, Hey, if I'm gonna add 10 reps, what is it gonna do to my productivity? Um, kind of a thing, because that's, that's the sweet spot. I don't know how many times when doing annual planning, you'll have a leader come up to you and be like, Hey, I actually don't wanna hire anyone, but I'll take the like 30% quota increase right now.
Sometimes we'll push that back and push on that and help them understand why that's a bad decision. But, you know, sometimes I think I've seen ops people just like follow the model of saying, Hey, let's just, you know, increase quota of 5%, but then add, you know, five new headcount to your segment and, and, and that, that, that has interesting impacts, right?
From, you know, how will it impact this, this equation I think is really important. 

Matt: Excellent point. Thank you for that. We're ready for the next metric.

Brandon: Cool. Let's jump to the next one. This one is very much, um, a planning metric, but I also think it's really, really critical and I'm, once again, I'm very surprised, including with myself, how often we forget to look at this.
And so let me orient you with this chart. What it's showing is this kind of pinkish, like stepped line is quota capacity. So this is, if you go, um, Like based on your financial plan, you said we were gonna have 10 reps in seat with a quarterly quota of a million dollars each. Okay, $10 million, right? That's quota on the street. Okay. Then that, and that should always be higher than your target. So this light blue was, is our target, and then the dark blue is where we actually came in. This organization did a really good job if they generally come in about it, their target, sometimes a little bit over, sometimes a little bit below.
Okay. And then this red line shows where their actual quota capacity came in at. So let's just take that first box. You can see, the planned quota capacity was about 7 million and they actually were able to achieve that. You can see if you jumped to Q2 -Y2, the second year, like there's a bit of a discrepancy, right?
Um, and that's okay. So, where this becomes really important to look at historically, it, it's important because it informs what you're gonna do, but when we're starting now to look, let's just say it's the end of Q4. We're coming into Q1 year three, and let's say it's March and we've had a tough time hitting our hiring.
we were supposed to have 10 new hires start on January 1st, and we've gotten five of 'em starting in March, another five in April kind of a thing. So we've got a hiring delay, right? Well that's gonna directly impact our quota capacity. So you can see we had a nice plan, um, of this like pink line that shows okay, we're gonna have, I think in this model I'm using 20% oversight or excess quota capacity.
So we've got this nice healthy model. It's kind of trended to how historically what we've needed, but we've got a problem, right? We're under hiring right now and Sure. in you know, Q1 right here, it's not gonna be much of a problem because you know, those, those new hires are ramping and it's pretty immaterial the impact.
But that impact is gonna be really felt in Q4 and it's important to be looking at this. So what this assumes is, okay, now with the hiring delays I know, or attrition and all those models, this is what it's gonna look like. I now have visibility that we've got a problem coming into Q4. Um, and like it's so, like, it surprises me so many times I've even seen publicly traded companies in their forecast calls where they, you know, missed their number and they blamed it on essentially this, um, and they effectively admitted that they weren't prepared for.
Right. And so it's so important to be looking in advance because, you know, Matt, you and I know if I see this problem in Q1, there's stuff we can do. We can accelerate hiring, we can like, potentially add additional hires. There's things we can do. We have a lot of runway to go solve this, but if I catch this at the end of Q3, there's almost nothing we can do except hope that every single one of our sellers does 130% of their number.
Right. So that's why I really like this number. Like I said, it should be a two second thing that you're just checking, right? You look at it and be like, yep, we're, we're trending. This is really great. Um, but you know, it gives you visibility into where things are going off or where there's opportunity, right?
if this dotted line, all of a sudden you start to see as exceeding, like you've hired people at higher rates, higher quotas in advance of what you thought you, you can actually start to say, We're gonna have excess quota capacity. And if our attrition and hiring plan still holds our attainment assumptions hold, like we're likely gonna exceed our Q4 number by 5%.
Right. And how often are your CFOs, your finance leaders or CEOs asking for, you know, we, we struggle to even get a forecast, one quarter into the future. But this is the way we can start to provide that visibility and say, you know what, like, based on historical performance relative to quota capacity, We're, we're looking really good for Q4.
we're right now looking, you know, a 105% attainment Q4. So there's a quick kind of introduction, maybe not so quick into I, what I think is a really important way of looking at your 
business. 

Matt: Oh, absolutely. Um, let me just provide a little clarification here.
For anybody that is trying to replicate this one, uh, when they see the slide and they're thinking that the, the quarters of the reps, are you talking about the quarterly quota since it's broken out by quarter? 

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. I generally do it by quarter. Um, and, and it's important to understand this is like, I, I'm glad you asked the question and you have to make sure it's the ramping quota, right?

Matt: That's right. 

Brandon: Think about like full capacity and like, no, no, no. That's not quote on the street. That's like. If they were full productivity. 
 Matt: You anticipated my second question, so I appreciate you clarifying that piece.

Brandon: Yeah, cuz like, cuz you, I mean, look, this is, we're trying to predict what's gonna happen, right?
And we, we know that if I've got a six month ramp, I know, like, okay, maybe one, but on average my, my reps are gonna follow their ramp assuming we built it right.

Matt: Uh, you know, one of the things that stand out to me is that. As I hear about the way you're using this one, to me it sounds like a, a metric that we should be using at least on a quarterly basis.

Brandon: Yes. 

Matt: In conjunction with hiring. Yes. And uh, especially starting Q3 as we start talking about the strategy for the following year, very much starting aligning how quickly and by when we have to account for hiring because if we go into the following year with a target for the year, but we don't account for those people to put 'em in seat early enough for the sales cycle land that you normally have.

Brandon: Yeah. 

Matt: Then either you're willing need to be willing to adjust to your target as a company or you need to understand that there will be consequences to that delay. And so, uh, I think this is a very important metric that you review with. Finance you review with HR, with the sales leader. Uh, anytime you have a churn or, uh, promotions, uh, internally, this is, this is something that should stay at the forefront on how do you keep in track your staff to be able to deliver what that they're supporting.

Brandon: Yeah, exactly. And, and you, you nailed it on the head. Like this only shows kind of the, the, you know, future four quarters. But in a perfect world, you're looking two to three years in advance and sure you haven't locked your future plans, but at least you can have an estimate and start to communicate that, because if you have a long sales cycle, a lot of your hiring that's happening in years, actually for next year 

Matt: for next year. That's right.

Brandon: Yeah. So it's a great call out. 

Matt: Let's jump into the third. 

Brandon: Perfect. Let's jump to the third one. All right. And this last chart, um, I call it the pipeline replacement chart. Um, once again, this should be a chart that you look at for two seconds.
 Uh, everything's looking great, let's move forward. But it, this is kind of like one of the early detector, um, signals, and it's a pretty simplistic chart. Um, and I'll explain what it is. Um, but it actually requires some sophisticated data analysis because you need to have snapshotted data, um, which Salesforce outta the box does not provide.
Um, or whatever your CRM, it's not super common. So tools like BoostUp actually do it really well. Um, or, you know, your data warehouse can snapshot data and look at time over time. So let me explain what this is showing. let's look at that first bar, at the beginning of Q1, year one.
Um, you start with, uh, you, you kind of snap the line there, and then during that period, how much pipeline did you generate? That's the dark blue. Um, the light blue is, hey, you had pipeline. What happened to it? Did it increase? Like I had a million dollar deal, that's now worth 1.4. Right? That's an important factor that people don't think about is what happens with your existing pipeline, because that's actually not saying you can slack on pipe generation, but that can actually be, if your're, if your folks are generally like, Under forecasting?
Well, you know, you're gonna get some additional pipeline growth just simply because the ops grow. Um, then on the inverse side, that pink line is the, the same, but it's the ops that decreased. Right? The red line is pipeline. During that period, that fell out because it was lost, right? Your rep said, yeah, this, this ops not gonna work.
Um, it's market is closed, lost, and then there is this green, um, bar that while it's good, it's. The pipeline is now gone because you won that, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and so you constantly want to be replacing your pipeline, um, to be driving growth. Now, one of the things that's not included, just because Google Sheets is not as sophisticated as some of the other analytics tools, is actually adding in some pipeline targets. And you know, there's a whole bunch of analysis that you can do of saying like, how much pipeline do I need to generate in a given quarter to then meet my future quarter needs? 
For this analysis, I generally don't include a close date. Um, as we all know, they like move, you know, close dates, move all over the place. And so I, 

Brandon: Like to look at just like a full accumulated pipeline. Um, So, and then this like dotted line shows kind of the net impact, right? And you want to at least be seen that you're replacing your existing pipeline.
In some cases it actually should be growing because I'm assuming your Target is growing, you have more reps, um, you have some of those types of things, so you should actually be generating more pipeline. Um, and ideally it's slightly, you know, that net is slightly improving. Um, but you wanna see, you can see in this one there's kind of this linear increase, of the blue bars. And then same with the kind of negative bars. That's a good thing. That means this is a growing org, right? Um, but some of the things that this shows to me is like, you can start to understand top of funnel needs, as I mentioned. If you're showing like, Hey, here's my quota, um, and here's my target.
And, sorry, I shouldn't say quota. This is Target and you need to do some analysis to understand like, okay, if I generate a million bucks, what happens to that? And then you can kind of stack it up and back into like a general pipeline, um, target. And there's a whole set of analytics you can do to review that.
Um, but then it also, one, one of the things I think is really important is if you pull this data, and let's just say, I'm just gonna look at the last bar on the right, the Q4 year three, if that light blew actually was much bigger and the, the pink was much bigger. Like, I've got a pipe, maybe not quality, but a pipe like forecasting.
My reps have a very tough time of like nailing down the amount, right? Because they're moving all over the place. And that's, that's hard for us to be able to predict and forecast. And so you, I mean ideally that's staying really tight, but things happen. Right? The other thing you wanna make sure is, are those like in balance?
Cuz if all of a sudden, your little light blue bar is this, this small and you're pink bar is this big. It's like, okay, we need to do some training with our reps on how to forecast the amount because they're, they're always way over optimistic. And then as they progress, they like come down in value.
Right? So that's like, I like this one cuz it starts to get you a glimpse into what you need to do and kind of sets this expectation. It also sets the expectation at the manager and the rep level for them to just be thinking this way. It's like, okay. I pulled out a million bucks in my pipeline, I need to go find at least a million.
Right? And so it's just, it creates this rule of thumb and this kind of behavior that I think is really healthy.
Matt: Um, I love this one in particularly because, um, I, I think it's, uh, uh, highlights constantly the need to constantly, you know, build. Convert or at least build progress and then convert, right? That mentality of constantly replenish the pipe.
let's imagine you're, um, a, a junior role in the organization, maybe an analyst that you, uh, that is trying to kind of provide this type of visibility. Um, and regardless of the tool they use, what would you say, uh, are parameters that you would like to advise as they look into, uh, the increase and the decrease portions?
Perhaps a, a small clarification on this one is, uh, oftentimes reps will put in deals at a certain dollar amount, right? Uh, even though they're still not fully qualified, sometimes it takes, uh, some discovery, some demo before they can actually size up the right type of opportunity. Um, and one of the advice that we have heard before is of course, Try to enter at more of a minimalistic number, more that is like the bare minimum of where the deal's supposed to be, so that you don't have, with a lot of inflation of pipe early on, that then deflates very quickly, but you actually show the growth.
Right? So what other advice do you have as they. You know, create these data points for each of these categories. 
Brandon: Yeah, it's a great question and I think like, you can evaluate this, it, it needs to be somewhat customized to your organization. But some of the things I would think about is like really that you nail on the head that stage one kind of I don't know if it's pre-discovery, early discovery. Um, does that again, included or not? Right? That could be, um, that, that could be a decision and maybe, to be honest with you, maybe look at both and see what, what is most valuable, right. I'm a big proponent of like, let's build them out and see, you know, which one is more insightful.
Um, because yeah, to your point, it may make sense that you only include like you only add pipeline, um, or include pipeline once it's been qualified. Um, in some cases maybe you have a pretty, pretty solid, um, stage one where you know, anything that's even come into stage one is somewhat qualified and sized.
And so then I would include it, right? I mean, you, you want to as much as possible, but you also wanna avoid, um, Unnecessary noise, um, that just, we've all done it, right? Like where you show a re report upward and they, you know, you cause unnecessary like, worry and freak outs simply because, um, you're including like early stage stuff and you're like, whoa, whoa, no pump the brakes.
All that stuff's new. Like, let's avoid setting ourselves up for that. And so look at it both ways and see what makes sense for your, for your sales process. 

Matt: Perfect. One more question on that one. Um, uh, so when I look at a graph like this one, it makes me wonder, again, this is organization maybe is still trying to figure out exactly their sales process.
Yeah. As you look at organization that maybe have, uh, uh, several quarters, potentially several years of good data that have been clean up, right? They, they've matured in the way to do things. Uh, would it be a fair assessment that, uh, the, the chart should look bigger on the addition and there's a little.
Last in proportion of lost pipe because we, we know how to find the right deals, we tend to lose less because we have figured out our model. Would that be a fair, uh, assumption as you look for companies that are a little more mature? 

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great call out. Um, I mean, it depends. It goes back to your, actually earlier question in this one, let's say we have, um, we, we changed this chart to be fully qualified pipe.
Yeah, you're spot on. Like. If we're doing a good job qualifying, we should be minimizing pipeline loss. We should be eliminating it before it even comes in because I mean, we all know it. Like if you work a deal and end up losing at stage five or your last stage, like that's a lot of wasted time. Now, you know, I could create a future opportunity and all that type of stuff, but generally like that is, um, a lot of time where if we would've qualified it out, we could have moved on to other, you know, generated new pipeline, found new opportunities, um, and worked on those. So, um, it kind of depends, right? But if I'm doing earlier stage, um, you know, the answer might be like, keeping it in ratio might be the right, the right way to look at it. So, you know, this chart I think requires some critical thinking, right?
And understanding, okay, how do I apply this to my business and what makes sense? Um, it also, um, one of the things that I will highlight, this gets really interesting if you can drill down to teams and even individual reps because like. as I mentioned, and you even kind of caught on to that of like instilling this kind of always be prospecting mentality and as you lose stuff replacing it, um, you'll see reps that follow the old like, okay, we're starting the new year. Let's go find a bunch of opportunities and then let's go work 'em. You'll see this like big spike and then nothing, and then just like a pour it out and so. You can actually identify some of those rep behaviors, um, with this chart very well.
And so, um, this, this I think is really interesting. If you can double click down to kinda the individual rep level as well and you can do it at team levels and all those types of things. 

Matt: Excellent, excellent. Well, these are fantastic. I appreciate you sharing all of these. Uh, is there anything else you wanna mention this before we wrap things up? 

Brandon: No, I mean this is, I, I love this stuff. I think it's a ton of fun. You know, you can find me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message. I love talking metrics as you know I think if I could make enough money I would just like look at data and analyze it all day long. This is like this stuff I just love.
So happy to talk, shop any point, and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to come in and be part of the program and chat with you, Matt.

Matt: I appreciate that one. So, um, today on the audience, there could be anybody, again, that could be early on in their careers or it could be, uh, more mature like, um, you know, the two of us.
And so what type of advice would you give to somebody that maybe is more in the earlier stages of a career to, to try to develop and knowing the market the way it is today and where it's going in the future? Right? It's a little bit different from the previous years. Um, what type of advice would you give them in either type of roles that they should expose themselves to or how they want to think about in terms of what is the value that I should be really bringing into an organization? 

Brandon: Yeah. So the first question about type of roles I would look for, um, is look for companies and roles where it's the whole first part of your career is about learning, right?
And so can you get exposure to various facets of the business, right. Can you get exposure to lots of different work? Right. Um, that's one of the reasons why I loved finance and coming up in finance, just talking about like my early days at Concur, I got to work with our services team, evaluate potentially creating a shared services center in the Philippines. I then rotated and was working with a new product development team. I then was working with our services team, like the professional services side, got to see revenue, sales process. Um, and so that was really appealing to me and got to learn a ton by rotating through those.
So that's that to me on that first question is look for individuals, and It's all about learning. So like, who's your manager? Are they going to, you know, help you actually develop and learn, like when you ask questions, and you can gauge this in the interview process, as I as like Matt say, you're interviewing me, I can ask you a bunch of questions and if your attitude is kinda like, oh yeah, like I'm just gonna give Brandon the minimum response like Guess what?if that's you selling me, like imagine what it's gonna be like when you, you know, I'm now committed, right? Yeah. say it's you, Matt, like are you someone that I'm gonna be able to learn from and can go and like, ask questions? I had a direct report at Amazon that like would come up to me, it'd be like, I was like ready to walk out the door and go home. Right. And I was tired a long day and he would come up to me and be like, Hey, I was looking at the financials and I noticed, you know, our, you know, Short-term cash ratio is jumping around because of X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, what? Like what do you, where is this coming from?
This has nothing to do with like our day-to-day job, but I actually loved it, right? He asked me a ton of questions, put me on the spot, I half the time would say, I don't know. I need to think about that. Or Let's bring, let's talk to so-and-so type of thing. So that like kind of. That curiosity. Curiosity was really, really powerful.
So anyways, look for that in a role. Look for that in a manager, and that's really important. Now, your second question, um, remind me what your second question was.

Matt: Yeah. Um, what type of, uh, value they should be bringing to the organization in order to run operation re revenue operations in the right way?

Brandon: Yeah. So one of the things I always look for in hiring is like, it's great that if you can, I can throw a project over the fence and you can go run with it. So like that ownership is kind of like, to me, table stakes. I also maybe will add a quick misconception that I've seen in a lot of earlier hires of what ownership actually means.
That doesn't mean like, Hey, I throw a project to you, Matt, you disappear and come back with the result. It means, 

Matt: mm-hmm. 

Brandon: you know how to leverage the assets around you, whether it's your peers, whether it's me, right? You come and say, Hey Brandon, like I'm kind of stuck. Can I take two minutes of your time, um, and bounce some ideas off you?
Great. Like, I'd much rather you take five minutes of my time. And get to a much better result because we can have a conversation than you doing it fully on your own. So ownership is kind of table stakes to me. The second one is, I don't wanna say going above and beyond, but really like understanding the so what and like what I.
What does it actually mean, um, in the broader business context, like that's hard to teach, hard to learn. But if you do, like, you are gonna rise through the ranks in revenue operations very, very quickly, right? If you can be sitting in a product meeting, which I think has happened to a number of us, uh, what did you call us? More mature individuals, um, that you'll be sitting in a product meeting. And like, I'm not a product person, right? I don't know, um, all that type of stuff. I know how to sell a product and bring a product to market. Um, but that I can come in and say, okay, we've got this problem, or are you thinking about it this way and contribute like, One, you're gonna find yourself really busy because you're gonna get pulled into every department in the company almost.
But you're gonna see like your internal, like equity, um, or I shouldn't use equity, but like how people view you is gonna, your stock is gonna go up, right? People are gonna be like, absolutely. You know what Matt like. I want him in all my meetings because he thinks very critically and just Sure he doesn't understand product.
Sure he doesn't understand professional services, but he knows how to ask the right questions, drive the right conversation. You don't even have to have the answers, right. You just need to be able to ask the questions and drive the conversation. Right. Um, and I think that's really important. I think one and the same, especially in rev ops, like we're not here to learn how to sell. Like sure, some of us can sell, some of us spend sellers in the past, but the reality is we need to like ask the questions of the sellers to like get them to think about, like it's our job to get people to think, right? And so I think that that's really critical. Um, skillset is just being able to think critically about a problem, understand how it fits into the business context, and then like, Ask questions, right?
Drive a conversation forward. And, um, you don't have to have all the answers. I, I mean, I've basically made a career of not having the answers, but like, um, but being able to, you know, talk to the right people, um, get the right people thinking about the problem, the right, right way, um, that's what I think is really powerful.

Matt: That's awesome. Great advice. Brandon. Thanks so much for your time for preparing for this one and for, um, the things, you mentioned this today, I think there's a lot of things that people should be taking away from from today's podcast. Look, um, I think, uh, if anybody wants to connect with Brandon, you're welcome to look him up on LinkedIn, uh, and, um, he's a good advisor, somebody that you definitely wanna ping ideas with.
So feel free to reach out to him. And again, thank you everybody for joining today and Brandon. We wish you a great day. Thanks so much. 

Brandon: Thanks, Matt.