With a truly global leadership footprint spanning Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America, and having been based in strategic hubs including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan, Louis Poulin’s vision and expertise stem from building effective revenue operations from the ground up during the early stages of some of the largest corporations in the world, including Cisco, Amazon, Google, and PayPal. His pioneering work has provided companies worldwide with a proven RevOps model to follow.
In this episode of Go-to-Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Louis highlights the career opportunities he’s had to create a centralized revenue operations function from scratch and address the inefficiencies and silos that are often exposed during this transformation.
“The first time my job was described by one of my former managers, they said we are ‘the plumbers of the revenue process and flows,” Louis said. “You look for leaks, you plug them, and you do that through technology, process, and data.”
How does Louis take his “plumber role” to heart in growing the RevOps role, and where is the transformative impact of AI in guiding companies in automating processes, personalizing content, and augmenting decision-making? It’s all here!
Check out these highlights:
Amy: What an amazing opportunity to build these revenue operations from the ground up and pull teams together in ways they’ve never been before. I find that fascinating and such an incredible opportunity. When building this up, how do you include forecasting, AI and revenue intelligence? What is your mindset around the future?
Louis: I think the future and the evolution of revenue operations as a function are interesting. I remember being a revenue operations professional about 10 years ago, and nobody understood fully what I should be doing.
As I think of what I did as this function continued to mature, I ask myself how I define the value of what’s there—having that purview and perspective, being objective about what’s working and not working without sabotaging a particular team and taking them off of their strategic goals and objectives. To me, it’s about partnering with them efficiently to get what they want finished, but also bringing your own priorities to bear.
AI obviously is very transformational for where we are today. As I think about applying AI to the revenue and the revenue operations space, I think about things like automated process enablement. That is a huge piece that didn’t exist even three years ago. And I’m seeing more of that functionality being built into some of these core platforms that run revenue operations.
Amy: How do you see AI capabilities impacting the customer experience?
Louis: As we think about ways to crack through the noise, with customers and potential customers getting bombarded with messaging from so many different companies, we need to create innovative content that’s engaging, and pay attention to what that offering is. I think using AI to help customize creative and crafted content to get that desired reaction from the customer as a live lead will drive an impact.
The last area where I think about AI is augmented decision-making. It is not necessarily autonomous AI decision-making when it comes to revenue and revenue decision-making. Not yet, at least. But I think having a copilot-type solution or embedding AI functionality that helps me as a revenue operations leader, look at my pipeline, look at my territories, look at my quota attainment, and ideally have that AI assistant proactively give me insights and analytics that I might not be aware of, or ideally find those blind spots that I’m not paying attention to that represent opportunities for revenue growth with that, with a particular customer base, that’s what I’m really excited about as I think about the future, and as I think about adoption and widespread adoption of a revenue intelligence platform.
