Bipartisan, shmartisan! We’ve got your unity right here! For those who believe that the Sales and RevOps teams are destined to forever be at odds, the latest episode of Go to Market with Dr. Amy Cook is for you.
Andrew Conley, GTM leader and advisor, teamed up with Cody Guymon, chief operating officer and RevOps leader, to share insider tips on how to approach Go-to-Market strategies psychologically, emotionally, and tactically successfully. What’s their secret to scoring a team win? Tune in!
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy: Within RevOps, sales and marketing have their own part they have to play. When it goes smoothly, it’s beautiful. And when it doesn’t go smoothly, it can be super painful. As part of sales working with RevOps, how was your relationship to begin with?
Andrew: When it comes down to sales and RevOps, there’s always going to be some healthy friction. Working with Cody early on, the disputes were around accounts or territory, and it was siloed to my role with my team and what we were trying to do. Now, I understand long-term thinking.
Sales is very focused on closing business right now. We’ve got a quota that we have to hit for the quarter or for the year, and it’s very focused on the need to close this deal now. Whereas RevOps is thinking in scale. They’re thinking in the future, tracking repeatability, and they’re thinking about what’s best for the long term and how we do it efficiently. There’s going to be some natural tension between those two objectives.
What’s really helpful is that Cody and I often have honest conversations to understand where we are, and we see each other’s point of view. We try to think long-term together about what’s going to be the best decision for the business. It’s constantly evolving as you have new challenges through different stages of growth.
Cody: I think that the healthy tension is great, and if you have trust with each other, then I think that’s the foundation you build upon to get to a great decision.
Amy: How do you develop that trust with your sales leaders? For instance, how do you put yourself in their place when you realize that they’re going to make $0 this year unless you give them the right territories?
Cody: You’ve got to start with data. When you find predictable models that work with creating territories and there are statistics behind them, we can explain ourselves well as a RevOps team. But I think it goes back to having that mutual trust and foundation to build upon.
Amy: You’ve mentioned an earlier experience where you were presented with an unpopular and ineffective model. How did you work things out between sales and RevOps?
Andrew: This idea was really confined in terms of the parameters of the territory, so we went through the data. My team, the reps, and the managers were all looking at it and trying to understand where it made sense and where it didn’t work, so that we could have a data conversation with Cody. We knew he was reasonable if we had the data to show percentages by account and categories.
Amy: Cody, obviously, you’ve done this so many times. What are some of your ground rules?
Cody: RevOps is a job that changes every year. So I think my fundamentals are to be curious. I think that’s the key. Always be learning. It’s not going to be the same annual turn every year, and my biggest thing is, listen to Andrew. Listen to sales reps. Listen to the sales leaders because they’re on the front lines. They understand what’s happening in the moment, so they’re going to know if there’s momentum in a certain vertical or not, and what sales methodology is really landing and what messaging is landing in the market. Just stay curious.
Want to hear more? Click here to listen to the full interview.
