Ofek Assael's Invisible Engine

Good morning everybody and welcome back to another episode of Questioning Gurus, where we discuss experiences in Australia and New Zealand with cross industry leaders. This is a podcast series dedicated to uncovering the latest insights and strategies shaping our economy. Guided by the Motom make the workforce be with you, each episode features expert views that do not necessarily represent the view of their organizations. We cover real-world case studies and practical tips to help leaders, professionals and companies enhance engagement, culture and well-being by empowering and inspiring their teams. Perfect for curious people and business leaders. On today's episode, the Invisible Engine, our DevOps drives practical business transformation. We have the privilege of sharing the studio with Ofec Asaile. We're also joined by Noiran of Spartan Rumble and by Jason Gioff and through your fit. We will be exploring Ofec's passion for revenue operations. I don't think you say that often. So what's your passion for revenue operations? I think I was not going for dating. So I think you could be ready for a career. But there you go. The nation of market. Yeah, I mean I found my one and that's done. So that's one of one. That's very efficient. I have to say, but you know, there might be stories though. Just, you know, everyone, Ofec is the founder of SmoothGale. It's a DevOps consultancy. So if you haven't understood, understood even one word of what I've said, this is the right podcast for you. Ofec's consultancy is dedicated to building the operational backbone B2B companies that needs Gale erected. Ofec's a veteran of HubSpot ecosystem in a certified trainer and has spent years dismantling the silos between marketing sales, customer success for high growth tech companies. So if that sounded like music to your ears, anyone who is dismantling silos in their dream, we're hoping that you enjoy this. But he's a bit of a wild card. You started out in theatre? Yes. Before choosing DevOps as my main passion, there was another smaller passion that was not as interesting, which is performance art in theatre. I spent a while, a few years just doing very weird stuff in closed basements until I found the thing that actually drives my motor to revenue operations. And so now you do revenue operations in dark basements or? No, they turn the lights on. They turn things on. Comes from the laptop. Okay, and you tell me quite often that you're a people geek or a geek? I'm a geek. I think for me, I think I'm more of a geek for the revenue operations. And I found that I'm a geek just by talking about it to people. And for some reason I'm seeing their eyes just shift and start looking at other things. For some reason I don't know why. And then after a while while you are so passionate about a thing and you talk about it to so many people and you see that they're not there with you, you're like, okay, maybe I am a geek to the thing. Yeah. So maybe we should start with you actually explain to us what revenue operations is, what does it look like in organizations? Why do you love it? Yeah. So revenue operations basically is a theory. First of all, before anything else is trying to understand the revenue departments and look at them as a single function for your business. So in the old world where we looked at marketing sales, customer success, all of those different departments as different departments, different silos. We could have assigned specific APIs for each one of those departments. We could have pushed marketing, could have pushed sales, could have pushed customer success to do each one of those departments job on the best side. But today we sort of found out that this whole sort of win of the business is not separate. It's basically one thing. So when marketing does its job very well, it doesn't necessarily translate to more sales. And when sales do their job very well, it doesn't necessarily mean that our customers are satisfied. So revenue operations basically the theory of trying to look at the whole department as one function, optimize it, and then obviously put it in work, implement the technical changes and also work with the people from those departments to make sure that everything runs very well. To give an example, I worked with a company just a couple of months ago where they had sort of a broken down sales process where they had marketing, qualifying leads, sales making the first sale which is a very small demo. And then another sales team coming in selling another product. And that was the one that they actually wanted to sell. The first one was just sort of real them in. And then they were moved on to customer success. We've got four different departments for different types of engagements in that part of the sales funnel of the customer journey, sorry. And each one of those has to be optimized not for amount of leads created, not for amount of leads marketed to, not for amount of sales, it has to be optimized for revenue. And for us to understand how do we optimize revenue, we need to look at all of those functions, not just one of those. So that's basically that. Obviously, because I'm a sort of a geek to the thing, I can talk about it for hours. So I'm sure it was the end of the recording today. I will just want to keep talking and you will have to stop me. So please do feel free to slap me at some point. The image I had in my head when you were describing that, would it be correct to think about it as they're all different parts in an organization? They almost seem separate parts because you wouldn't kind of necessarily connect sales and marketing in your head. But actually you're saying make it an engine that generates revenue. Correct. But then create a whole system that on the interface, you won't necessarily have to deal with it. That's the pleasure of us as revenue operations managers. That's what we need to do. But for marketing for sales, for customer success people, I just want them to do what we are paying them to do. If you're a marketer, market, if you're a sales rep, I don't want you to do anything else. Anything that happens in the background is our job. But we are the ones because we design, implement and maintain the system. We need to be the ones that actually communicate to those departments. Hey, marketing put more attention on this sector because our data from our current customers tell us that this is a good opportunity because we've done some NPS scoring and we found that our product is most fitting this sector and this company size. That's something that we can translate back to marketing. And again, that's something that usually for most people when they talk about sales operation or just talk about those departments as different silos. That type of communication which is gold wouldn't be there unless we had a very good revenue operations engine. Revoc seems to be quite a new area, am I correct in saying that? Yeah. How old are we talking roughly? I would say around a decade is when it actually started formalizing but it's all in, it's all part of the evolution where up until let's say 20 years ago, we started shifting from outbound to inbound, started shifting from the seller has all the power because you'll go to an electronic store and you'll ask the person which one is the best TV because you'll buy, I don't know anything about TVs, that's the old world now we can just look it up. And then is when we started to shift more into inbound because the buyer has the power they can just Google and know exactly what TV are they looking for, what the requirements should they look be looking for. So that's one shift and from that imaged the revenue operations sort of point of view because marketing has changed, sales has changed, customer success has changed from not just being the sort of team that is responsible for handling tickets, they also became the team that is responsible for most importantly delighting our customers, making sure that they're happy as possible. And second of all, upselling, cross selling, all that fun stuff. So it sounds like it's looking at the interplay between those different relationships and the effects that marketing can have on sales and sales can have on customer success and back the other way around. Who owns Revox within an organization? So that's because it's something that is still emerging and solidifying and I've had the [BLANK_AUDIO] of basically starting off my career with self-appearations for a short period, but then moving into revenue operations quite fast. I see it solidify in the companies I work with, and usually it starts off just like a lot of growing companies. It starts up with whoever takes ownership, whoever is the person that is technical enough and understands enough, those are going to be the people. Usually it's the head of sales, the marketing, head of customer success, usually it's sort of an added position before it's actually defined as a dedicated department, and that point where either companies like mine come in or just new departments come in or revenue operations managers, because that sort of area of jurisdiction is quite unique in the sense that we still have marketing people, we still have sales, we still have all of those departments, but we as revenue operations managers come and sort of cast a net on the whole, again, function which is revenue, we cast a net on all of that, and we have above it all looking for pain points, looking for friction, looking for when and where can we actually improve small processes that in recurring customer journey makes a lot of difference. I'm looking at it from an employee experience lens, but not as employee experience in revenue apps, and one of the things that you made me think about was when you look for roles as a HR leader, and then your head of HR or your head of PNC reports to the COO, and my take on it is that that not set up for success, because if your people function is supposed to do an employee experience or the whole experience, then you should not be reporting into a function, but rather be somewhere on the top systemic process, and it sounds like revenue ops if it's owned by marketing, for example, then the focus is on how do you make marketing more focused on revenue or automated versus the whole ecosystem of revenue generating function, right? Exactly, right. Yeah, because also when you look at revenue operations from a marketing point of view, you basically have probably marketing operations just because of what you just said, just because it's sort of bought in before it had the chance to be something of itself, and it's the most impactful when it is able to look at the whole function as one thing. So I think when you're looking at that lifecycle that connects marketing pre-sales, and then you're going to the sales function, and then the customer success, from a revenue operation standpoint, do you see more friction, let's say between marketing and sales than between sales and customer success in your experience, or is there like, I mean, I'm supposing there are challenges in all of them, but is there like somewhere where there's more? There's more, I'd be thinking if it's maybe in or even generating, or I would go to sales and customer success, but that's not necessarily true. So is there somewhere where you see more pain? Well, I had the privilege of walking with quite a few companies in different sizes, different industries, different parts of the world, and one thing that is global and always the is the personas that we work with, marketing are quite, it's quite stereotypically marketing people, sales will always just want to have the lead sell to them and run away, and customer success people usually just want things to be done, just right and again, just put completed tag on it and move on to the next thing. With that, I've saw that friction does come because we have not just different KPIs a lot of times, but we also have different types of personas. So with different people, and again, it's all about relationships, it's about different people coming to do one thing together. We have different kinds of friction. I wouldn't say that there's usually one point where we have more friction than others because every company is different. I would say that when you build the whole system from the get-go, you need to be very mindful of that. And something that I think is a part of the revenue operations theory is not just about the systems, and not just about the departments, but it's also about the people because it's not just us as revenue operations managers need to look at the whole function as one system and optimize it and all that. We also need to translate it and make sure that it hits the ground because at the end of the day, we're not going to be the people who do the marketing sales of customer success. So if it only makes sense for us, there's sort of an innate flaw to the system, which means when marketing market, they need to understand that they're not just marketing for qualifying lead and then forgetting about it. They need to understand their function in the whole system. And when you have that adoption, and that's the hard part because that's people and people are hard and then computers for some reason, when you have that understanding in those types of departments that everybody is part of a single function, it's way easier. That sounds to me like transformation. Because when you say, they use to it in a certain way, right? So I'm guessing that very rarely do you come in at the in setup. So the organization is already running. They have a problem. They come to you. Is it usually identified as that we have a problem here? And then you open it up and you go, "Huh? Here's the system. Is that usually the process that you find happen?" Well, depends on the company. I would say it for most of my experience. I was brought in at a stage where there was a specific pain point, but it was just a symptom. It wasn't the core issue. That is where things get fun and that is where the actual impact is because a lot of times the symptom that affects the decision makers could be the thing that the investors just ask for or something that they've heard of on LinkedIn or something like that, which makes them want that thing in the business. But when you drill down to it and understand the core issues, you can not just supplement and fix the symptom. You can also show exactly what else are they missing. Not just what they've read about in LinkedIn or in a conference or whatever it is. To give an example, I was once started a conversation with CEO of a new company. The CEO was quite experienced. It was his third company startup that he built and he knew right after the bad. If I'm remembering right, it was a serious A startup at that point. He knew that his investors would want forecast reports at some point. We brought me in and we had a chat about it. We had a chat about his business. He said, "Okay, get me forecast reports." "Poor me forecast reports is not just that." And "Porkast report building the report is the easy part, building the infrastructure for the data and building the processes in a way that that data is being gathered automatically in a way that accurately thank God, yeah." That's the hard part. That's what you actually need to invest months on sometimes. I drilled down into forecasting. I said, "Okay, for forecasting, we need to have a reliable estimation of the amount of the deal. We need to have a reliable estimation of when will the deal close because we want to know when are we forecasting to." Maybe the most tricky part is a reliable projection of that deals probability to close. Those are three metrics. From one report, we bolded down to three metrics. Each one of those metrics is a project about itself. How can we actually estimate and project accurately? What is the probability of each deal to close? What data are we basing that up on? And for our case, it was sort of a combination between the sales reps because it was sort of an early thought up. We wanted to give a lot of weight to what the sales reps had in mind. So there was subjective focus, so basically divided it up to categories. And each category had its own probability to close, which we were able to factor in. Can I ask you because I'm following the geekiness of it. If I was the CEO who wanted a report, I'd get started with, "Hey, I have a problem. I need a sales report." And you go, "Let me tell you." you and you start going blah blah blah blah. Right? How is that received? Right? Because this, what you've described to me sounds like deep understanding of processes that create an outcome. I, as the CEO, have a pain point. The sounds pretty easy to me because like I've read on LinkedIn that AI bought to do it now. Right? And so can you just get me in it? Can you get me one of those? Right? Can you find people respond to, or actually it's a little bit complicated once we solve complicated, we will get a multiplier. Right? Right? How do you solve that? So in my line of work, you need to sort of paste it in because there is the quick solution which is just asking charge of the hey, what's my forecast based upon this data that I shoved in hoping for it to make sense. That's the quick and sort of dirty version of doing it. And then there's the other extreme which we started talking about which is sorry again for gaking out, which is building all robust system for data capturing automatically, training the teams, all of the fun stuff. That's those are, let's call it two extremes of the spectrum. One is very quick. One is very accurate and you want to find a sweet spot between them or the time frame that we are working towards. The one thing that we need to remember is that if we become addicted to the, or addicted or just used to the quick and dirty process, that could skew all of our numbers and it gets worse as we go along because sometimes I can work with, with a client. And they would ask me to create an automation that does this and move it there because that's the manual way of me doing it at the moment. If the process is self is silly, we can automate it. But once that's automated, you've got a silly process multiplied by a thousand. So it's, it's, that sounds like damage. That's, that's like that. Just a question, he, once you've brought in a way of working and establishing those processes, I'm imagining, and this is asking your consultant, Brain, is, so you, let's say you've done the right work and you've set up the systems. You've talked about, you know, the systems being easier to deal with than the people or the people working directly with you, is being the more complicated part. So once, once you've set up, once you've set up a system which is automated the right way, yeah, is your practice shifting towards having more time to manage the people processes correctly or more, with more time and giving you better outcomes because of that. Exactly. So I'm working towards, I think optimizing for revenue is sort of a beautiful title. So what I'm optimizing for and what I'm working towards usually is to make each team member, each user of the engine that we're building, the efficient version of themselves. So when they are efficient, when marketing is working faster and getting better results, same as health, certain is customer success. Once we have that efficiency, what do we do with it? Those are obviously good problems and that's where we want to get to but once we've achieved that goal, what now? Now that we have, for example, if we've done our job beautifully and the work that could have been done in a week is now being done in three days, what am I doing with those two days that I've left? Just getting them a basket to the beach and telling them, okay, you'll see you on Monday or am I actually utilizing that for something else? And that is where the change management piece usually comes in, which is also a lot of fun. I would be honest, I'm still enjoying that immensely, but that is more of an open discussion rather than me knowing exactly what we need to do for a specific goal. That is when we sort of shift the gears and start talking and saying, okay, we've managed it to get where we want to get to. How can we actually double down this? How can we actually utilize this? I have what we've got, customer success team and they were really stressed about implementing an AI chatbot because most of what they were doing is responding to people on the chatbot and just handling tickets. We've very slowly and gradually introduced that AI chatbot, though they work that they've been putting into handling tickets at load. The customer satisfaction had increased because they don't need to wait for anyone. They can just get their replies immediately. But we do have a good problem right now, which is we've got a team of customer success managers with nothing to do. So how can we actually utilize them? In our case, it was creating a knowledge base. In our case, it was investing some of that time into supplying FAQs, supplying some more information about the data we're capturing and basically utilizing all of the human hours and skills that we have developed and utilizing it elsewhere. Again, not just working more efficiently, but also doubling down that once we've got that. It sounds like there's a framework that you put in place whenever you're going on an assignment to do this. Do you always start in the same place? Is there a particular process that you follow? You always start in with marketing or customer success or with sales? I'm trying to understand more about what it looks like as an experience sitting inside an organization. If you were to come in, what would my expectations be of? What does the first period of the engagement look like that discovery period? What are you trying to understand and then what are you going to do? Where does it start? Multi-faceted question. Sorry, it's been a long time. And maybe a suggestion. Maybe we can give the example because Ofic and I are working together on our project right now, which is a very specific type of project. It's not like all projects. Maybe we can hear how it's done in collaboration with the people on time. So usually all interactions between us and the customers is sort of a research discovery audit. We're trying to understand as much as we can about the company because as mentioned, because we're sort of casting a large net and trying to understand a lot of different processes that could take time in order for us to make that first touch efficiently and not ruin the net theme because we didn't know that we're affecting somewhere else. First stage is usually just understanding. And that is done multiple different ways. The way I like to do it and the way I've done it in the project that No and I are working on together is one just asking a lot of questions. I had, I think, around 20 meetings with team leaders, decision makers, stakeholders, trying to understand what do they feel. What are their pain points? Because like I said, a lot of times the symptoms is the best indicator for what's the actual core issue. So that's one thing that I always just try to talk to any of the people that are relevant. That's one way, another way is to just get into the systems themselves. Usually and a lot of the revenue operations work is done on the tax tax. And the heart of the tax tax is most often the CRM. So getting into the CRMs and all integrated systems and just scope it out, make some test records, play around with it, see what happens when actual test records go through the customer journey and find where can it be optimized. But that's just gathering material. Because we have all that, we basically try to create a project list which is an edge, each project has a matrix of how the impact level and effort level. And then we sort of organize it and again bring it back to the decision. I think what we did uniquely in this project is straight from the start, understand that at the end there will be opportunity. So there will be time or capability or something that has been unleashed. So you know, and what do we do with that? That was one of the things. So from the start we positioned optimization as a process of ways of working and revops with one of the commitments of the team to have a think today, how can we use this to create the high impact result? Because it's not something that comes in a day. Right? So you start the team of understanding that and the other thing that we did was figure out how to prioritize for that business because it's not a given how you prioritize. and everyone once revops comes in, wants a piece of revops yesterday because they've been in so much pain for so long, doing grant work non-automated. The other part was to create a system where I'm smiling because we knew that that one was going to be potentially harder to resolve and it actually wasn't, is not everyone can get time with Ulfic immediately to solve their problem. And if you've read a suggestion of AI implementation of something, we have to have a process of suggesting it without necessarily doing it. So we've heard you, we've noted, and it has to be received but not actions of the reactivity into revops once they come in. Just everyone wants it and they want it that way, but you actually have to hold off and say, let me check what's best. Yeah, so that. I think that's maybe if we'll try to sort of reduce the answer to two words is just be pragmatic. Be pragmatic to a way that you understand business, you understand the processes, you understand the different departments. And from that point forward, what would be the most impactful? What can we actually achieve? Is there any low-hanging proof that we can maybe just solve very quickly, get some quick wins, and move on to the bulkier project? What would make the most sense? Because again, especially when working with in organizations, you work with a lot of different people pulling in many different directions, and you always have to keep your head up at the plan and the strategy, and in the long-term impact of the business. And it's it's pragmatic in a system way. So because it's very pragmatic for my silo and for my function, because I'm actually in pain, and that pain is actually impacting revenue now. But the absolute commitment to do this well is we have to look at the system. So it is painful for you. We recognize the pain now, what's the best thing systemically, and we promise we get to you. And here's the time that we're going to get to. So we're making a lot of things visible so that people can see when we're getting to them. The last thing, which is we spend a lot of time on, so often does not spend time on this, but he spends time understanding it through different ways of working. So the design of the ways of working, the human part and the organization part feeds into revops and revops feeds into that. It doesn't mean that revops has to do it. So this is where I think in terms of transformation, the people function is very, very important. Because there's a bunch of things where you start shifting mindset, mapping behaviors and teams, team performance, that feed in and not opposed to, but if you don't do that in advance, then come back to value once the automation is there. So that's been the experience together. - Yeah, 100%. That's something that I've seen happen too many times where I design a system. I implemented all of the changes over there, but it's just not getting adopted because people are used to working manually, people are used to working with Excel spreadsheets rather than something a bit smarter. And again, it's just part of the work part of actually delivering the system and the change that you want to deliver is to make sure that there's an open window for adoption, is to make sure that someone will receive and hold on to what you're creating, because that's the most important part. Again, if I'm. - Yeah, you can't be cool. To get the multiplier effect, I think, and I would really, before we, there's so much more we can, we wanna talk about, but one of the reasons RevOps is business critical is not the automation itself. It's not the tech. It's the multiplier effect of using the right tech in the right way for the right ways of working, because then we've done some numbers. The multiplier effect is what unleashes the potential. So it's in your system anyway, you're using the system in a way that's not effective. Can you talk to us a little bit about automation and being a multiplier? - Of course. So, and like we said, automation is built on processes. I, a huge fan on automation, I work with different automation tools that are dedicated for that, not just for, inside of the tech themselves, so not just in the business applications, but also something to actually bring it all together. And I, because like me, I know that I'm always rushing to that place where I can actually start building some fun automations that will connect this or that in a way that is not natively connected. However, that all has to stand on the processes. So whenever we try to introduce AI, we try to introduce some cool automation. The process is a baseline is what I will always talk about beforehand. Automation and a technical part as a general rule is usually the easiest part. Building a process that is robust, that is tested, that makes sense for everyone, that you know that everything is collected in a way and at the time where it's supposed to be collected, that's the hard part. Usually what I would advise my customers is before you actually think about automation, think about the process, if you can, if it's relevant for that process, try to do it yourself. Think what do you need to do at what point and sort of write that script for yourself? What do I need to do at what point? And once we've done that enough times, because we are lazy, and because we want a more core, better, we would in a positive way, 1/2%. Once we've tested it, and we know exactly what needs to happen at what point, then we can sort of put the more weight on automation. I can say that in an effect case with the project that I'm talking about, we actually knowing that we want to bring in revops before we knew what it was called. We did extensive, extensive customer journey mapping. In the best way, we knew possible, so that when, first of all, that we could see some of the systemic issue, so they could, and then when we bring in a professional, they can take what we did and not start from scratch. We didn't assume that it was the end, or like if we've done it, then he doesn't need to do his discovering, but it was, it's that on top of extensive customer journey mapping first. Exactly. And I would say that when you don't do that research, when you don't get a very good understanding of the sort of formula that you have for the customer journey, and you don't have to realize it, you don't break it down to the different elements of every stage, that is just an open window for something to sneak in that you didn't think about. And sometimes when you do it manually, that's the best part of it is that usually the damage is minor. When you actually pour some more gas into that fire with automation, every small dent in your pipeline becomes a huge leak. - We are at time, before I let you go, do you have a quick list of dues and don't? So there's an end-lippless of dues and don'ts, but if I'm a new head of sales or HRD that is thinking about revops, and I'm not sure, what's your dues and don'ts, what's your recommendations for me? I'd like to consider the need. - Yeah, so I think the main one for me is what I said before about being pragmatic, and for you to be pragmatic, there's an exercise of visualizing what does it, that you actually want, what are you walking towards? So I think that's the first exercise, understanding what do you actually want in a certain timeframe, what do I want this week, what do I want this quarter, what do I want this year? And once we have that, just walk backwards, because a lot of what we do is revenue operations managers is to walk backwards, design a platform or a system or an engine based on goals, and those goals are key and replaceable element in this whole process. So be pragmatic, understand what you're walking towards, and find the best tools that will help you make that come to life. I think that whole thing is one thing that's very important. Second thing I would love to talk about is just the human element, because unfortunately you can't do anything in an organization without communication, you can do anything in an organization without building that relationship and understanding the jurisdiction. Obviously that translates to the platforms themselves, but it starts and ends with the people. So never forget that. - Amazing. I have to say that the way this has actually changed a lot of my practice, because now when we're doing strategic change and you want to do growth in a very highly volatile market, if you can. make sure that you're unlocking everything that already exists in your business and you're preventing waste In your business. So you're doing your foundations. What have I already got? Then you kind of set to sore, right? So but but kind of that thinking of I'm Systemically going to set myself up so that the foundation is strong as the world changes I think is quite profound for business transformation and what what I'm seeing is Once that's clear once you know that that has the name. No, I know it's revops It's it's an enabler. It's an able for all of us in a different role So I think if that's if we've been able to give that to listeners than great But if you have questions that we want to hear them I think they should talk to you and not me or Jason or even Rod even though Rod No, I'm fired So how would they contact you affect if they wanted to speak to you? So either LinkedIn to get to me directly which I think would be the best or through the company website small scale that I owe I think that's also those in the podcast For shorts. Oh description is a good word. We'll do that. I would do it. Thank you so much for coming in I feel like we should meet you again because there's a couple of things we haven't covered as I've Yeah, yeah, I like it. We like it So thank you all for listening. Thank you so much for coming in. I'll be fascinating. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you