RevOps for Dual GTM Motions: AI, PLG, and the Tenacity Advantage with Alex Kean of Merge

(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Cognizim. Cognizim helps businesses connect with their dream prospects by providing premium contact, company, and event information, including thermographics, technographics, intent data, verified business emails, and verified mobile numbers. - Hey Alex, how's it going? - It's going well, Jeff. Thanks for having me. - So today I'm joined by Alex Keen. He's the director of Rebops at Merge, at merge.dev. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about Merge? - Yeah, so I've been working in Rebops actually only for a few years now. My start to my career was in banking, which I did for a few years, switched into a kind of corporate strategic finance role across tech companies in New York and the Bay Area. Worked at a company in the middle of that called Expans, which is a cybersecurity company. We sold to Palo Alto Networks in 2021, but at Expans I met a lot of folks that I now work with at Merge. So I now work for my former manager, which was a happy accident. RVP Finance is my old manager from Expans, and then our CEO is actually our chief of staff there. So it's fun to have the gang all back together. That's really how I found my way here. And what Merge does is we are a platform for product managers to embed B2B integrations into their product. So rather than build individual integrations into their product, they can connect to us. And we have normalized unified data tables across categories like HR, ATS, financial services, ticketing, file storage, knowledge base, and are always launching more. - That's amazing. So as a director of Rebops, can you tell me a little bit about your organization? Like what type of roles report to you? And then what went into your thinking of team construction? - Yeah, so when I joined, we were just a couple of folks. We've since consolidated the marketing operations function under us. So we have one person who's really focused on demand gen and marketing operations. We have a second who is focused on all things sales ops, as well as also has a former banking background and does a lot of planning, modeling, strategic, kind of go-to-market problem solving. And then we have another person on the team who really focuses on all things systems and also handles a lot of post sales work, as well as some other odds and ends in partnership ops and product ops. And I think the thing behind that is we still have fairly fluid kind of walls between all of us. We all do a little bit of everything. I like to kind of structure it as much by skill set as by functional area. So we'll of course kind of like trade projects where there may be something very marketing or like webpage focus that the systems person will work on. The marketing person might be doing modeling for planning. I think given that we're kind of a small org still, we get the benefit of being able to spread ourselves however we'd like. - I love that construction because you have folks, and are the folks early or mid-stage career that report to you? - Yes, I think everyone is probably early to mid-stage, certainly not first job, probably closer to second or third. And so really we congrats them, just promoted a couple of folks on the team. So they're kind of moving towards that lead or sort of manager role where they're really subject matter experts in their areas. - Okay, great. So the way you've discussed it is that folks have an opportunity to one, have air coverage when folks are out. You don't have this single point of failure issue. In the second, folks get an opportunity to do a little bit of a tour of duty, right? To have the opportunity to do a little bit of, you know, what their colleagues are doing and can expand their own personal growth. So that's really interesting. Now, when you're thinking about the core persona, you talked about product managers, I have to think about perhaps this is a more of a B2B sales led motion. Can you tell me a little bit about the motion itself, how you go to market, and then how your team supports that motion? - Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot of the kind of traditional SaaS go to market motion. It is very, very sales led. We rely a lot on our incredible and growing SDR team and we're retiring new SDRs. Just a quick shameless plug there. We have a whole lot of different backgrounds, really, really ambitious team. And so our SDRs lead a lot of that motion. They're spending a lot of their time trying to find out. I think they probably spend the most time and where we try to come in and help them is finding just the right person. So our product and our ICP is really trying to find a particular PM who heads up a particular product line. So for example, for a company like DoorDash, it may be a bit of a hard one to figure out because it is ultimately a consumer company, but DoorDash may have a DoorDash for business line. And so we're really trying to find the PM of that particular unit and get in touch with them. And so the SDRs lead that motion. The AEs are often kind of outbounding and coordinating with them, trying to multicred together. And then we have the marketing and kind of demand-gen motion where particularly in enterprise and commercial and upmarket, we're trying to show ads to folks so that they're seeing merge all over the place. And we're also very, very active. Anyone who follows Shensee or Gil or other folks in our work, we're super active on LinkedIn. So you'll see us there often as well. - So is your SDR team, as I have a couple of questions for you then, are they inbound, outbound or all bound? Second of all, the ratio of AEs to SDRs, like what are we looking at in terms of that construction? - Yeah, yeah. So the SDRs are mostly focused outbound. We do a lot of, most of our inbound comes in just straight through demo requests. And we kind of have our own way of filtering out leads that can usually just book directly on AD calendars. And then the AEs can typically look at a company and pre-screen it out if it's not a good fit. And then on the SDR side, they are actually, I apologize, I got lost on the second part of that. What was the second part? - The ratio of AEs to SDRs. Is that one to one or three AEs for every one SDR? - Yeah, yeah. So it's roughly one to one. So we have about a team of almost 10 AEs and then almost 10 SDRs. - Got it. - And we need to believe that your ACVs are in the high five figures of six figure range. So that's super interesting. I'd love to hear about some of the learnings and the iterations of the SDR team. Like, where the SDR team is today versus maybe 1.0. Like what were some of those learnings? - Yeah, so I think where the SDR team kind of the journey of what we've gone after, what the SDR team is focused on, I think as at most companies, pardon me, you're really trying to figure out what works, what doesn't. They're starting out with just founders kind of yelling company logos out in the air and then they're going and trying to figure out how to pitch them over email. It's not that repeatable. It's kind of, it's obviously quite scrappy. And so over time, we've tried to really figure out like what are the signals that have a high return, what kinds of emails and even what kind of channels are we using most often? So I think I've heard from a lot of RevOps folks on this podcast and elsewhere that calls are actually one of the highest performing, if not the highest performing channel, LinkedIn is really successful. I have to agree with that, that email is where we get kind of our lowest reply rates. It's hard to stand out there. And so we've worked on really just kind of the more multi-channel sequences of sending an email, then making a call, connecting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also helpful for just distribution of if you have your SDRs and they're posting content every week, you get to be in front of people's eyeballs in many different ways. And then we've introduced in RevOps signals like, we've gone from, oh, they're hiring integrations engineers, which is sometimes hard to spot and doesn't always surface all that often to things like, oh, they've launched a new product that needs integrations. We also do things like straight folks pages of what integrations they offer and kind of match that against our own offerings. So it's much more kind of strategic with how we're going through the motion. - That's very interesting. I'm thinking immediately to scraping signals together. You can scrape jobless things and find keywords too, you could have a list of target companies and then crawl through their pages to find the right slugs, URL slugs, and then crawl the text there. So that's really interesting. Okay, so with the B2B enterprise motion, has the company thought about kind of a higher velocity motion, like a PLG? - Yeah, yeah, so we, interestingly enough, in our core product is certainly positioned as best in class, best in the market, very white gloves. It does require a period of actual implementation, both from solutions architects on our side and then engineering and product teams at our customer. And so the initial go at the PLG motion for our core product, maybe didn't necessarily have perfect product market fit given how much has to be kind of set up to really get it up and running. But where we are introducing that motion is with a new product that's coming out that we've deemed agent handler. It is complimentary to our current platform, but still quite different. And so we'll be launching it at the end of September, early October. And it will be complimentary in a way that whatever our ultimate mission is to make secure data access easy. And so whether you do that via our platform of unified APIs or our platform of agent handler that is helping you pull data with agents, permissioning folks properly, if who is able to do that, and then providing logs of what's been pulled and how and by whom, those will really be two complimentary platforms. And the second one will go out with a PLG motion. So folks can really test straight from our landing page, embed it straight into their agents and use it going forward. Okay, so that's cool. So when I think about RevOps orgs, you know, RevOps orgs take care of process, enablement, decision reporting and advisory, and then lastly systems. Having two motion side by side is a tense amount to having two RevOps teams. But when RevOps team you're setting a double task to the team, I'm curious about, you know, what deltas or changes that you're anticipating for your organization, for both of those, for that new motion that's gonna be brought in. - Yeah, yeah, so we, funny enough, we actually went out, really scoped what it would look like to build kind of the Cadillac of those two motions, how they would perfectly intertwine together. Went and surfaced that in our roadmap to our executive team who said, "Hold on a minute, "the product hasn't launched yet. "We don't want our entire RevOps team "focusing a full quarter of work on something "that we don't know if the market entirely wants. "We obviously have strong conviction that they do, "but until we see dollars come in the door, "we don't wanna dedicate resources out." So we went and scaled all that back. And I'd say we got started working on the new motion, call it three weeks before launch. So it's an exciting time at Merge right now. But what that scoped down version really meant was, go ahead and kind of do the MVP version. There are gonna be things like manual CSV uploads to start, but we kind of designed it in a way that it could be modular and that we could add things later on and that we could swap different systems out without hopefully breaking flows in between. And so that initial motion is really designed around, don't flow anything through our systems that's going to inhibit or break current flows with the current platform and business, but make it so that we can design it the right way and invest more resourcing to do it in a scalable way going forward. And so it's really designed around getting proof points before dedicating resources and builds towards it. - Yeah, in my experience, the top of funnels, like the first thing that needs to be addressed because for a PLG motion, you get an inordinate amount of emails that are like Gmail's or HotMails. And then from there, it's trying to enrich the data to get to the business email and then scoring those leads. It's always a bit of a challenge. And there's a handful, like a very small percentage of folks that actually pay and they make, hopefully they make up for all the other free users that are somewhat of a cost to the business. And how do you identify what's like a high intent or high potential signal to then send to like a growth team or to your SDR team to follow up on? You mentioned agent handler. It makes me think of AI, LLMs and MCP. Have you given credence to maybe leveraging your own tool for your own systems internally, like dog-fooding in some way? - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we actually, at our all hands, the other day did our first internal demo of here's what it would look like for an internal ops team to use our new product. So we have some N8N workflows that we've designed, just kind of fairly simple agent flows, like go ahead and summarize pipeline for me weekly from this kind of filtered data report from Salesforce. And we would potentially want to, when we go and connect our MCP and our agent handler product, we can essentially cordon off who has access to pull what data. So for example, through agent handler, we can permission, let's say, particular AEs to only look at their own opportunities. So they may be able to pull the past couple of weeks of pipeline that was generated, but only under their ownership versus being able to see everything that's going on. So that's kind of a fairly basic use case of how we would use it. But it also makes it very easy for us to go to different agents that we've created in N8N or elsewhere, attach our MCP to it. It immediately knows what tools we have permissions to and it's already authorized all of them to do that work. - That's cool. So then they intake window, right? Like I always think about like chat GPT extended their prompts in their playground to include several MCPs. So the interface is a chat bot, like how do you imagine your team interacting with the LLM and by extension the MCP? Is it through a chat window or a Slack channel? Like what does that interface look like? - Yeah, so right now through our testing, we've really been just using kind of like that text window in N8N. We're making sure that we're all cleared through security as every good growing series B company does before we start to connect things like Slack and other interfaces. And so in the future, we'd ideally a current other workflow that we're designing right now is kind of like our customer health bot. So right now customer health data lives across everything from we reverse ETL product data into Salesforce. So there's a lot of adoption data in Salesforce. Obviously our ticketing tool is an important one to look at a summary of our customer channel and Slack for that particular customer, a couple other data sources. And so we're kind of trying to build an agent that you can chain together all of those sources, summarize the data from each one and then do kind of a big executive TLDR at the top and call that bot within a customer channel to return a summary of how that customer is doing if we think they're gonna renew with their healthy if they're ready to buy more. - Cool, so you've set up a rag with your different systems. The most RevOps folks don't come from an AI architecture background, it's so new. There's a lot of folks who are learning on the job. I'm curious how much interaction you have with your own product team interacting with you and instructing you on how to work with dog-fooding the system. And then secondly, how much of a feedback loop are you providing back to your product organization? - Yeah, it's a good question. So we end up working at the current product that we're launching up until now has really been what we call an internal tiger team. So just a small handful of people. It's actually largely our co-founders coding it on the weekend, in addition to, I think one PM, a couple of engineers. And so I'm definitely very careful about when I reach out and that I've done all my research beforehand because the time is up until the end of this month. Very, very valuable to them and in small chunks is it available. So we do, I do work with the junior PM on the team to figure out even like just, hey, how do I authorize this certain tool? How do I get this up and running? Obviously there's still every once in a while a bug here and there. So it also, I can deliver that feedback or even kind of my feedback on the UI flow. And so it is helpful I think for both of us as we kind of work through that and get that up and running and we'll probably mirror a lot like what our customers are going through. - That's awesome. So coming up on the end of the show and I always ask this for folks, like what's one piece of advice that you would leave for the RevOps and the go-to-market community? - Yeah, I think, I think that my biggest piece of advice or what's really helped me particularly in kind of this age of AI and new tooling is just how important it is to be super, super tenacious. I think 20 years ago, if you wanted to solve a problem or teach yourself physics or whatever it is, you would kind of walk around a library forever and maybe not even find the book you were looking for to teach you about it. Whereas now, if you're able to prompt over and over and over again with LLMs, given that there's access to all information or at least up to a certain point, you'll almost always find the answer that you're looking for. And so a lot of our tooling has just been developed by us sitting up late at night, continuing to ask why isn't this particular workflow that we're building working? And it almost always eventually gets there. So it's super helpful to have all that today. - That's amazing. Well, Alex, for those who want to connect with you and learn more about Merge, where can they go ahead and do so? - Yeah, I think LinkedIn is perfect for me and then merge.dev is where you can find us. - Awesome. Thanks so much, Alex. Appreciate you coming on. - Thank you, Jeff.