The Distributed Truth Evan Dunn, Elise Vue, Aaron Landgraf

In this episode of the Distributed Truth Podcast, Evan Dunn is joined by Sebastien van Heyningen, a seller turned RevOps expert and the founder of Central Metric. Central Metric helps B2B SaaS companies increase revenue efficiently through building scalable systems.

Sebastien van Heyningen discusses the importance of focusing on the buyer journey in a holistic manner and the challenges companies face in achieving this. He emphasizes the need for a consensus on the buyer journey and the importance of understanding the steps that buyers actually take. Sebastien also highlights the limitations of the concept of a single source of truth and the need for each team to have its own truth-filled operating system. He suggests tracing the best buyer journey that has been delivered and combining it with the existing true north to create an automated and easy-to-follow version. Sebastien also advises companies to ask their clients and gather insights from various sources to understand the steps buyers need to take.

TRUTHS OF THE DAY

The buyer journey is more important than the offering. “We're all kind of doing the same stuff and the folks that actually do it in a holistic way and consider every step, what experience the people that you're trying to engage with are having, those are the ones that win. I put an article up recently that was like, the buyer journey is more important than the offering. And I think as the market becomes more and more crowded, that becomes more and more true.” - Sebastien van Heyningen

The importance of collecting insights from buyers. “We're all kind of doing the same stuff and the folks that actually do it in a holistic way and consider every step, what experience the people that you're trying to engage with are having, those are the ones that win.” - Sebastien van Heyningen


Connect with Sebastien van Heyningen and learn more about his work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienvanheyningen/
Central Metric: https://www.centralmetric.tech/services/

Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:
Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com
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In this episode of the Distributed Truth Podcast, Jackie discusses the challenges of operationalizing the revenue engine of B2B SaaS companies. She highlights the fragmented customer data problem and the need for better approaches to unified customer data. Jackie also shares her insights on the link between investing in unified customer data and revenue growth.


Jacki Leahy is the founder of Active The Magic, blazing new trails as a RevOps advisor and vision operationalizer. Previously, Jacki worked at a variety of tech startups, and before that, she was a Manhattan real estate agent and a kindergarten teacher.


Jacki shares her real-world learnings from working with nearly 100 different B2B SaaS organizations on their customer journey and go-to-Market strategy. She sees a shift in the center of gravity toward the "right side of the bowtie," toward long-term, sustainable growth. But the "fundamental misalignment of the data architecture of Postgres and Salesforce" and lack of investment mean that customer-facing teams do not have the tools they need to understand user behavior. And for SaaS to succeed, this needs to change.

Rebecca gets practical about how founders can reimagine their tech stack to optimize for revenue-driving activities. Rebecca brings her own experience as a founder, as well as background working with Fortune 500 companies, to deliver timely recommendations for managing their tech and data investments. In order to eliminate silos and reduce bloat in the tech stack, leaders need to reverse engineer how their customers interact with their teams and technology, and prioritize the investments that most directly attach to revenue.


Rebecca Clyde is the co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai. The company’s genAI Chat Cloud enables conversations between businesses and their customers that are engaging, personalized and insightful.


Ms. Clyde is an accomplished business leader with unique expertise in marketing automation and company building. Prior to Botco.ai, Clyde founded Ideas Collide, an Inc. 5000 digital agency now in its 15th year serving Fortune 500 companies. She was previously a digital strategist at Intel and holds an MBA from Arizona State University.


TRUTHS OF THE DAY
REBECCA: REMOVE DUPLICATES TO SOLVE ISSUES FOR THE ADMINISTRATION AND FOR CLIENTS
“It's such a hard decision to make for folks to decide to go get care for their mental health, or for a potential addiction problem that they might be having. It's a huge step for them. And we should remove any barrier, and certainly not make the data be the problem along the way if anything.”

REBECCA: CUSTOMERS JUST WANT A GOOD EXPERIENCE, THEY DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT YOUR CRM
“I like to take a very customer-centric orientation as well because honestly, I know everybody uses Salesforce or some type of CRM, we believe it's imperative. But your customer doesn't interface with it, they don't actually use it. And in fact, they may not care if you use Salesforce or a CRM or not, that's not what they're going to be experiencing.”


Connect with Rebecca and learn more about his work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaclyde/
botco.ai: https://botco.ai/


Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:
Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com
Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!

Jeff has built a high-performing CS operations team at GitLab supporting hundreds of customer success and support managers. Jeff gets very detailed about how GitLab developed its customer 360 program, how they developed product usage data insights for CS, as well as how vital it is for this information to be distributed across sales and CS together.


Jeff Beaumont leads customer success operations and programs at GitLab. Jeff has worked in SaaS for over ten years, before which he was a CPA.


TRUTHS OF THE DAY


JEFF: PEELING BACK AND DISCOVERING THE DATA ISSUES
“They're not aligned on 'this needs to be a company initiative' so you have teams just doing skunkworks projects by saying 'this is what I have to do, this project over here that unrelated to this, but I'm still passionate about this usage data project because I see the vision. I believe in it' but they can really only devote a couple of hours. That just does not get it done.”

JEFF: COLLABORATION ACROSS CSMS AND SALES
“So from a sales rep perspective, they're incentivized to make sure that their CSM and their solution architect or sales engineer are both well-equipped, have the data that they need, and can execute. Because it's going to come back for them in the future. You need to sow and then you can reap.”


Connect with Jeff and learn more about his work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbeaumont/
Github: https://about.gitlab.com/
Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:
Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com


Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!

Cat joins The Distributed Truth to discuss one of the most overlooked-yet-important parts of Revenue Operations: documenting the flow of customer data across GTM tools. According to Cat, the ability to track leads to customers to renewals is “very rare” in B2B orgs of any size. We talk diagrams, nightmare scenario “spiderwebs of insanity” and Cat’s unflagging appetite for simplifying and optimizing the tech stack. And if you want to know how to sell to a Revenue Ops leader like Cat, make sure your CS team prioritizes their needs and feedback.


Caterina Torres is a Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Weights & Biases, previously at Supermove and Zoom. With a background spanning from sales data management to marketing systems, Cat brings a level-headed view of the importance of customer data strategy to Go-To-Market efficiency.


TRUTHS OF THE DAY


CAT: HOW OFTEN DOES ONE END UP IN A SPIDERWEB SCENARIO
“When a company is starting up, they actually do a pretty good job of connecting or finding a single source of truth area. But I'd say the larger the company is, that's where it becomes a spiderweb of insanity.”


CAT ON WHICH TEAMS NEED TO SEE THE FULL CUSTOMER JOURNEY
“Being able to see the full journey is extremely important for all the teams whether they know it or not. Maybe the engineering team would be least likely to benefit from it because they're building the product so they don't really need to see.”


Connect with Caterina and learn more about her work:


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caterina-torres-%F0%9F%A7%A9-2331b628/
Weights & Biases: https://wandb.ai/site


Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:
Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com


Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!

Connor discusses the biggest problems facing GTM - and they all have to do with data across GTM systems. In fact, according to Aptitude8’s research, the #1 implementation challenge for CRMs is data migration and data management. Listen to Connor’s expert insights about the history of the Lead Object, the importance of data models to your business model, and the need for centralized data management owned by RevOps teams.


Connor Jeffers is the founder and CEO of Aptitude8 and Hapily and is basically a Jedi of making HubSpot work for companies of all stages and sizes. Connor has spent his career in marketing and revenue operations leadership, as well as startup incubation.


TRUTHS OF THE DAY
CONNOR: THE NUMBER ONE CONCERN WITH MOVING DATA SYSTEMS
“I think the core of data migration is, 'migrating data is hard.' Sure, that's true but also not, you export it and import it. The problem is, normalizing it, transforming it, making it useful in the new system, and usually where it's coming from is it's dirty and unstructured. And that's the root cause of all these issues.”


EVAN ON FIRST UNDERSTANDING YOUR COMPANY APPROACH
“Business model matters for your data model. In other words, if you're B2B then you need to know companies and if you're B2C you don't necessarily. Though, you can argue, there's a concept of a household that B2C companies are now trying to aggregate to particularly for media, entertainment, and even CPG. They do this with tons of data in the back end and CRMs struggle to keep up with these needs.”


Connect with Connor and learn more about his work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-jeffers/
Aptitude 8: https://aptitude8.com/


Connect with Evan to learn more about Syncari and The Distributed Truth podcast:
Evan Dunn | Syncari | Syncari.com


Make sure to leave a comment, and subscribe!