Podcast episode 9 with 🌱 Kathryn Castle is out!
She runs Candybox, a #Salesforce Partner from Mexico, and have a distributed and remote workforce which meant that they were ahead of the curve and Covid enforced lockdowns and restrictions to the world.
We talk about the challenges of running a nimble start up and recruiting great talent.
They are always on the lookout for great talent, so have a listen to the podcast to get an idea of the company, and please connect with her to find out more.
Enjoy!
#OnThePeiroll
Transcript
Pei Mun Lim
Hi, Kathryn, welcome to an episode of my podcast called OnThePeiroll. Thank you for joining me today. How are you?
Kathryn
Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m doing well, how are you?
Pei Mun Lim
I’m very good. I know you’re currently located in Mexico. And I know that you are from the UK originally, your profile tells a very interesting journey that you’ve had. I was wondering if you could share. share that with us how you got from where you were to where you are today?
Kathryn
Hmm, yeah, let me see if I can condense it. So I was previously living in the Netherlands, before I moved to Mexico about two years ago. Although I’m originally from the UK, as you correctly stated, I was there for about seven years. And by the end of that time, I was just feeling a little bit restless, I guess, is a good way of describing it. And I was looking to do something completely different. Although I work to a really good company, I just wasn’t feeling particularly challenged. And I got the opportunity to move to Mexico through a friend by complete coincidence. And I guess I thought at the time that maybe this is the opportunity I’ve been looking for, and I decided to just go for it because you don’t get the opportunity as somebody from you know, the, almost the opposite side of the world to move to Mexico every day. So off I went. And when I moved, I had planned to do some consulting work through the company I was originally working with. And in order to do that I needed to set up an LLC, because there wasn’t a branch in Mexico to employ me. And once I set up that LLC, what happened was I started getting inquiries through my network and through contacts, contacts. And in a very short space of time, I had too much work to do just myself. So I started working with some people part time. And that led to hiring some people full time. And suddenly I’m running a consulting company.
Pei Mun Lim
Oh, wow, that is really interesting. I hope you don’t mind if I dive a little bit into the details. I can see from your use from your profile, you started off and in the customer care. And then can you just talk a little bit about that professional journey, how you went from there, to Salesforce in where where you’ve ended up? Yeah,
Kathryn
I mean, I’m sure this won’t be a very uncommon story, I kind of came to Salesforce by accident, not really knowing what I was getting myself into at the time. I started way back when in a customer service position, moved to a small software company, and kind of started the tech support team in Europe. And so those of you who’ve worked at start service before you know that your job description may say one thing that you end up doing a lot of different things, and you can kind of just pick things up that interest you and that are valuable to the business. So I started managing that company’s Zendesk instance. And I became really interested in business process, you know, operational efficiency configuration of Zendesk, all of that nerdy stuff. And roll came up in that company’s business operations team, which was focused more around Salesforce and some other tools that say was used. And although I didn’t have any Salesforce experience at the time, I lobbied my Zendesk experience to say, hey, look at all these cool things that I’ve done in Zendesk previously, I’m sure I can then Salesforce no problem. And for whatever reason, they agreed with me, I was clearly very convincing that day. And so I came to Salesforce and I was sort of the one person of the group based out of Europe, the others were in the US. And so I was doing all kinds of things, you know, use a support configuration, building more complex processes over time, and I stayed in that role for a while. Then I went back to management in a support role for a little while, and then flipped again, back to back to business operations and Salesforce related activities. And then from there went into consulting.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, I’m just going to divert slightly to follow my curiosity here. So from your experience, any thoughts about Zendesk vs. Salesforce?
Kathryn
Zendesk is a really good platform for specific use cases. And a lot of customers that we work with use it. I think it’s a really solid solution. Particularly for, let’s say b2c more than b2b. When it comes to b2b use cases, something I see, that can become a bit of a complicating factor when using Zendesk is that the Zendesk Salesforce integration, it works in the use case it was designed for, but it’s not super configurable, unless she wants to go down that kind of custom route. And because of that, companies can run into some difficulties when they have half of their customer successful customer experience team working in Salesforce, that’s usually Customer Success managers. But it can depend, it could be like an implementation manager or something like that. And then you have another group, which is usually customer support working on of Zendesk. And a lot of b2b companies we work with, they require those teams to collaborate pretty heavily. And that’s very difficult when one team is in one platform and another team is in another platform, you need to do things like collaboration, or escalations, then it can get a little bit complicated, which has nothing to do with centers function functionalities as a support platform or sales forces. It’s just integrated and lead to siloing.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, we can imagine that, when you talked about moving over to Mexico, was was that led by a work? Or was that audit work? come later? Did you think oh, Mexico is a great place to live? Let me go and then.. Is that how
Kathryn
Yeah, it was definitely more the latter. Ironically enough, I was planning originally on taking a bit of a sabbatical and traveling around. So kind of the opposite happened, even before I even prefer that the pandemic hit. Because my consulting work took off so quickly, I found that instead of, you know, doing part time hours here and there, or suddenly working probably more hours than even when I was doing a full time job. So sabbatical will have to come later.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, so you have the situation where, which a lot of people dream of, basically more work than you can handle? How did you how, let me back up. So it’s not contracting? It’s basically consulting for different clients. Am I right?
Kathryn
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Pei Mun Lim
How did you get to get to that particular space? A lot of the other consultants or Salesforce or Microsoft they career it’s, do I join an end customer? Or do I join a partner where I get some consulting experience, maybe I’ll contract in either space that’s basically with an agency for a specific amount of time, then you’ve got the freelancing, which is a tough gig, because you have to look for every single customer yourself. There’s no guarantee of three months, six months, whatever in, it might just disappear in that in an instant. How did you end up just having lots of work as a freelance consultant? Initially, I know your company?
Kathryn
It’s a good question. I think it probably got something to do with specialization in a particular industry and working with particular types of companies. And so what I focused on originally, what we focus on now, as a company is working with small, fast moving, usually b2b, tech focused businesses. So that’s a fairly specific niche to be in. And what I was hearing when I was still just a solo consultant before it started building out the business, from prospects and customers was, we were working with a consultant or an agency before but they just didn’t understand our business and you do. So I think there are definitely other agencies and freelancers working in this space, we’re not, you know, unique and magical. But it is, in my opinion, an underserved market still. So there’s quite a lot of demand and if you work with With one company, you’ll often find that sooner or later, if they’ve had a good experience with you, they will refer you to other companies. Because the kind of the startup tech world is fairly small, a lot of people know each other. There are very strong networks between people. So there’s that referral aspect to how we get a lot of our business.
Pei Mun Lim
So you talk about a fast moving startup B to B, what kind of cloud do they tend to focus on? Would that be to Sales Cloud or any, anything particular?
Kathryn
Its first and foremost, Sales Cloud, for sure. That’s far and away the most common. We also have done Service Cloud projects, communities, not necessarily huge, full blown ones. But setting up things like knowledge bases, or contracting communities, place where places where, you know freelancers, for example, can log in and, and conduct various workflows. More than that, I’d say something that’s maybe a little bit unique in our space is that we work with all kinds of other vendors and integrate them with Salesforce. So that’ll be things like the aforementioned Zendesk, it will be platforms like HubSpot. platforms like outreach, sales, love DocuSign panda doc. I mean, the list goes on kind of indefinitely. But startups, particularly in the tech space, they’re really well known for having a diverse tech stack, let’s say,
Pei Mun Lim
I can imagine that, what makes you choose this particular leash, to focus on?
Kathryn
Really just that that’s what I had experience with. So I heard an existing skill set, and it was valuable. And I enjoyed it. So that’s, that’s the direction he took me in.
Pei Mun Lim
Amazing. And then all the work started coming in, you said, and then we started to look out for people you could work with, how do you? How do you find those people?
Kathryn
Good question. A couple of different ways. So first is through personal networks. And so most of us have an existing network of people that we’ve worked with that we know in various capacities. And my experience has been if you reach out to people, and you ask them respectfully for help, or you know, if they can recommend anyone, or put you in contact with anyone, the vast majority of people are really happy to help, which is lovely. So for existing networks is one way. I think another good way to find people can be through professional groups. There are some that are in person. But to be honest, being in Mexico and running a remote company, I don’t know a lot about those. And it’s not ones that we’ve leveraged heavily. So far, the groups that I’m thinking of are more industry specific or operations specific, through things like slack workspaces, or websites where you can tap into a kind of tight knit group of professionals in your specific space. It’s a really good way of finding people. And then just more traditional methods like LinkedIn, job postings, things like that.
Pei Mun Lim
How do you vet, the people you’re working, or you’re going to pull it to do your project with? I’m sure there’ll be some people that you’ve worked with before that, you know, this is, this guy’s really good, good attention to detail, but it’s like Fiverr, you know, those websites will or top, whatever, you know, those websites where the number of freelancers are so many? And how do you, how do you choose? And how do you vet the freelancers that you’ve got work with? Yeah,
Kathryn
that’s a really good question. So depending on what the level of involvement is going to be, we might go through something that’s kind of like a traditional interview process, which has some more soft skills focused conversations, and then a technical exercise, and then a demonstration of what’s been built. And I think there’s a reason why a lot of companies conduct these types of activities because it’s, it’s tried and true. I would say if we if we’re working with a freelancer, as opposed to hiring somebody in house where we’ll try and start off with a fairly small portion effect, no, crazy deadlines, not super high risk as a way of getting our feet wet a little bit and seeing how we work together. Because sometimes even if somebody has got amazing technical skills or amazing consulting skills, it’s still just not the right area for them or not the right the right kind of fit. So we’re usually start with something small, that will give us a chance to get to know each other in a fairly relaxed environment. And if all goes well, we’ll ramp up from there.
Pei Mun Lim
Do you have any sort of onboarding process, for example, making sure that they fields correctly, and they don’t go off and do things in their own way, and they don’t document or comment out things if you have a process onboarding people?
Kathryn
Yeah. So we have an onboarding that’s specific to employees, which is longer and more extensive. And then we have one that’s for contractors, the contractor, one, it’s primarily handled through a community that we built a while back. So they receive access to that. And there’s an onboarding built into the workflow when you log in for the first time, which is prompting you for things like documents, you know, very exciting stuff, and also explaining, how does everything work? Where can you see things that have been assigned to you? How should you process them, how should you look your hours, etc, etc. On top of that, we because we’ve distributed we have to work a lot by communicating asynchronously. So we have a slack workspace that everybody is part of, we have different channels for different clients, both shared with the client, so we can chat with each other back and forth. And also just internal, so that we can just discuss things amongst ourselves that might just cause a lot of noise if we were to discuss them in a shared channel. So a lot of specific tasks will be discussed there amongst people. And as needed, we’ll set up course to go through things in further detail.
Pei Mun Lim
That sounds very global, because you’ve got to take into account of different time zones and the fact
Kathryn
everyone Yeah, exactly.
Pei Mun Lim
Now, your model is very ideal. For a lot of the Salesforce consultants or admins that I speak to that is its Pinnacle. Being able to work remotely, and perhaps, live in work in Thailand, for example, I know developer who does that, can you talk through the makeup of the teams that you have, and how they are able to gel and work well together?
Kathryn
Yeah, so I will say as a caveat, we’re still a small growing company. So we have a general structure in place, but we like to keep things flexible, because we know it might change in the future. But generally, we will have a couple of people working on each account. The reason that I think it’s better to have a couple of people as opposed to your sole person is we will know that Salesforce is kind of a beast. And it’s good to have somebody to bounce ideas off of to make sure you’re thinking about something the right way, sometimes you get tunnel vision when you’re thinking about how to approach something. And just talking things through with another person can be really, really valuable. I think most of us have had the experience of being a lone admin or something similar. And most of us don’t think it’s the best setup. So I try to avoid that. And then in those little groups, there’s generally a couple of different roles or functions. It is possible for somebody to occupy multiple roles, I would say, but I guess I would categorize them as strategists, builders, or functional consultants, and then developers, the strategists are usually people who are doing most of the client contact. They’re managing the accounts, the relationships, they are doing a lot of the process architecture, sort of figuring out how things could work brain storming along with the client doing requirements gathering. And they will often be the ones that have the most direct experience working within the companies that we’re working for. So they’ll know exactly what they’re talking about when they say for example, we need to set up our marketing funnel stages, or we need to implement our first deal desk. Okay, I’ve got some ideas for you. And then the builders in functional consultants, these are people who have solid technical knowledge within Salesforce. And they will often also have experience working with startups and or tech, but maybe not to the extent of the strategist. So they will work together to, you know, provide that that well rounded experience. And developers probably self explanatory that people with development expertise in Salesforce and potentially other languages and platforms.
Pei Mun Lim
So when you say strategies, in my mind, and the job labels that I’m thinking is, it seems to be a cross between the account manager, Engagement Manager, project manager, technical architect,
Kathryn
to
Pei Mun Lim
feel that relationship with the client to really make them feel that you know them, and you know, what they want to achieve? And the solution you’re providing is something that have taken into account long range goals in how they’re currently working. Is that right?
Kathryn
Yeah, yeah, there’s definitely an aspect to that to it. And something I might not have mentioned is that we’re not generally the type of consultancy that comes in and does a one off project, just, you know, put a bow on it. And off we go. We are more the type of consultancy that forms a long term relationship with a company. And we’re almost like an extension of an operational team that they may or may not have hired at that point. So understanding the business being able to provide feedback on best practices in the industry, what might be coming down the pike that they haven’t anticipated yet, what are some different ways they could approach various issues that they’re mulling over? Those are really valuable aspects to our service.
Pei Mun Lim
It just occurred to me that fact that you have targeted startups mean that you’re there right in the beginning, and that you can form that relationship, that I was just reflecting on how my particular experience because I’ve worked with a lot of partners, both Microsoft and Salesforce. And a lot of our clients aren’t that early in the journey, they’ve already been operating for a while, they’ve got the ways of working, which may not be conducive to introducing new change, there is internal political landscape. And so our engagement tends to be pretty short, with a bow at the end, or the end of go live. And if we managed your credit report, and there is post go live support as business as usual as managed services, etc. They’re not common. And I was just thinking, as you were speaking that this is the model that you have is actually perfect, because you are getting to know a business asset starting now. And you’re growing with them. And how you position yourself is just, it’s just the right place, right time, creating the right relationships in your partners for a long time, hopefully, and you can grow as they grow. And you can see what is coming and you can buy. This is the way it should be really not. Not the let’s go and do something and leave.
Kathryn
Yeah, you know,
Kathryn
I mean, it sounds it sounds perfect the way you said it is obviously somewhat slightly different in practice. And you’re still struggle with various difficulties, for example. I mean, obviously, you have politics, there’s always going to be politics, no matter what the company size. Even if you get into the early stage, unless you are implementing Salesforce for the first time, they can already detect it. Because you’re you’re you know, you’ll have somebody who’s just been trying to configure Salesforce by necessity, which is super common. So you can’t get around that necessarily, although you can help clean it up. I think another thing is maybe unique to startups, but I haven’t done a lot of enterprise work so I could be wrong is just the pace that you need to move out and this flexibility that you need to be able to offer because, you know startups are changing so fast, like they will be making decisions one week that will completely change the next week, for good reason. And so if you’re a consultant, you need to be able to flip what you’ve been working on. You need to be able to D prioritize one thing that was number one priority, the week before and bring in some thing that was actually on the back burner. And us need to be able to roll with those punches. And ideally try and provide a little bit of extra structure for the company to, to to work within, because they often don’t have that yet themselves for, for very understandable reasons. But it’s it’s striking that fine balance between giving a bit of structure without hamstringing them, or hamstringing them.
Pei Mun Lim
I like that. So I’m just going to address a couple of things. One is you’re talking about enterprise type projects. And I have the tech that there is monumental, if you’re talking about ripping out some other CRM systems put in Salesforce is just huge. But I, we are going to charge her, which is unfamiliar to me. So bear with me, while I indulge on my curiosity might have worked with small companies and large companies. When I say small companies, I’ve never really seen them a startup in the sense of the word, they are just small companies. And they’re, I suspect that their characteristic is different. And I’d like to hear you validate that. So with small companies, a lot of them are funding the implementation out of their own pockets, basically. And therefore, there is a lot of overhead around managing expectations and what’s going to be delivered and everything in the startups that you’ve worked with. Have you found that to be the case? Or could it be because there is investment from other parties that it’s not so much, it’s less of an issue and more focused on, there’s an objective I want to get to, I might change my mind. It’s a journey, I’m going to go with you. And there’s a cost involved. And I’m accepting that it isn’t more of that than
Kathryn
Yeah, and that’s, that’s a really good point you raised, I think you’re 100%. Right. So these are not just general startups, they are high growth mode startups. And often they will have received some kind of funding in the last six months to a year. And we are, you know, one of the investments that they’re making, to achieve the growth that they want to achieve within a certain timeframe. So thankfully, we don’t have to justify our costs a lot. It’s a very privileged position to be in. And it’s generally more important to our clients that we move fast, and we achieve a lot within a short timeframe. So we are trying to support these very ambitious growth goals that they have. And there’s already been a really generous budget usually allocated towards that.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, you’re going to area that interests me a lot. And I suspect yourself as well. So we’re talking now about the consultants that knew that works really well, in your business, and the clients that you have. When I’m talking to new consultants in I’m talking about what kind of character what kind of attitude they need to have. And I, you know, I say, right, if you join a small partner, some of the things that you need to be really good at is multitasking, and the ability to switch very quickly and go deep, very quickly. And wear many hats. If you’re in a larger GSI, then you have the, you have the good fortune of having a project manager to handle all the sticking difficult questions, you can just focus on just the technical thing that you really love to do. And then you don’t get to hone the soft human skills communication that is more necessary when you’re in a small company. So when I’m talking to those who are entering, I say, join small company first build all the skills and then if you find something that really, really catches your passion, then you can move on to the bigger enterprise projects. Now of the moment. I know the job market is exploding. I’m seeing a huge amount of ads for People do you? Are you in that space that you are hiring as well?
Kathryn
Yes, we are hiring. And indeed it is a very good market for job seekers currently.
Pei Mun Lim
So talk me through what you’re looking for, you’ve already mentioned a couple of things. Flexibility is one, a multitasking, and the ability to help provide structure to your clients, because they will just like any customer, I think I want what I want right now and give it to me. And, you know, we know what,
Kathryn
what is yesterday?
Pei Mun Lim
Yes? And what other? What else are you looking for in the consultants that you’re looking to hire?
Kathryn
No. So it’s obviously going to depend a little bit. Depending on the level of seniority that we’re looking for, for more senior roles, we’re looking for existing experience in the space that we’re in, so that they can come in, and they know exactly what our clients are talking about. They’ve done these types of projects before maybe at an end user, maybe at another consultancy, they are able to jump in and provide value frequently. Or Meteor or junior rose. There’s more general aptitudes that we are looking for. And one of the top ones for me is productivity. So I really like to see someone who is not just operating under a framework of I’m here, when you need me Just tell me what to do. They’re more, I see things that I can help with, whether they’re internal, whether they are for our clients, and I’m obviously going to communicate that to everyone. But can I go do those things. And the reason this productivity is so valuable to us at the stage that company’s in right now is that we are always perpetually busy, we have a laundry list of things that we want to do that’s a mile long, and we can never get to it. So we don’t have a lot of time to necessarily point things out to people. And it’s much more valuable for us to have people who are going to identify those things themselves. And often will find when we hire people like that, that they will have totally different ideas to me or other existing members of the team. And they provide a fresh pair of eyes a fresh approach, which again, is is very valuable, because you want you want diversity on your team, you want people who are looking at things from a variety of different perspectives, I think that’s better than everybody seeing everything in the same way and potentially having blind spots. I also think curiosity, kind of growth mindset is really valuable. I don’t know if that’s something that’s specific to working at a startup or if it’s just a quality that I think is good to have in people you work with generally. But my opinion is that Salesforce is always changing. It’s, you know, there’s a new release every three months. They’re constantly making acquisitions. Even if you know everything about Salesforce today, in six months or a year, you might be kind of rusty already. So the best people that I’ve worked with are the ones who are excited by those changes. And they really like that. They’re always able to learn something new. And they’ll be saying, Hey, can I get in on this Service Cloud project? I haven’t worked with it too much before and I really want to expand my knowledge. And they’re going to be doing certs in their free time they’re going to be you know, digging into trail heads, they’re going to be getting an error email. And like, I haven’t seen this error before. Let me go research it and always expanding their knowledge. And yeah, those people are great because they are always growing and learning and improving.
Pei Mun Lim
So I like all of that. Do you have? Do you have anything that you think will not that you will not tolerate in someone within your team, for example?
Kathryn
That’s a good question. I mean, to a certain extent, like I said, it’s good to have variety. But there are certain characteristics that I don’t think are very good fit. One of them is this. What’s the opposite of proactive? reactive, I guess? Yeah. Kind of react to personality, your stance, it doesn’t work too well for us, because we’ll end up with a situation where there’s a lot of people who are more productive, and they’re very busy, because they’re always picking up these little tasks that they see. And the more reactive personalities will be sitting around and waiting for somebody to tell them what to do, and nobody has the time to, for once of a better word, spell it out for them. So I think that that type of person definitely has their place. I just don’t know if they’re a great fit for us right now. So whether it’s something I would tolerate, I don’t know if I phrase it like that. But I definitely don’t think it works particularly well, for us at this stage. Right?
Pei Mun Lim
I would agree. I think that does not, that’s not a good fit for consulting life.
Kathryn
In general,
Pei Mun Lim
would you say that you hire fast in fire slow, or hire slow, and fire fast?
Kathryn
I feel I feel like we’re your highest low at the moment. But that’s not because of how I want things to operate. It’s because it’s such a crazy market out there. And I personally think we offer a good environment for specific types of people, you know, once you’d like to challenge you, like fast moving environment, who wants to be exposed to all kinds of different things and have this really big growth opportunity to learn all kinds of things in a short amount of time? That’s not for everyone, of course. But we are a small company, we don’t have a lot of brand recognition. Yes. And so we’re competing against big names as well known names. And obviously, that can be difficult. So I would say we would prefer to hire fast, and to avoid missing out on great candidates who surely have multiple job offers. But it’s a work in progress. And then fire fast versus fire slow. Luckily, it’s not something we’ve had to deal with much so far. But I feel like it’s better to fail fast. I think it’s often obvious within say the first 90 days whether someone is a good fit or not. And I’m I am a proponent of coaching, for sure. But there are just some scenarios where it’s better for both people to cut their losses early on and say, Hey, we gave it a go. And this just wasn’t quite the right environment. So I think, depending on the situation, it can be better to figure that out sooner rather than later.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, yeah, you’re right, the markets really exploding at the moment. I think everyone’s all the projects that won’t hold has now been unblocked. And there is still a huge amount of excitement about Salesforce. And so I can I can understand where, where you’re coming from? What, what excites you at the moment? what’s the what’s the big thing that you’re keeping your eye out for? In the new near horizon?
Kathryn
question. I think I’m very interested in seeing where this idea of revenue operations as a service, which is the area we operates in, is going to go in the future because it feels it feels to me like revenue operations itself is a fairly new practice. It’s developed out of your company’s having a marketing operations team, which is within marketing, and then sales operations, which is within sales, and then maybe Customer Success operations within CS. Maybe that doesn’t exist at all. That’s also a bit of a newer practice. And because those operational functions report into different departments in the business, they can often end up building things that don’t play nicely together. So you might end up with siloed data, you might end up with a process where the handoff between the sales and the marketing team, for example is not the smoothest and revenue operations is uniting all of those functions and saying hey, we really shouldn’t be doing this separately because we’re working on something holistic. And so I guess to sum it up, I’m just very curious to see how the practice of revenue operations as a service develops, and how it’s going to mature. Because it’s still young, it’s still developing. A lot of companies are still figuring out how to do their DevOps and consultancies, like mine are figuring out, what are the best ways to support them, where all of the different possibilities to work with them what works best and in different scenarios? So yeah, for me, it’s a very interesting area to be in, because there’s a lot of question marks still,
Pei Mun Lim
are you talking about that as a concept in the way that people have been threatened with digitization, digital transformation in terms of how companies are, because what you’ve just said, described describes the status of businesses, when they’re just about to embark on a digital transformation, they’re talking about wanting to put everything on the same platform, no more silos, everyone can get access to the same data. So that there’s no, the workflows are more streamlined across the different departments. So that’s what transformation is. But now with Salesforce, everything’s on a CRM, all the data is there I got marketing is a different beast, but you have your service, you’ve got your service, and then more or less on the same platform, the data models are integrated. I’ve done some projects on Marketing Cloud, and I know it’s because it’s an acquisition, it’s not quite in the same place. But when you say, revenue operations, can you just provide a bit more detail, I’m trying to get some clarity in my head,
Kathryn
I might have just thrown a very industry specific term in there without without explaining it. It’s something that is becoming more and more common in tech. My main experiences in tech, so I not sure it could also be gaining ground in in other verticals as well. But the idea is that instead of having a bunch of operational roles, like marketing Ops, like sales, Ops, CS Ops, support operations, product operations, partner operations, whatever, instead of all of those reporting into the sub department, so sales, marketing partnerships, respectively, there is a centralized revenue operations team. And that team is responsible for all of the, like the operational functions in and around platforms like Salesforce, so as pertaining to revenue. And what they’re trying to avoid by creating this separate team that is, you know, reporting to itself and has its own goals is avoiding things like building process that works for one team, but not another, ending up with data silos accidentally having compensation models that don’t actually drive towards the same goal. Like I think a lot of companies that I’ve worked at, if they don’t have a centralized DevOps team, it’s really common for, excuse me marketing to set one type of KPI and then sales just set a completely different one. And because they weren’t decided together, they were decided separately for, you know, independently good reasons. They actually end up causing conflicts at the company. And you know, this, this becomes a real issue over time. So having revenue operations separately and not having a lesion So suppose to a specific department, it helps to avoid issues like that. And it’s really started gaining traction. I would say in the last couple of years, you see more and more instead of a specific sales operations or marketing operations role, a revenue operations role with maybe a specialism in a certain area
Pei Mun Lim
that has provided a bit more context around it. Thank
Pei Mun Lim
you very much.
Pei Mun Lim
I’m very conscious of the time To be respectful of it, so thank you for a really great conversation. Before I was, is there anything you’d like to share with the listeners? I know you’re hiring? Is there any last words or any requests you’d like to make off of the listeners of the podcast?
Kathryn
Nothing apart from I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I certainly did. I hope it was enlightening. If anybody would like to contact me or connect with me, on LinkedIn, feel free to do so. As you say, we are hiring. So if anything I’ve mentioned sounds interesting to you. I would love to hear from you. Or if I can be a resource to anyone considering going into consulting or considering starting their own company. Feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy.
Pei Mun Lim
Excellent. Thank you very much. I’ll make sure to put all your details into show notes when this airs. Thank you so much, Catherine. I
Kathryn
really thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you.