Name: Unlocking revOps success: 6 strategies to eliminate friction and speed up deal cycles
Uploaded: 2025-05-28T17:31:06.157Z
Duration: 42 min 28 s
Description: Unlocking revOps success: 6 strategies to eliminate friction and speed up deal cycles

Transcript for "Unlocking revOps success: 6 strategies to eliminate friction and speed up deal cycles": Hello, and welcome, everyone. I am Nicole Duarte, the community manager over at Revenue Operations Alliance. And it is with great pleasure that I introduce Jackie today, the director of revenue strategy and insights over at PandaDoc. Jackie's gonna be talking to us about six strategies to eliminate friction and speed up deal cycles. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to her, and I hope you enjoy today's session. Thanks, Nicole. Hi, everyone. I'm very excited to go through a number of things I'm sure many of you guys are familiar with. So definitely, please feel free to submit any questions as we go through this. I'd love to hear from all of you. We're gonna talk about, yes, lean teams. And what about lean teams reducing friction and speeding up those deal cycles to really open up your time to really focus on those strategic initiatives. What people said, I'm Jackie Serame. I'm the director of strategy revenue strategy and insights at PandaDoc. I joined development December last year. Previously, I was at ServiceTitan for the last four years. And prior to that, I, worked at Coo during a few major events that they've gone through and the launch of their live streaming. I've done a lot of m and a work at Service Titan, and, I actually started my career at JPMorgan more as a sales analyst on the equity floor. So lots of different experiences, but mainly in that tech arena, looking at subscriptions, looking at SaaS types of metrics, and advertising. So back to our topic, you know, faster deal cycles. Doesn't just have to be a dream. I think everyone always wants things to be faster, better. There are tactical ways we can do that. I'm sure a few of you have experienced some of these challenges. I definitely have. And we'll start with something that, you know, we even see at PandaDoc. There's, of course, the games of tag and telephone. You know, especially we're here at PandaDoc, we're fully remote, so is my prior role. You can get pinged on many different things. Approvals can be in certain threads, and having one place where everything can go through is is really gonna help us stay on track for where is the deal, how can I find out where a deal is, particularly, again, in those remote environments? So automating, you know, as much as possible, having single sources of truth, all of these great things that we're gonna discuss, those will be elements to help, sort of mitigate these gains of telephone and tag. Having different definitions of things, and your pacing always comes to mind. What are different stage definitions? And it absolutely varies company by company even within certain verticals of customers. And, again, we'll we'll get into those details, a little bit later. And then really thinking through your sales process and making sure that you're thinking about the humans on the other side, not just thinking, oh, this is sort of the optimal way either from a tech standpoint, an ops standpoint, you know, forecasting standpoint. What what are folks really doing? What is their level of comfortability? You know, what is the natural flow of their day to day? I'm sales team. Now it's where I would prefer to sit on the sales floor. I really understand and hear their challenges every single day. And being remote, again, you have to have more, you have to be a lot more conscious of how you're gonna get that that those insights, and then put those insights into your work. So let's get to it. On this agenda, we have a few topics that really, I think, are are the top things that most folks can really tackle today. You know, creating single sources of truth. That'll be a big one. Oh, I mean, you know, again, feel free to ask any questions. Automating approval, putting everything in one place so it's reducing context switching for reps. Delivering unified deal experiences. They're similar, but there's definitely nuances to that, from consolidating your tech stack to actual putting things in one deal room, for example, a bit more customer facing. You're building deal centric processes, buyer centric processes, which absolutely flow nicely into, like, the last one, which I would say is reimagining activity driven forecasting. So, the more specific and repeatable you can be, sort of the better you can get at forecasting. So I'll talk about how all these elements play together, and the the tactical pieces of them. And, again, feel free to drop in any questions you may have as I go through this. So creating a single source of truth. Everyone will love a good single source of truth. What does that mean? You know? The more that we can get together and agree on these definitions, of course, the faster we can do. Then how do we get alignment on these definitions? Oftentimes, it's building those relationships across teams, you know, sales, ops, finance, the data team, the systems team. You know? The more that we can be open and communicate and have one singular definition, the less time you need to spend on, hey. Did you need this? Did you need that? And, again, in a in a remote environment, I think it's even harder. So, you know, when you think about qualification criteria, what makes an MQL, an SQL, PQL? And thinking about folks, when you're growing so rapidly who so you're hiring a bunch of folks. You know, they're coming from a different company. Are you defining your metrics in sort of that standard industry standard way? Are you putting a lot of if this or exception that and and that's how we get to this number? All of this adds up to, like, a much more challenging onboarding experience, I would say. And then especially as your company continues to get more complex, and if you keep adding those on, it can really slow folks down, not just from, again, that onboarding learning standpoint. But when you're building these reports, when you're trying to deep dive, when you if you're finding yourself putting any filters on something, you know, those can all be signs that maybe you have to take a pause and really think about what is the single source of truth. How can we make things easier for us, our stakeholders, and allow us to move faster and spend time on on, quite frankly, other more strategic items? Other major consideration here too is the timing of things. Timing of adding or finding these metrics. Because as I said, like, as the company evolves, like, these things may change, and that's absolutely fine. We're making sure everyone, continues to evolve together where enablement takes place. Yes. I'm just checking if any questions. Automate everything. So, you know, at first, this is automate quotes, automate approvals, but, truly, you can there's the technology which we'll get into really allows for minimal interference when things are set up correctly. And it's not just us internally that ask for automation. When you automate things and things feel intuitive, when things have less manual intervention, you're, again, able to move faster. So when you're able to move faster, truthfully, you should be able to close more business, not just because you're pushing through deals, but I think that time to close, that time to lead is just so absolutely critical. PandaDoc recently released our stated CPQ report where we surveyed over thousands of professionals, in the operation space, and their sales data all showed strong correlation between deal speed and win rates. I mean, we feel it, you know, even in our personal lives. If I'm looking for something, if this person's gonna respond and I can keep this ball rolling, we'll absolutely come to some sort of agreement sooner than later versus, you know, if you get back to me in a few days, maybe something else comes up, I've explored another option. And I I would prolong my process, so I'm actually moving to it in a completely different direction. Part of, this piece too, again, is, like, automating those approvals. Approvals when you're going outside of sort of your purview, that can slow down a deal. So the more that we can automate that, we're gonna make it clear for everybody, simplify it, have it all in one place, with with all of the sorry. If this person is available, if that person is available, we're building in a robust approval process to speed things up as well. So it takes an average of folks, you know, thirty to fifty minutes, which is quite quite a bit of time just to create a single quote, just to get it out the door. Just, hey. Here's here's a quick look at what our pricing and what our services look like, which which is a bit long if you have, you know, 10 or so deals going on in a week. That's a lot of time that reps are spending just sending out a single quote. When you are able to speed up this process, you do see an average of 10% or so increase when you're able to get those close close those delays in the adult process. So there's a lot of benefit to really focusing in on how are what areas can you automate that will immediately have relative impact. So I would say definitely say, like, this area is one of them. Consolidating your tech stack, also a very hot topic. 02/2015, for those who were in this industry around then, it was already a busy time. You had a few different options. You know, you took a few different calls to kind of view some newsletters. Fast forwarding to today, ten years later, the landscape has absolutely exploded. You can find all sorts of software for niche industries. I mean, virtualization of soft software is is has been a huge help in many ways. And now the awareness and the validation of what your software needs are and what, you'll need in the near future is absolutely needed. I'm just taking a look at the chat. So my in my experience here, of course, we wanna consolidate. You don't wanna have every team be in their own individual piece of software. Yes. Now you're getting you have the option to go to be so specific. These things do such specific things for you, and maybe they are the best in this area and the best in that area. But the more that you can centralize your tech stack around your CRM, the more that you can truthfully utilize all the features or choose a software that you can grow into and eventually, use their additional features, the less change management you'll have, the less tech expertise you'll have, the less context switching you'll have. So all things that I would consider when you're really thinking about your tech stack, try you're a lean team. You really don't have that much time to get up to speed on the eight to 12 different, softwares that you pull reporting from. Again, the more that you can centralize, the the faster you can really move. So quoting approval signature, all in one tool. Absolutely. Looking for native integrations is is really what's the best. And, truly, I I constantly ask our, CSM for whatever vendor we're using. You know, what do you see other companies that look like us use? Like, where have people been successful? Where would you kind of discourage us to look? Because they're gonna know it the best. Use templates and apply those rules. Again, that implementation piece I know I'm talking about rev ops folks. The implementation piece is so important. Most of the time, you don't even realize that a lot of the software that you already have has many, many overlapping capabilities with each other. So I would I would absolutely consider these items when you're thinking about, hey. Again, how can I make these deals, you know, faster? I would absolutely start here. Of course, PandaDoc is a great product that does all of these things, pretty pretty well, I would say. So that's definitely one that you can explore. Any questions here? Thoughts? Thanks thanks for the encouragement, guys. So delivering a unified deal experience. What does that really mean? A unified deal experience. It's really thinking about before I get what's on the slide, this comes up a lot. You know? Like, what really should be in that first sale? And it's thinking about that buyer experience, thinking through the implementation, thinking through this time commitment that they're already giving to you upfront. Do you really kind of just get their foot in the door depending on how robust, your software or your product is? Do you really just get them started and have your team, work on expansion or upsell or whatnot at a later point? Or is implementation really fast and you really wanna sell them all up front so you can have a robust onboarding experience? I think those things are very important to think through when you were thinking from the buyer perspective. When you want you want your buyers to be able to find everything really easily, you know, leverage that deal room, make a Google Drive. Use tools that have deal rooms like PandaDoc. You just wanna make things easier for yourself and your company, but as well as the buyer or the prospect that you're working with. Obviously, no one needs to get done next and by who. Kind of do that project management for them. We've we've really had, that piece be well received for us, having offer visibility, also knowing has the person looked at it, has it been forwarded, and actually working that into your talk tracks again to speed that deal process. But also just to help stay on top of everything. I think those are again, tooling is just so crazy. Now there's nothing really things that you wish you could know are probably available nowadays, through the right tools. Being able to champion your product where you can if it makes sense, depending on what type of company you work at. And, of course, just being responsive and getting the deal done. So that that relates heavily to the other points I made. Are you on the right tools? Are you on fewer tools? You're not having to track many things in any different places. And are you doing your best to keep the deal moving? So that's these are things to think through for the buyer experience. And related, is then thinking about building those processes around the buyers. And what I mean by this, you know, you round yourself in the user journey. What does that mean? This varies by company, and this is probably one of the this is, like, why I like to do my role quite frankly. I'm really thinking about ICP for the company. How has it evolved over time? And then where how can you really create distinct buckets of prospects and customers that will allow for really strong forecasting. You know, if you're able to distinguish either by company size, maturity, you know, revenue, vertical, of course, is really big, location. What the stations make these prospects operate in a predictable manner? You know, what does that cut look like for your company? They all speak different languages. So Canada has a very wide ICP, and the decision so far is a force to to continue to address every wide ICP. Some companies have a strategy to narrow your ICP and really nail a deep narrative, really understand the languages that they're using, how they're using their tool. Every different type of customer can call the same thing a different thing, a different name. But the more that you can speak their language, of course, the more the faster you're able to build trust and really understand their use case for whatever product or service you're selling. So to me, this is this is the place to spend a lot of time because when you can nail this, again, it's walk before you run. Slow down to be really fast and accurate earlier. The more you can nail this, this to me is is really where the secret sauce can be. How do these buyers think and react to your type of product? This also, of course, evolves over definitely evolves over time, especially as your own product matures and changes. So constantly think about this, and you'll see it again in the next slide when we talk about forecasting. So, anything else here in terms of grounding yourself in the user journey? Of course, all of these components on the slide are gonna be different depending on the type of prospector you're talking to. This chart here that is just for illustration, it's really just being able to identify, hey. When I'm looking at these different journeys, where am I seeing these, objections? Am I getting to it too late in the process? How does that not come up sooner in the process? And also dialing it in. So, again, you are, you're really trying to optimize your deal cycle time. And, again, it might change by different, industry, for example. Some industries are faster than others. Some industries or companies have much more layered and complex decision making process. So just being conscious of all of those components, you really dial in, how you approach it, and you're not kind of, I don't wanna say stumbling through, but giving the same general template to every single type of customer. Last component here, I would say, is, again, talk to reps. This is gonna be very hard to determine just by looking at the data. You're gonna have to talk to reps. Nowadays, if you're using Gong or a different type of call recording tool, we really set the time to listen to those. And, like, as ops professionals, if we're no longer able to sit on the floor with those and and sort of get that organically, these are the steps that I recommend taking to feel closer to the business. So forecasting, I actually come from a more finance econ background. I used to say on the FP and A team at Hulu when I was doing, when I was covering that sales team. So forecasting is something that's very near and dear to me. There I've seen this done many, many different ways. In fact, I love seeing how other folks do it as well and and to learn. And the amount of data and analytics that go into forecasting, especially today, in in today's world, is just so robust. So when we think about forecasting, when thinking about the topic that I just mentioned, you know, the more predictable you can get your motion and your sort of ICP or your segmentation, the easier forecasting is. You know, that buyer activity data produces better forecasting. You know, having the same definitions produces better forecasting. You know, having all of your data in one place gives you better forecasting. And why is forecasting important? You're able to not only just see where you're going clearly, but you're able to then pull those strategic levers, you know, with better forecasting. If you're pacing ahead or, if you feel like your forecast is facing behind, you are able to to sort of use your levers to have a better outcome. You know, whatever that may be. That's the reason why I have hesitation. You could forecast in many different ways your top line, your bottom line. It could be capacity planning. It could be a number of different things. And, also, with better forecasting comes better target setting. So, hopefully, those things go hand in hand, which is very important for your overall company's health. You know, you're gonna use historical data to define these expected stage durations as I sort of mentioned earlier in aligning on, single sources of shoes. I mean, all these other items are pretty typical. We wanna monitor for a forecast in, you know, one single place. We can also get into you know, as your company continues to grow and mature, you know, depending on what CRM you're in, you could you should definitely start thinking about different opportunity record types promotion if they are distinct. That's definitely something I've seen particularly between, say, you want SME motion and your enterprise strategic side motion. Those are, like, we're gonna be different and require different definitions, and should be treated distinctly. Aligning your forecast to actual actions and activity versus just sort of what reps are inputting. Again, it's that automation piece. How can you use automation to help with the manual work, to help align with definitions because they're all based on concrete things that are happening. It really forward looking. You know? The other thing to of course, being in operation, I'm always thinking of at least three to six months ahead, particularly if I'm working on an implementation or something that's gonna happen in the future. We just constantly have to put ourselves in the place of what are we gonna need at that point of the company's growth stage. And all of these are just so important to really know and understand so you can choose the right KPIs to measure. And, it doesn't have to be a lot. You know? I think, oftentimes, people wanna look at everything and double click everything. You should actually you should very well be well versed in everything. But there's, it's always coming down to basic economics. You know, how many deals, average size. And if you can get those things really dialed in, you're better off than those. So building forecast into day to day workflows. Absolutely. We should always have a pulse even if it's it takes practice, so don't be discouraged if that's not, like, a strong muscle. It takes practice, and you gotta start somewhere. So having a really strong foundation of what you believe is making, a real difference or driving your forecast, just keep an eye on it. Look for those trends. Think about, hey. If I'm not seeing anything, is there a better way to organize our, prospects or customers? Have you looked into seasonality changes maybe that and see some consistency with different groups? You know, there's there's many different ways you can take a look at this. But forecasting is definitely important. I would say it's probably one of the backbones of, like, company success. Any questions here? Awesome. We actually I was hoping for a lot more interaction team. Is there anything that I can help answer either about the topics I discussed, lean teams in general, growing teams, anything I can help, getting this topic? Alright. RevOps is a brand new position at our company. Oh, interesting. How would you suggest for the first areas of improvement for us to look at? Wow. Great question. Well, first of all, congratulations. I'm sure your company now has a RevOps team. I always feel like there's a sigh of relief when the RevOps person is hired. First, areas of improvement. You know, I always feel like there's two immediate buckets of robots. You're either going to wanna look at your, tech stack and your systems in place to see if you're getting all the right data and if your workflows are in order, if they match your selling motion. And that will be really important before you get into the insights. So, for RevOps, you typically have your operating cadences, then you have your sort of insights and analytics. And then I would say sort of a third bucket is is more of that systems piece, that's gonna be a bit more focused on on that tech stack. Operating cadence being more of that workflow piece versus the actual, say, like, systems integration work. And I would always start with that source of data and that information because if you don't have that set up appropriately, you could report on anything. And if there's not real trust or reliability, and it's gonna be really challenging to carry strategic conversations. That's my 2¢, Whitney. If you have any other if you have a follow-up on how to answer, let me know if that answers your question. Oh, great. It's I'm gonna give her a chance for the follow-up. A really great point. John, what are your pain points? I can love a consultant approach. Okay. Give it a little bit more time. Okay. Oh, interesting. So we are currently restructuring our CRM from the ground up as we cannot have full trust in the data right now, yeah, or during this process. What is our best work? Oh, that's hard. Typical. So you're typically gonna have to have overlap. You know, you're gonna just have to do the best that you can and maybe make minor changes. Again, focus on that those bigger levers. What are the levers that you really need to nail until at least get to 80% while you're restructuring from the ground up on the other side? I feel for you. I've definitely been in those positions. I think the biggest thing that we can also do in rep ops is just a lot of education. Like, hey. This is the best data that we have right now. And we we know that we are soft in perhaps these areas. Are we comfortable with that or not? And we kind of work within those bounds. That's always been my approach. I definitely welcome others to chime in in the chat if you have a different approach, but it's it's common. Especially, I don't know how many times a rev ops professional has come into a new company. And, you know, you don't always know what you're gonna get and have to work on. So, definitely very common. And definitions also changed. Maybe, like, at maybe at one point, the CRM was nailing it. And just after, you know, some growth stages and changing the product or whatnot, it's just a little bit not as reliable. So I hope that helps. I had one earlier. How do you align RevGen teams and what activities to monitor when each team is interested in different activities? Great question. Put on your strategic hat, first of all, and see if there really is a difference in why they need to look at those different activities. I think, of course, the more that you can unify these metrics, the better. Or I think a great example, you know, you're if you have an SMB motion that's very transactional, you're inherently gonna look at and evaluate your activities differently from an enterprise strategic motion. You know, if I'm thinking through you know, I don't expect my enterprise team to be emailing outbound as nearly as much as I would, in SME team. So I do think that's gonna be, a bit more of, like, strategically what as a company do you guys wanna align on, and then what does it make sense to have differences? And then another layer on top of that is if you're smaller, you know, again, thinking about speed and time spent, I would think through you know, when you got one person in enterprise, one person in SMB, you know, that's your strategy, and you have five folks on the team and they're all doing different things and you feel like you're spending a lot of time in every single area, that that's probably not a good use of time either. So it's it's very situational. Let me know if, if you have more on that. Marcello, thank you for your question. Oh, here we go. This one looks like a good one. How would you answer the debate of not needing to have a single source of truth and that we can just bring together all the different data sources even though we all know how difficult that can be. Wow. Kayla, thank you for that. You're getting some emoji. Love it. It's so tricky, and I'm living this right now. Single source of truth, fewer source of truth, similar source of truth. I think the biggest challenge here is when you make changes. Are you set up where if you change in one source of truth where there's overlap, you either have a very tight orders of operation or a way to ensure that it is consistent throughout your sources. And if the answer is no, then you're likely gonna be in a really challenging place. So that the debate of needing to have a single source or bringing together I mean, I think we are all bringing together different sources. If each source is a distinct topic and there is no overlap, I'm less concerned because then, you know, you just go to different places for different things, and maybe that makes sense for your business setup. I wouldn't force anything if then you're done again, think about what feels most intuitive or needed for these platforms and really try to work with those strengths because if you're forcing a certain type of dataset or and, you know, what we see a lot is you want certain types of data in Salesforce or, you know, you want it to be filled out in a certain way. The more that you can lean on automation or just a more natural workflow to get your information, the better. I would kind of optimize for that and make sure that they're distinct and you have very clear definitions. If you're bringing things together or forcing one thing into another and it's living in two different places, that can be extremely challenging, especially when it comes to, hey. But I'm seeing this and this system and this and the other system or this. When I look in this system, it has these filters because you have that ability, but you don't see it in this system. And that definitely goes for when you're looking at strict reporting tools or, you know, you're trying to, at least in my, rip off experience, I'm constantly trying to make sure that I'm matching with finance given the type of reporting that I'm doing. Hey. Is this even close to what finance is reporting now? We're seeing the same narrative. And those are typically maybe kept in two different areas. I would keep it to, like, use case. So I just gave a lot for that debate. I, again, welcome other folks to chime in in the chat on what they think is the right thing to do. But, you know, in RevOps, there's sometimes not quite a right thing. There's best practices, and I think sometimes best practices nowadays, you know, that are is less and less applicable to certain places depending on where you're at and speed and size. But definitely interesting topic considering that up. K. Here's another one. Sean, can we use to heavily manipulate your own data? Yep. So that it was usable totally then back into CRM fixes step by step with immediate need for reliable data with salt and oh, yeah. Sorry. So you're you're answering, with his other question. Really great point. Yeah. Again, the manipulation of things, like, when you find yourself doing a lot of that heavy lifting or manual work, I typically like to take a pause and really think, like, how can I fix this at the root of the issue? And sometimes it's the CRM. Sometimes it's the tool. Sometimes it's the data source. I that's, that's the really tricky one because sometimes we're that's sort of, like, last resort is really taking a look at the data source if that's the right thing. But, yeah, really do spend the time to find where you can get the biggest, for the sort of the best long term fix. Got it. Got it. Oh, yeah. Merging is interesting. Awesome. Any other questions, guys? Thanks for that. I really appreciate, the questions and participation here. M and a is is definitely interesting. I would say that's a little bit different. The other thing too is, like, if you're running lean or if you're running an only team and you have these sort of, like, one off events like an m and a or, you know, something where you know you have to get through the project and then everything will more or less go back to business as usual, I definitely encourage working with, consultants, Salesforce consultants. Def when you evaluate Salesforce consultants, I would try to make sure that they work with companies similar to yours just because, you know, an ad business is very different from, like, b to b SaaS or whatever it may be. Because they've likely done it many, many, many times. And if it's an integration, they should be able to really help with that, especially if it's, you know, if you're worried about consolidating data and whatnot. Having an extra set of hands temporarily is really helpful versus, you know, you go out into market. You try to hire somebody because you have all of this workload ahead. But then after the integration, you know, really think through what level of effort you need on a daily basis. Okay. Can you list the most common pain points as opposed to use cases where customers are over designing the solution too early that customers use PandaDoc to solve? Please. Approval process for sure. We've been a lot of folks have just been relieved that it's a very easy thing to set up and keep track of in one place. Not to mention if you're if you are trying to be either acquired or, you know, you wanna be SOX compliant or something, then it becomes a hard requirement. Right? So I think those are some easy pain points. Also, we have we've had a lot of great use cases for some of our add on products where we're just giving customers, again, that centralized capability to either, you know, add a note or you do verification, like, have all of those things that they need to run their business in one place. Being able to, of course, use our system as a CPQ, sort of price book, component too has really helped. So those are, I would say, the most common pain points I have come across in my work that I've handed off so far. Yep. Definitely. Compliance issues, time to do quota. Yeah. Three is also still, like, it's related to CPQ. If you're familiar with CPQ, it should really help keep your pricing. This this is my take. I think CPQ from an ops perspective really helps with making sure your discounting is also falling within approval process. Folks are actually sending out quotes that are already approved or approved in terms of preapproved pricing and ranges and whatnot. So time to quote is definitely that workflow piece, but it's also making sure that things are going out the way it should. You know? Our our people within that discounting range that they're sending out this doc, our folks making sure they have all the right information from their customer, and all of those components can be captured through PandaDoc. Absolutely. Wow. Thanks so much, Jackie. Anything else, team? And we said for everyone who's joined, rev ops, I could talk about rev ops all day. There's there's never there's never a shortage of topics. So, thanks for joining. I really appreciate it. And if you have any other questions or, you know, you think of something else, definitely feel free to find me on LinkedIn, send me a message there. I'm always happy to chat. And then I'm just gonna hop on to say a massive thank you to you, Jackie. Thanks for delivering such an insightful session, and thank you to everybody for joining and for adding your questions. It's been a great session, and I hope to see you around our community. Thank you so much, Jackie. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day or evening. Appreciate it. Bye.