Kill Yr Silos: EP02 - Strong Connections We Must Have
This was a special episode of Kill Your Silos to record. My guest was Dayna Rothman previous co-worker and CMO of OneLogin.
Besides being friends and respected coworkers we also both share the common background of growing up in the punk scene, which I believe has influenced her fearlessness in her business life. Dayna has always been a strong advocate for innovation and has written the book (literally) on marketing automation, I found her simple but honest look at RevOps and what it takes to break down silos very refreshing.
RevOps & Marketing Goals
Jason:
How has RevOps helped your organization and helped you specifically as CMO?
Dayna:
Revenue Ops is a super important part of OneLogin in general and it’s also how I get my job done. We’re a very metrics-driven organization, so I rely heavily on our operations team to ensure that we have all our tools in place, all the data makes sense, and that we’ve got the right conversion rates and funnel metrics. They help from a planning perspective—not just strategically thinking through how we’re going to make our numbers, but also from a day-to-day campaign management perspective. I think it really helps bring the Sales & Marketing functions together so we’re all looking at the same data and there’s one source of truth.
Go to 4:05 to hear Jason & Dayna talk more about OneLogin’s org structure
How Important is Org Structure to RevOps?
Dayna:
When I joined OneLogin, Marketing Ops was still under Marketing. Then, from a leadership perspective, we decided to make that change and I’m very comfortable with that. I’ve worked with organizations that have a centralized function, so I think there are a lot of benefits to it. One of the biggest benefits being that if you have Marketing Ops and Sales Ops reporting to different business stakeholders, sometimes you don’t quite get as much of a neutral point of view as far as the organization and the data. That’s why we like to have a separate function that informs all of us versus having them under the different leaders who maybe have different agendas.
Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. We see that there is a lack of control when those functions are no longer under Sales or Marketing or whatever, but the fundamental lift to the organization is much, much more significant and you can move the right things forward.
How Do You Prioritize Work?
Jason:
How does the work your teams needs done get prioritized? When the RevOps team says, yes that’s important, but it’s not what we’re going to do now, how do you manage that relationship?
Dayna:
There are a few different things that we do. One, it’s really important to have strong relationships amongst the GTM leaders (CMO, CRO, Sales leadership, and COO) so you’re able to have the tough conversations and take a step back to prioritize what makes sense for the business versus what makes sense for an individual function.
We also have this combined go-to-market council that meets each week, which is something we started about a quarter ago. We have all this data we look at across the Sales organization and the Marketing organization that tells us how the business is performing and a lot of decisions as to what RevOps is going to work on are made in those meetings. It’s got all the business stakeholders so we’re all involved and on the same page.
I would say the other important element is that you set up your dotted line structure in the right way so that your RevOps team is supportive of that. So, even though my Marketing Ops person doesn’t report to me anymore, we still have a very strong dotted line relationship. Our Head of Revenue Ops understands that, as does our COO, so we’re able to have those tough conversations.
Go to 9:00 to hear more about the dynamic amongst OneLogin’s GTM leadership and the structure of their weekly council meetings
RevOps Evolution & Maturity
Jason:
So, we know where your RevOps team is. How would you say they’re critical to the future success of your organization?
Dayna:
I think the team is gonna grow naturally as the business grows—I mean, it has to. Our reliance on the RevOps team is significant; we ask them for a lot of stuff. They’re pulling a lot of data, crunching a lot of numbers, making a lot of spreadsheets. It doesn’t totally scale.
Sometimes we’ll have a bit of an imbalance around strategy vs. execution. Sometimes we’ll be more focused on execution in one area and then it kind of sways back to strategy. What I would like to see as the company grows is for us to have enough people to execute and then people who can focus just on the numbers and the strategy.
I think that’s another issue when you’ve got people in the systems doing the Salesforce stuff on a day-to-day basis and you have to pull them out to think about the strategy, and then they have to go back into Salesforce—it just doesn’t scale.
Go to 13:41 for more on the importance of generalists in RevOps and OneLogin’s current inflection point
Recognizing Silo Syndrome
Jason:
The most common symptoms of Silo Syndrome are information hoarding, lack of cross-functional collaboration, use of misalignment language, competition between go-to-market functions, and team-based identity. Which of these have you experienced?
Dayna:
I’m gonna say competitiveness between go-to-market teams. I think in most organizations if you’re not hitting a number, it gets down to whether it’s Marketing’s fault or Sales’ fault and pointing the finger. I think that’s one of the most consistent issues I see and also one of the most detrimental.
I think it’s natural but I also think it can get really toxic, especially if the problem persists. You’ll find you have a whole Sales team or a whole Marketing team where that bad experience is festering. And if a new leader comes in, it’s really hard to move past that. It’s negative, it makes people feel bad, it’s just not good.
How Do You Combat Silo Syndrome?
Dayna:
At the end of the day, I think it’s really important that the leadership team stands behind the fact that we’re all on the same team and have the same goal: to close business, regardless of where it comes from. Of course, we track whether something is sales-sourced or marketing-sourced, but what I like to do and what I’ve done at OneLogin is move away from looking at those things separately. When I go to the GTM council meetings, I’m looking at the full funnel. We can talk about the source, but at the end of the day it’s more effective to look at it holistically.
Go to 25:43 for more about our model for RevOps maturity & gap-first thinking
How Do You Find Operational Gaps?
Dayna:
I’d like to think I’m in the stage of looking at the data to identify issues. You can look at the funnel and conversion rates and source from all different angles but it’ll help you identify problems in your funnel and where in the buyer journey things are going wrong.
At OneLogin, we’ve spent time looking at all these different intricacies based on some of the data we’ve seen. For example, if our MQLs aren’t converting to meetings or the Sales team isn’t accepting them, what’s going on there? Is it scoring, is it our audience? Or if we’re not having enough meeting convert to stage 2 opportunities, what’s going on in that particular segment? Is it the sales pitch? Let’s listen to the Gong calls.
There are elements of data in each of those things but by looking at the funnel and your conversion rates, that will help you at least identify the area you should be looking at.
Go to 28:00 to hear Jason and Dayna discuss the difference between the buying experience you want to deliver and the way your customers actually buy.
Parts of this content originally appeared on GoNimbly.com
