 about recording, and we're also live streaming. So for those of you watching us on YouTube, like and subscribe if you'd like to get the next episode when we do the next interview. It doesn't look like we're getting any feedback, so I guess we're ready to start. Jen Spencer is Chief Revenue Officer at SmartBug, which recently published a benchmarking report on the convergence of inbound marketing and revenue operations. It's a survey of 200 plus revenue leaders and includes actionable insights on how best to adapt to these trends. Jen, welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me, and I'm excited to share details about the report with you. I'm excited to hear about it. In this episode, what kind of apps are most businesses using and how will that change moving forward? How important is integrated technology to most companies and why cross-functional collaboration is the new competitive advantage? All that and more with our guest, Jen Spencer, after this. We're here with Jen Spencer. She is the Chief Revenue Officer at SmartBug. Just to set it up, Jen, for those who aren't familiar, what is revenue operations? Revenue operations is really the processes and the systems and the people that unite that customer lifecycle journey. So we think about someone being a stranger to your organization and they come in through marketing efforts. Sales is converting that stranger into more of a friend and becoming a customer. And then customer success teams are supporting those customers and then growing those customers and driving additional revenue from them. RevOps encompasses all of those elements. I remember one time I was at a party and I told someone that, because I used to be a Chief Revenue Officer as well, and I told someone I'm a Chief Revenue Officer and they thought I was an accountant. Oh yeah. You think you can use it, right? Yeah, absolutely. I love being a CRO. I love sitting in this seat, getting to work with these types of teams. I love the fact that the collective marketing and sales and technology community and customer success communities have been moving in this direction. I've been watching it over the last five to 10 years and I feel like we're finally at this boiling point and that's why it was just so exciting to be able to get inputs from so many revenue leaders and understand what they've been through and then break a piece apart. Well, where do we still have room to improve and how do we get there? And is it through people, through process, through technology? So it's an exciting time. So your company Smartbug did a survey of people in revenue operations, marketing, sales, and customer success. What was the survey and what did you learn from it? The survey was really about where revenue operations and inbound collide. And the reason why we looked at it through the frame of inbound and revenue operations is because Smartbug Media, we're an intelligent inbound marketing agency. So we eat, sleep and breathe this idea of inbound marketing. We wanted to launch a benchmark report, an industry benchmark report to bring together RevOps, inbound marketing and technology. And we decided we were better together by partnering with some of our other technology partners, Terminus, Typeform, Vidyard. And from that, we were looking for what kind of operational efficiencies are folks requiring. What is RevOps really about? Is it about data and analytics? How much does it have to do with the people? This idea of collaboration and the importance of collaboration. And then also looking at whose responsibility it is to achieve revenue targets. And that's been just really exciting to see how people responded and what that means for changing the landscape of marketing. And we were looking at it particularly through the lens of inbound marketers or companies that employ inbound marketing strategies. So just to make this really practical for someone maybe outside the bubble who's trying to sort of figure out what RevOps is. Let's start by looking at the technology because obviously, if you've got people in different departments collaborating in a digital environment, you're gonna need technology for that. And what is a tech stack? The tech stack is it's the core technologies that you're using in your organization to support that customer journey and also the business operations that go hand in hand with that customer journey. So in most organizations, the center of that tech stack, the heartbeat really structurally is going to be their CRM, their customer relationship management platform. And then from there, there are other technologies that you might sort of bolt onto that CRM in order to achieve certain goals, right? Whether it's marketing automation for helping nurture the contacts that are in your database based off of their life cycle stage or their buyer persona, it might be sales enablement or sales automation. So to really give your sales reps more power and tools, account management for those customer teams and customer happiness all the way through to quoting software, billing software, invoicing software and ERPs and deliveries tools that you might use in rounding out your business. So when I think about having all these different tools to serve different people in the organization, to me, it says enterprise or at least mid-size, a significant business doing 500 million plus a year. But what about small business? Because I know in the report, 30% of the 200 plus people that participated in the survey were small business. So how do you define small business? So we're looking at, we're thinking about small business. We're looking at organizations that they typically are doing under, let's say, $200 million in revenue, right? As an organization and but they're growing and they have a desire to grow. And I think that's kind of a commonality when we look at who was responding to our survey. These are organizations that they're small. Now, maybe they don't desire to be enterprise level organizations, but these aren't lifestyle businesses. These are organizations with boards of directors or private equity owned or they just have a desire to kind of to grow. And that's, I think that's a really important, a really important piece of this too, because they're not just thinking about what do I need to be using in order to operate my business today? They're also thinking about tomorrow and they're thinking about a year from now. And when they're making decisions about what they want to use and how they wanna use it, they're also thinking about the implications of their growth and how that technology is gonna support them. But does this type of a solution work for a company that's doing less than 10 million a year? Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, when you think about the, when you think about buyer behavior, right? Let's take ourselves out of a business to business B2B setting and let's think about our consumer lifestyle that we live in. We are irritated when a brand that we use, we're a customer of when they don't really know who we are, when they make assumptions about us, when we get an ad, we see an ad for something on social media and that ad is nothing like what we would ever wanna buy ever. I mean, it's so disconnected. What do we do? We screenshot it and we share it on Instagram or Twitter and we mock it, right? We have these very high expectations for brands to know who we are. And the B2C world has really set the pace for this. And so then we transfer that into our lives in the B2B space where we as buyers expect that people are going to understand us, those salespeople, when that we actually talk to them they're gonna know a little bit about us, they're gonna know our history. So the best way to do that, the most scalable way to keep all of that organized is through the use of technology at the very, very least having a customer relationship management system or your CRM. You think about something like an interoperable stack that would combine different types of technology into one solution at a small business. Maybe you'd have a content management system to operate your website and some sort of a forms plugin to be able to pull signups or registrations or orders into a customer relationship management software system. And then maybe I don't know email newsletter app to be able to keep people up to date just a small stack like that. But you see so many small businesses rather than build an interoperable stack they go with some all in one solution like a Shopify because the developer talent isn't really available to them. Is that a mistake? Is it a mistake to be all in with one company on your platform or are you better off sort of mixing and matching? So if one doesn't work, you can bring in another one you're not wholly dependent on one software company. It's an interesting question. I don't think it's a mistake. I think there's a world for combining best of breed technologies and integrating those technologies. And we saw that in the report too. I mean, we saw the increased need for integrated solutions, but that's really more at the upper end of the market because not that everyone doesn't need it but does everyone have the time and resources to put into that? And that's where platforms like the Shopify platform, Klaviyo or HubSpot, where they come to the table with a complete all in one solution that and maybe the solution isn't like niche to their business. And maybe there's something else out there that has been a little bit more customized to that particular industry, right? And that happens. But then you're as a business owner or as an operator, you're then having to look at how those systems will connect. And what we see by and large is when people start piecing together systems, they don't connect them well. They're inefficient. They're ending up spending a lot more time trying to keep things connected with this cobbled together solution. And the pros of that best of breed solution start to just diminish as they just or people are running out of time. And that's where the platform type of solution is actually much more attractive to a smaller business, especially if that platform allows for growth and also allows for other connectivity so that if that you outgrow certain aspects of that platform that you can then bolt on something that you really need. So you wanna make sure that if you go that platform route and you are concerned that you might outgrow certain elements that you still will have the ability to add something later down the line. But it's much more, for me, it's much more effective. It's like you get it right out of the box, right? It's like opening this thing up and you're like, well, everything that I need like the core for my core business is all here in one place. You know, you think about companies in growth stage, they often offer amazing deals, you know? And I remember like when WeWork first opened up, it was awesome, it was really inexpensive and they had amazing coffee and a great setup. And you knew that, you know, once they got to a certain maturity state if they would get there, it wouldn't be that way anymore. You think about like mature companies like telcos or cable companies, they're always trying to squeeze an extra nickel out of you. But when a company's in growth stage, right, particularly in a winter take all market, they're really giving it away free and cheap and it's a great opportunity for customers. I wonder, you know, if you look at a lot of these closed systems now that are serving small business, I'm thinking about, I don't know, the food delivery apps as an example or even Upwork that is used by a lot of freelancers in the development space, you know, they retain the customer information. Shopify doesn't do that. Shopify gives you your customer data. HubSpot gives you your customer data, but they're still in growth stage. And so you wonder, you know, if you hit your wagon, you know, to that horse and that horse decides one day, you know what, you don't get your customer data anymore, then you're kind of up a creek without a paddle. And if you think about like Facebook or LinkedIn or any of these guys early on when they were growing, you could get email addresses, you could get all your contacts information. You can't get it anymore. And it seems like small businesses are starting to wake up to that, that they want to retain the customer data. Do you think that having an interoperable stack protects you in any way from having access to your customer data, particularly if it's maybe anchored by open source? I mean, not necessarily. I guess it really does depend. I've seen, I've experienced clients who have been held hostage by certain solutions. And I mostly see it honestly when we're looking at very vertical specific solutions. So someone who they have a solution that is specifically for plastic surgery or for chiropractic care or for legal teams. And it's very, very niche and it's, and yes, and they come to us sometimes and say, well, we ended this, we ended this license and now, but this company owns our website. Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? What do you mean? No, that's yours, you should own that. So I think there's a distinction and a really important distinction between all-in-one platforms that will retain, they'll own kind of that customer information and other solutions like HubSpot. Like another example, there's another platform that is at the lower end of the market, quasi kind of competitive with HubSpot, for example. And I'm not a partner of theirs, but their agency model, I do help run an agency. Their agency model is one where the agency licenses the software and then uses the software on behalf of the customer, right? And when I see that, I say, I'm completely turned off by that. No, our customer, the client, the end user, folks listening, you need to own your license. You need to own your customer data. No one else should own that for you. And if you're in your domain, you're the destination. The domain, everything, you need to own that. And so it means reading the fine print, right? It's we often sign off on things and we feel good about the decision. We've had a great salesperson, but you do need to read the fine print and you need to make sure that you own your data. So if you're buying HubSpot, you do own your data. And if you decide you don't wanna be with HubSpot anymore, all of that data can be exported and then you can use it for something else. It's yours, it's yours to own forever. What drives companies to deploy new technologies? How many apps does the average revenue leader use and small business tech stacks with Jen Spencer? Stick around. Jen, your survey found that 64% of corporate leaders say they'd walk away from purchasing new technology if it doesn't include a native integration with their CRM. Can you explain for the general business person who's not familiar with the inner workings of digital business, what exactly that means? I would love to. So when you are using, when you're using your customer relationship management, your CRM, that platform, and you see you can potentially integrate that platform with another solution, meaning you're gonna have data, certain data points that might pass through maybe from one to another or maybe back and forth, might be unilateral or it could be bilateral. And most people are looking for bilateral communication. You update something in one system, it gets reflected in another and vice versa, right? So there are technologies that have things that are native, that are sort of out of the box. So within that application, you're right there and you can typically click a button and there's going to be a couple of things you're gonna configure. You wanna match property A to property number one, property B to property number two, right? Looking at those platforms and it's very, very simple, very effective. That's what people are looking for. What they're becoming more and more disillusioned by is this idea of, well, you could use this web hook or you could connect to our API or you can use Zapier or any other kind of solution to integrate. And once you have to go that route, now things become more complex, now you're involving a third party platform, now you need additional attention, now there's something else that can break. And the reason why we saw so many leaders saying like it's not worth it to them, it's because they've experienced that pain. They've lived through it where they thought, well, this is gonna be easy, these tools are gonna talk to each other, but the onus is on you as the end user to make it happen. As opposed to a native integration where those two entities, those two technology companies have been collaborating together, they've identified, hey, there's market opportunity, let's go partner together and make this work really, really well for our customer so that they don't have to stress out about it. And that's really the difference between the native integrations and other integrations that folks are starting to recognize or just not a fit for them as they're trying to scale their smaller business. So looking at tech stacks, the report found that just over half of the 200 revenue leaders surveyed said they have two to five integrations running with their CRM, 21% have six to 10 integrations running and 13% have 11 plus integrations tied to their CRM. What do you see happening here from a trend standpoint? More consolidation or more solution sprawl? We're always gonna see more solutions sprawl, I think. We'll see, it's interesting. There's always gonna be kind of both happening at the same time because as companies are launching different kind of products, larger companies can come in, gobble those up, kind of absorb them and make them part of a platform. So there's a real push especially in the marketing and sales technology space to be a platform, to be that system of one system of record for an organization. But even as that consolidation happens, guess what, people keep dreaming and they keep building and they keep creating new tools, which is exciting and that's what makes marketing technology and Rev Ops system makes it so awesome. So they're gonna continue to be kind of creating that. So I think it's always gonna ebb and flow. I think as we consolidate some, it's gonna just continue to sprawl in other ways. But the trick is gonna be, how do you make sure if you are one of those ancillary technologies, how do you make sure that you're gonna be so embedded in that core platform that it makes it easy for that user? And those that can't make it easy, those are the ones that are gonna disappear and they'll end up just being consolidated as part of a larger platform. Are you guys HubSpot partners? We are, we're a HubSpot elite partner, the highest rated and highest awarded in the ecosystem, the HubSpot ecosystem. So how does HubSpot stack up against Salesforce? Oh my goodness. HubSpot has come leaps and bounds in the last few years and it's really exciting to see. I've been using HubSpot's CRM and sales solutions for the last about six years or so. And it's safe to say that today and especially with the recent announcement of Operations Hub, they truly have an enterprise grade CRM. So HubSpot always had, from the second they really launched the CRM and sales hub, it was always for a small business, very, very competitive with Salesforce. Today, we are seeing mid-market and early enterprise size organizations moving from Salesforce to HubSpot, particularly because of the ease of use. And we've been talking about technology, which is great, right? But the thing is that people have to use this technology. So you can buy, you can purchase the best technology on the planet, but if your team doesn't adopt it, if they don't embrace it, if they don't use it on a regular basis, and if your team is unable to extract the benefits of it, then it's a waste of time and it's a waste of money. And that's where HubSpot's had a leg up because people, they get into the system, it's very intuitive. People feel like they can breathe in it and their reps are enjoying using it. And it's been, yeah, it's been really fun to see. So, you know, we're talking largely about front of the house software, CRM software that's used to do with customers and take orders and process orders and provide service and manage a sales pipeline. But, you know, obviously at a mid-sized company or manufacturer or an enterprise company, there's also the back of the house, right? There's enterprise resource planning software that deals with everything from payroll accounting to, you know, bill of materials, to powering the robots on the manufacturing floor. And obviously, you know, the holy grail at the enterprise would be to have both of those two systems talking to each other. I just wonder with a system like HubSpot, I mean, they don't have an ERP, do they? And, but that's where, that's where integration is so important. So they don't have an ERP and- Or is that what you were talking about? Ops, something? Well, the Ops Hub, the operations hub is a component of that, but truly before operations have existed, we were still integrating ERPs with HubSpot CRM. We were already doing that. And what it- Live through middleware, how are you doing that? Yeah, it's through the API. So, you know, a few years back, HubSpot really doubled down on being a platform and recognizing that in order to really be an effective platform, that meant that they had to create an ecosystem where other technologies could easily connect to them, right? And so there was a lot of investment made behind the scenes, the non-front of house, the non-sexy stuff, right? Like not the stuff that gets the marketing and sales leaders all excited, but the stuff that gets the operations professionals, the finance leaders, the C-suite. Okay, like these are the inner workings of our organization. And this is something that Salesforce has done exceptionally well, right? I mean, it is hard to leave Salesforce because they've built an ecosystem and where people have hitched their wagon to Salesforce, these companies, these businesses, other technologies have, and they're solving, they might wanna leave Salesforce from a sales enablement perspective, but accounting and finance needs to stay on Salesforce because of other kind of technologies. And HubSpot's not quite got there yet, just because it's still early in that adoption. But you should be, your ERP should be connecting to your CRM and your CRM should be fueling your marketing automation platform. So one of like a customer that kind of comes to mind that offers kind of custom solutions, design solutions for kitchens and bathrooms, they recognized, hey, in our ERP that we have, which was NetSuite, in NetSuite, we have all this really interesting data that says things like this is, here's the designer that was used or here's the products or here are the materials, all of these details that went into this project. And they wanted to pull that data into their CRM, be able to segment it and then run marketing campaigns to specific segments of that customer base to based off of the projects that were all stored in the ERP. And by integrating NetSuite with HubSpot, they're able to do that. So it takes some thought, it takes a lot of strategy and planning and you don't just like open up the systems and start pressing buttons, right? You have to like kind of map it out. But once you map out that basic use case, then getting those technologies to communicate with each other isn't challenging, but you do need the help of a professional in order to do that, to connect those two different systems. Account based marketing, WebOps KPIs and cross functional collaboration with smart bug CRO Jen Spencer when we return. How does account based marketing help sellers create a more unified customer experience? The beauty of account based marketing is you're predetermining what type of company, what type of organization would be a really good fit for your business. And then you are looking at all the different ways that you can make yourself available to that account and you work to penetrate that account. So it allows for less distractions. So your sales team has kind of their shortlist. I'll give a perfect example, my sales team, every single sales team member, they've got their top 10 accounts that we've identified these companies would make very, very, very good clients for us based off of a number of different factors, the different dimensions that we might use to determine that they make sense as a tier one account. And I tell that sales team, you need to know those 10 accounts, like they're your own children, like they're your own pets, right? You know their names, you know their behaviors, you recognize them if you ran into them on the street and that allows for like less distractions and then provides marketing also with a bit of a framework of now we're not just trying to boil the ocean here, right? We're gonna specifically put some campaigns in place to try to bring those people into our universe. And then that translates into a more successful customer experience because we've predetermined that there's very good alignment between that business and the business that you have. And how does customer data or account data rather help sellers create raving fans? It kind of goes back to what we were talking about buyer expectations and knowing kind of the ins and outs of your business, but that customer data, if you have that customer data, that's great. That's step one, right? Making sure you're gathering that information. But then step two is looking at how are you putting it to use? So for example, if you have a customer that always, when you send some kind of an email, maybe you do a monthly newsletter and every time you send a monthly newsletter, they're clicking on something that's the same topic. It goes back to the same pain every time, time and time again. Well, now that account manager, whoever's working with that customer, they can see that aggregated and they can approach the next conversation they have with that customer about that particular pain point. So where we see organizations make some mistakes is they collect all that data, but they don't actually do anything with it. So you have to do both, but a customer will become a raving fan of yours if they feel understood, if they feel like you get them, you know their business and you're also actively working to provide them more and more value in every interaction that you have. And listen, we're only human, right? So if you're an account manager and you have 50 different accounts that you're managing, how can you possibly remember that everything you might have to about those people? How do you remember, you know, whether it's their birthdays or their children, what school their children are going to, what college they just got accepted in or somebody's, you know, their interests or their big pain point or what their next kind of career goal is, these are all relationship elements that it's impossible for one human being to remember all of that about everyone all the time. So if you have all that data in a place that you can actually access and do something with, then that's gonna allow you to create more of that fandom experience because at the end of the day, we all want to just be heard and understood and appreciated and respected and using that data will help people get there. And your study found that while 96% of companies use revenue to measure sales, the same is true of only 66% of marketing departments and 45% of customer success teams. How should marketing and customer success be measured? I believe that everyone plays a part in owning those revenue goals. Big surprise being a CRO, but I do have to say, I mean, it's a bit harder when you're in your smaller organization, right? It's not uncommon in an organization that there would be maybe one person on the marketing team or maybe that customer success team doesn't really have the level of leadership that they really would need in order to truly own those revenue goals. That's not why they're there. So I think you do have to take a look at what can be expected from you based off of the size of your organization. But I believe that marketing is responsible for driving pipeline for sales. And they do that through demand generation and they do that through brand awareness and visibility. One is a bit harder to quantify than the other, right? It's harder to quantify brand visibility into kind of revenue pipeline goals. It's easier when you're focused on demand generation efforts. And, but that's where marketing technology and sales technology can really help with that attribution. So I believe that there should be a little bit of ownership of revenue from marketing teams. And then on the customer success side, for companies that are, if you have a recurring revenue business, maybe you're a software company where you're a SaaS software as a service model, it becomes very easy to have customer success teams own the churn numbers and how sticky have you become with these customers or any kind of upsells, cross-sells, expansion opportunities that you have? They should be owning those numbers as well if you have the capacity in your organization. Jen, final question. Why is cross-functional collaboration so important in the modern enterprise? Cross-functional collaboration is critical because you're thinking about that customer journey and supporting that customer where they are and you don't want your customer to be communicating with someone in the organization and have the left hand not know what the right hand is doing. So as a, like a great example of this would be, let's say you have live chat on your website. If you have live chat on your website and I'm a current customer and I go to that live chats that page because I'm having a problem and I need help, I need support. If the person who is operating the live chat responding to it is in sales and has absolutely no idea that you're a customer or doesn't have a mechanism to actually shift you from talking to a salesperson over to talking to someone in customer success, that's gonna leave a pretty bad taste in your mouth as a customer because you're just coming to the place, you know, you're coming to this site and you wanna be served. So it all goes back to putting the customer at the center of every decision you make and kind of walking through these scenarios of what are the ways that customers engage with us and how do we need to make sure that we're collaborating as a unified team because probably the person owning live chat maybe they're on your marketing team and, you know, or you've got an SDR who's handling that or, you know, vice versa, right? Maybe you've got support that's managing live chat but what do you do with new sales inquiries and those opportunities? Everyone needs to be on the same page if you're in a customer-facing role and anyone in marketing sales or customer success you're really in a customer-facing role. You're not doing back office work. Jen Spencer, Chief Revenue Officer at Smartbug. How can people get a hold of you? You can find us online at smartbugmedia.com. I would love to connect with folks on LinkedIn. So just look up Jen Spencer at Smartbug and let me know when you connect with me, let me know that you were listening to the show. So I have some contacts for how you came to find me. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time. It was a very interesting discussion. Thank you. Thanks for having me.