Operations with Sean Lane | Want to Cut Your Reps' Prep Time By Over 50%? Adopt Hyperautomation

The long run value of humans is going to be creativity, right? Not solving problems, but knowing what problems are worth solving.

So it's really interesting. Hyper-automation is a concept that exists in the back office of enterprises and it hasn't really entered revenue. It's a brand new concept that we're sort of bringing into revenue. And what's weird about it is, you look at all these public companies, like fastest growing companies of all time, Slack, Twilio, fastest to a hundred million in ARR. There's a company out there called UiPath that beat all of them. In just a couple years, they went from below 10 million ARR to a hundred million ARR. So massive, massive potential in that segment called robotic process automation. And robotic process automation is a little bit like, kind of like what sequencers do, they just automate away really low value tasks that are repetitive. I click here, click here, I copy it from my spreadsheet, I paste it into an email, sequencer takes care of that. Hyper-automation is kind of this next generation evolution of that where basically what you're saying is, okay, there's the low value stuff we've automated that away, but there's the high value stuff that I still need a human for. And what I'm relying on is human judgment, right? So like I'm going into an account, I'm prospecting into it, and I need to get a feel of this account. So I look at how many VPs of Marketing are there, or there's three, well that means something versus one. And how long have they been in there and how fast are they growing? So we rely on humans for a lot of this intuition, like what do I say? What's the most salient thing? Hyper-automation is basically saying, how can I take the latest things that are happening in AI and try to replicate and emulate that judgment? And if I can do that, and this is where it kind of gets funny, right, because a lot of people say, oh, the robots are coming. They're never gonna defeat humans. It's not about that. It's more like, if I could take the things that are high value that you don't have enough time in the day to do, like researching your accounts and doing this, it's still high value, but it's not the same as like sitting down and really thinking about a customer's problem and kind of like looking at it from tech. Like that's the creative stuff. So hyper-automation is just taking that automation we've had for the last 15 years to just the next level with the latest AI techniques.

The way that I frame it, the way that I think about it is, before, if you think of Ops just in general, there wasn't a ton of Ops, it was originally just Sales Ops and Sales Ops was like under Sales and the job of Sales Ops was to make Sales efficient. And so what is making Sales efficient? It's like whatever the VP of Sales says, that's what we're gonna do, like that's the job. And so what is the VP of Sales say is like, well, it goes to the reps and says, well what's taking up time? And so that's one way of looking at it. I think what's happening with RevOps, and I think what you guys are like doing at Drift, for example, that's having like really big impact is flipping that and saying like, well it's not about the Sales reps and making them efficient, it's about making the customers' buying journey efficient and pleasant. And then as a result we become efficient because we've cut all the fat out of the equation. So I think when we're talking about, what is a low value activity that we're automating, the first thing you have to do is think about, well, low value from what lens, low value for whom? And then once you know that, then you can like jump into and start having the conversation on what's a low value activity or what's a high value activity?

Let's say that I want to go into an account and I don't really know what that account looks like or how it works. And I have a flow, so I have to go and find the people and guess the emails and find the accounts and some salesperson might say, that takes a lot of time, right? And I'd say to you, hey Sean, that's not selling time, that's not Sales. I'm doing non-selling activities. And then you'd go and buy a Zoom info or an Apollo or something, get the contact data, give it to me, and I'll just drop in my emails and just essentially spam the account, right? And so I say spam here in the sense that like some of those are high value going to the right people, but some of it is spam, which means that they're getting unsolicited outreach they don't want. And so from an internal view, that's like how you would say, hey, we're making Sales really efficient, right? Like Bill or Jane over there is no longer doing this really inefficient activity, they have all the selling time. But at the same time, I'm doing untold damage to that account, right? It's a bad experience for the customer, maybe Bill is the wrong, or maybe the person that you're getting is the wrong person today and six months later they get promoted and they have this like really bad impression of you and in the long run and maybe the rep who sent that isn't even there. And so somebody inherits this account, it's like, why won't these people talk to me? And I think that's like this myopic, more Sales operations inward focused approach. So with hyper-automation you'd say, oh man, like I gotta go on LinkedIn, I have to go look at these people. I have to try to figure out their personality. It's like how do they all fit together? And it's a lot of unstructured data, right? So it's not like I can just sit there and look at like, some people put in a headline, some people don't. So it's not like if this, then that. You kind of have to apply a lot of nuance to that analysis and even how you find that analysis, you may have to leave LinkedIn. It's not just like, oh yeah, I'm gonna go scrape LinkedIn, I need to actually go to some other network like Twitter and go find more information there and start stitching it together in different ways. So to me that is an example of a high value automation with a customer experience in mind versus a low value automation that's really centered on the seller. Now both impact the seller, right? It's just are you looking at it in a time horizon of a day or are you looking at it a time horizon of three months, six months?

I was talking to somebody today about kind of how all this works and we were looking at a very small part of the problem and we were having a conversation code, no code. And I said, you know what's funny is like we originally prototyped this in a no code tool and no code is part of it, but we've written 15,000 lines of code around it and then that, and it's a very small part of it, and the person was like, okay, that's like really complicated, right? But if you think about it, 15,000 lines of code versus your 50 billion neural connections, you know, millions of dollars taking you from kindergarten to whatever, I think people really underestimate just how much value add humans are adding in the part of the Sales process. It's like getting to know you and finding targeting. The long run to me is, it's so clear. The long run, GPT-3's out, AI's already creating IMIC, all that stuff, the long run value of humans is going to be creativity. Not solving problems, but knowing what problems are worth solving. So when I think of, when I go into an organization, I don't even, when you think of the efficiency pitch, I only focus on one thing, which is how much time are your reps speaking to other people? That's the only metric that I think matters. And the reason for that is if the true value that a person can provide is exploration and creativity and stringing a problem together, if that is the true, the maximum value that a person can provide, probably most of that is gonna happen in spoken form or collaborative form. So it doesn't really matter to me if you are, like we've automated away all your activities, like if you have two hours of speaking time a day, I don't care how efficient you think you are or how much from an internal lens, like I added, I made Sales 300% more efficient, doesn't matter because the maximum value that they can provide is two hours of the day. That's the utmost maximum value that they can provide. And so I think that's kind of how I think about the shift with RevOps, it's like how do we rethink what our resources are and how do we align them to customers in different creative sort of ways to maximize that airtime.

So, first of all, I'm not redefining anything. I think the game has already been redefined by the customer. And I think again, the company you're at, played a huge part in it. The whole premise of sales operations and making internal metrics, the whole premise of that is that we have leveraging control over the situation. 30 years ago we had control through information as symmetry. So it was like, I'm in the Chicago market, I'm the only person who sells this widget, I'm gonna call on this prospect or maybe there's five, but like what are the odds that five people are gonna be calling the prospect at the same time? Like that was the first information of symmetry, that was the first leverage. Then the second leverage came from like, I can just achieve, I can automate these low value tasks, I can achieve it. And today, like there's kind of five versions of every app. And even though they're different, they all make the same claims. The thing as a buyer is like, all I can go off is the claims and the cost of exploring those claims with you. And I don't always buy the best product. I just do my best to predict what that ROI is gonna be. And so now it's like, you can bet me all you want. If I can book a meeting off of Drift, and I get to that first account executive and they get me into the product release, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna do the easiest thing.

Our company came out of a pivot and in the middle of that pivot, like one of the things we had an opportunity to do was kind of look at everything that we've done up till then. So we just gotten profitable, we're kind of looking around, we're like, all right, we didn't really, we did good, but like not the best. We're gonna pivot the business, what's been working and what hasn't been working? And one of the things that we found was we wrote down all the things that we hated doing. And what we realized was also things we hate doing, other people hate, like the customer hates as well. So like, here's a good example. One of the biggest problems we had was quoting. We hate quoting. Why? Because after I give you, right after we do the negotiation discussion, I generate the quote, 19 seats. Okay, we go through the CPQ tool, we fill everything out, we generate this thing, we get somebody to double check that we didn't screw it up, great. Send it to the customer, oh, I want 20 seats. Okay? So we go and do that, right? You send it again and the customer gets back to you and says, hey, yeah, actually admin licenses, I kind of forgot about that. And you're like, come on man. And then, right, you send it and then they, you have to follow up six times. Let me ask you this, like how, what's this, like how would we fix that with sales operations? Like what's the view to that problem that I just described?

But let's just say you have a really adamant VP of Sales and is like, I want you to automate this with tech. Like, what would you do?

Okay, so like that is. Like that is incredibly futuristic, right? Like 99% of people that I talk to when I ask this question will say, CPQ sucks, right? Replace the CPQ. And then like, maybe we should import that person into a sequence to send them a daily reminder after the contract's sent. Like that's how and I'm glad that you say that, by the way, because like again, it makes sense why you're an influencer in the community and all that stuff and why you work at Drift, like, but 99% of people immediately say CPQ. And so what we thought was exactly what you said is like, this is a shopping checkout cart. Why am I checking out somebody else's cart? It's like on Amazon, right? You go check out your own cart. And then what we realize is when you start working backwards is like, our pricing isn't clear. We're making stuff up based on the wrong, like we got somebody through a funnel who's not a perfect fit, but we want the money. So we go through this and if you add up all the costs that's associated with that nonsense plus the new CPQ upgrade that's going to solve everything, but it isn't. If you add up all that cost, like this is a very unprofitable, inefficient organization. So I think like my viewpoint, like our view about RevOps like came from that. We were sitting there trying to look at our own business and figure out like, why are renewals so terrible? Like why is it so, like why do I have to chase after this person? Like really. Like we sold them, NPS is high, da da da da da. Like, why is that? And the answer is always somewhere really deep up funnel. And so the thing that solves these, and so like if you're trying to solve every problem, bit by bit by bit by bit, you miss the big picture. And that's what I, and that's like my attitude towards low value activity automation. It's like, all right, we're making it easier to chase the person down for the renewal. We're making it easier, da da da. And it's like, that's not the problem. The problem was like, hey, we weren't paying attention to the account when the new VP came in. Like, that was the problem.

So our MQL to SQL rate went up from 15% to 85%. The amount of time that we spent on demos, like before the demo, you know, you have to like get your water and like prep, it went from one and a half hours to two minutes. We don't negotiate anymore. We don't negotiate pricing. Upsells don't require re-contracting, it's all consumption based pricing. Customers do their own CPQ, always. Like basically we just, we went and bought some off the shelf technology that's not very great. It's actually designed for SMBs to sell the SMBs, but we just threw it out there and people just like now check themselves out and it's just a stress-free environment. So that's the outcome. That's like the promised land or that's how we define the promised land for us and that's what we were really happy with.

Yep. So the first thing we did was to basically say, we're not gonna have decks anymore. The website is the deck. So, because like basically we're gonna show people, we're gonna walk people through the website and like, what's there, right? We not gonna have this thing where marketing said something and then they came in through that and then Sales is now showing a different deck and there's like a misalignment, whatever. So that was the first action we took. And as we did that, what we realized was before, you had to prepare your demo environment and get ready and get focused, 'cause if you click the wrong thing, the wrong thing's gonna happen. And today what we do is we show videos, we show videos on the demo. So we have videos that are 60 seconds long and it's, we're still not done. Those videos are now going on the website to make it easier to buy. But what we realized is like as ludicrous as it sounds, why would I get on the phone with you to watch a video? Well, it's like that's all we had, but what we found is if we can break down the things that they wanna see into pieces and show them on the demo and see how they react and copilot and ask them, so did anything stand out to you in that, what should we dive into on the call? You get all this valuable market research out of it. And so what happens is those videos improve and eventually what you find is it's the perfect demo. You don't need to, the wording is perfect. The length is perfect, everything's perfect. So we get on calls and the other thing is, we know that those videos work because they're aligned to the marketing, they all map out to the website. So here's a good example. When somebody complains about sales enablement, I'm like, you don't have a sales enablement problem, you're letting random people into your funnel who like, the reps don't know how to handle that and they're telling you they need another deck. The solution to that is not more sales enablement, stop letting in the path fit customers into your funnel and whatever you train them on is gonna work just fine and or enable them to hang up the phone, right? Enable them to get off that call so that you don't create this downstream, like, we need a head of enablement, we need more training, which takes away from the talk time, you don't need any of that. You just need a really clear funnel that each piece kind of works with the other pieces.

A hyper-automation conversation is really, really simple because again, we focus on the journey, most people just don't even know 99.9% of what we're doing is possible, so we take 'em through a funnel. And by the way, so in that funnel, one of the biggest projects we did here was we took our product and we broke it up into like 15 different products, just based on the AWS model. We were like, hmm, we spend 500 grand a year on this thing and we've never really spoken to a Sales rep except for when we were begging for them to accelerate the contract signature so we wouldn't be penalized for being out of contract and lose our discount. I'm like, how do we do that? And so our journey is much more oriented to how do I make this really easy for you? Like, hey Sean, at Drift, you got our marketing, you get it, David might not get it. There's all these say they don't get it. I'm just like, how do I help you, Sean, get it and show one more person what it is? And it's never like, hey, show like them full solution and the idea. It's like how do we plant, how do we use the product as a vehicle to plant an idea inside that organization and then build out the product in a way where there's natural hooks into additional use cases where the product starts to tell the story itself. And I think like that is more of a RevOps concept, more than a hyper-automation concept, which is, at the core of that is, just what is the point of a, what is the purpose of a business? The purpose of a business, I think and by the way, this is like not an easy question. We asked ourselves this question in the pivot, we were actually like, do we close shop? What is our criteria for deciding to stay open? And what we landed on was like the purpose of a business is to drive lasting change, as much lasting change as possible and the opposite of a massive impact, but non lasting change, so non lasting impact is like a Tamagotchi, it's a fad, right? So sequencing became the thing, we've spammed the crap out of people and now nobody pay any attention to email, that's like a fad. Transformation, a lasting impact, is more like we've completely changed the way that we think about this problem, with Drift, with you guys, and I promise I'm not sponsored by Drift, but like I think it's a great company. They do a really good job of saying like, look, this is how it was before. We need to flip the lens and rethink how we think about this problem. And so, the only way, the way to make lasting change is not ACV, it's not number of logos, it's not this, it's not that. It's how do you, it's almost like inception, how do we create an experience that leads this organization to change the way it thinks about the problem? And then you work backwards from there. And it sounds, I think, a little abstract, but from a product manager perspective, if you think about it, this is all product managers do. This is like literally what they do, they look at user behavior, they try to figure out what are they doing today, how do we change that? Is it a nudge? Is it a this? Is it AI? I don't know. But how do we get them to change what they're doing? And I think we're just applying that way of thinking to revenue. And I think that's the lens.

Yeah, that's an awesome question. So I think that there's kind of two things happening. So like, there's my thinking, but realistically there's two things happening in the market, that are impacting at the same time. The first one is, if you look at RevOps, just as the economy's getting worse, there's a lot more money and resources going into it, people are seeing as more strategic and there's just more higher level of talent coming in. It used to be kind of like almost an IT function, the Ops functions. And I think you'd get these real gem people who do amazing things, but still in really an IT kind of view. Now these people are VPs, they often report directly to the CEO, so that's one thing. Like actually you're getting people who used to be product people or McKinsey consultants or whatever coming in, who are bringing that experience. I think the second part is just a much more bottoms up motion. It's just community driven and I think that's about meeting people where they are. One thing we really try to do today is to not, people have to be ready for change. That's really, really important. If you're in a company that isn't ready for change, what good is it me telling you about all these technologies and things, if that's not what's going to make you happy and get you promoted and save your job. So we've just been really focusing on social to drive awareness. And you know, one thing that's been really cool is, just three weeks ago I put a post on LinkedIn and I was like, hey, you know, I'm starting a new Slack community called Automation Heads. It's literally for people, we are not gonna talk about people in process. We're only gonna talk about technology and we're gonna, and it's just a safe space for people to ask outlandish questions and pitch people on outlandish ideas of, I'm gonna use GPT-3 to do this or you know, what do you think of Elon Musk's robot and what's that gonna do? You know, like, just like that and we got a hundred people on social signing up for this thing.

And that really surprised me, right? And I think that shows that there is appetite, but it's appetite that wasn't there two years ago and so I think it's just gonna pick up from here.

So we've been working on this for six months, this may be blasphemous, but we sort of set out a project to basically say, what would it take to not have SDRs, who don't do anything but talk to people? By the way, we don't have SDRs. We used to have SDRs and we used to have Sales people out bounding. And we basically going back to our new metric, which is we only wanna hire people who talk to people and help them in creative ways. It was, well how do we do that? And you know, as of a couple weeks ago, it works pretty well. So it will take the workflows and it will take our old SDR playbook and we give it to it and it will go on LinkedIn and a whole bunch of different data sources, pull the data together, figure out, based on our criteria, who the right people are in the account, analyze what they talk about online to try to map that to interest as a first guess in terms of what's going out. And then validate, guess and validate the email down to the level of weird stuff like, how would you validate an email if like you didn't know, it's like copy, paste it into Gmail and see if you get the little avatar. So that has been really life changing.

And it's life changing, not because that stuff sucks or is annoying or expensive, it's just life changing knowing why certain campaigns are working and not working, that's the thing. Before, have you heard of sprint testing as a concept?

So it's like sprint testing, it's like how do use sprint test, like with ads, sprint testing is easy 'cause it's like the same ad and you know exactly where it's being served to who, and like you have that. With email, you don't really have that 'cause there's like so much like manual stuff going on and you don't really know if there's deviation. So our current project is trying to optimize our email funnel with bursts of only 30 emails. So what we're trying to do is with no more than 30 emails, get to a point where we've optimized our emails on one sort of domain where we can make all kinds of mistakes and then take that to a high value, an untouched domain. And interestingly, the goal of the experiment is to turn off all tracking on that, on the real scale thing. So it's like, do lots of measured experiments small and then get to a level of confidence where you're so confident in what you've done because the underlying data's good where you're like, I don't need to measure opens anymore, I'm just gonna send it. And there's like a little trick that we're gonna be posting, we have a content series on LinkedIn, we're gonna post there on how to track clicks without having click tracking. So we're gonna rely on meetings booked and actual content read as the metric of mass outbound rather than opens and clicks and other stuff that turns out that doesn't really say anything anymore.

Oh my god. "Breakthrough Advertising".

So if you go back to original copywriters, like David Ogilvy, "Breakthrough Advertising" is a book by one of those greats, Eugene Schwartz. And basically he breaks down, like he's basically, here's the mathematical theory of markets and how different products and different parts of maturity all boil down to certain playbooks and the guy is just like a genius. His book legally costs $500 to acquire. It's a very expensive book, but if you're very skilled, you can find it online.

Solving problems that involve people. Like they're never, you know, it's not like one plus one equals two. There's usually like a part of human psychology that I enjoy very much.

The people.

Oof. Well, I mean, I was really lucky to be part of a team just right out of college. I got lucky and I picked a team that got acquired by Google. A lot of those people went on to do really great things. So it was the hardest job I probably will still ever have, even compared to an entrepreneur. And I just do everything I can to replicate that here, just a group of people who do nothing but push each other to do things that they didn't know they could do.

Don't start too early. I think 24 was too early to start a company. I think probably like 28 is just like the time when you've just had enough runway. Like when I started this, I didn't know what an MSA was. So if you don't know what a MSA is, don't start a company. How about that? That'll be my advice. At least in the B2B space.

So, yeah, don't start too early.

I think, you know, Peter Thiel says this in his book, like every startup is different and there'll never be another one, so there's no point being scientific about it. I think there's a lot of survivor bias. Of course, the crux of my story is business one didn't work and then we got lucky enough to be profitable enough to take a step back and ask ourselves questions that most people can't ask, either because they've gone bankrupt or because they've scaled so fast that every problem is somebody else's problem. I think that's my fortune, but I don't, I wish you better fortune. I hope your first idea works better than mine did.