Episode 134: Revenue Operations, with Chris Hummel

Chris Hummel

This is the fourth part of our series on Revenue Ops.

Chris Hummel is a Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute

He has been fortunate to hold numerous executive and c-level roles, including serving as the Global CMO at two Fortune 500 companies. While leading sales, product and marketing teams at world-class companies including Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, United Rentals, he sat in the executive chair and board room meetings where we confronted key issues of performance, growth and transformation in several industries: construction, industrial, software, energy & automation, IoT, the public sector, healthcare, and other technologies. Living and working outside the US for 14 years in Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia has helped develop his global fluency.

In 2022, he co-authored the book, “Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales and Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth” which consolidated lessons from more than 100 CXOs. While so many of the challenges were similar, these leaders were rarely exposed to the learning of their peers.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ciena

Juniper Networks

Chris’ email

You can purchase your copy of Revenue Operations from Amazon.

His fellow partner at the Revenue Enablement Institute is Steve Diorio. You may also be interested in a previous podcast episode with their associate, Neil Hoyne

RevOps System diagram, used with permission

Episode 133: Revenue Ops, with Vito Mazzarino

Vito Mazzarino

This is the third in our series on Revenue Operations.

Our guest grew up on the west coast and received his degree from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Over the course of his 20 year professional career, Vito Mazzarino has been both a company owner and an employee brought in to help with Marketing and Business Development. While doing that, he grew to love using automation to streamline marketing & sales processes. 

By the middle of the 2010s, he knew the automation tools well enough to implement them. He took this as a signal that he should make a change, so he moved to Montreal Quebec and started his own agency.  

Growth Geyser was born in 2018 to strategize and deploy automation that grows a company’s  customer base and  hits their sales targets. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Growth Geyser’s 17-point Lead Management Checklist for Small Business Owners (PDF)

Episode 132: From Backroom to Boardroom, with Debbie Qaqish

Ep 132 Debbie Qaqish

This is the second episode in our Revenue Ops series. 

As Partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, Dr. Debbie Qaqish has helped marketing teams drive revenue growth, foster customer centricity and lead digital transformation. With a focus on revenue operations, the customer experience and a personalized, omni-channel marketing mix, Dr. Debbie has established herself as a thought leader and digital pioneer, spearheading the overdue shift of traditional marketing strategies to what she coined as “revenue marketing” in 2011. Since then, marketing operations became her area of expertise, devising strategy-to-execution plans that earn marketing a seat at the table.

Dr. Debbie has published over one hundred articles, blogs, podcasts, webinars and white papers and in 2021 published “From Backroom to Boardroom”

Dr. Debbie earned her doctorate in 2019 from the University of Phoenix.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Dr Debbie Qaqish’s personal site

To receive The “From Backroom to Boardroom” eBook, send an email to Debbie 

Steve Woods

PayCor

MarTech stack appearing in book, used with permission

Episode 131: Revenue Ops, with Lawrence Quan

Lawrence Quan

Sales has been around forever. But how long have we had marketing? In North America, it’s the late 1800s and  early 1900s. 

You’d get an idea of what they were focused on by reading the journal of the US agricultural economics Bureau. In it, they chronicled the 1937 annual meeting the National Association of marketing officials (You may know it by its current name, the American Marketing Association). The proceedings were entirely about the marketing of… farm products. Producing and selling as many commodities as possible, to as many regions as possible.

Despite being in just one category, this assembly of academia and Industry was trying to formalize how this function would blend in with the other departments, like sales, within the average American business. Fast forward nearly a century, there seems to be a new framework on the horizon for how the marketing and sales functions should be organized – and it’s called Revenue Operations. The purpose of this four part series is to go inside businesses where it’s being used and listen to thought leaders who have written about it. 

For this first episode of the series, we going into the trenches with someone possessing a diverse blend of experience spanning Revenue Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Product, Lawrence Quan brings a holistic view of revenue to startups of all stages. 

He is Director, Growth Marketing with LTSE. He has also built growth teams at Rewind and led Growth Marketing at Clearco. On the side, Lawrence works with seed, Series A, and Series B SaaS companies to build and scale go-to-market engines.

 Listen to the various places he’s seen RevOps in organizations but wherever it sits, he stresses that it is a team sport. Hear how a revenue-focus gets infused into the Marketing Mix, and how the best marketing ideas don’t always come from marketing. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lawrence’s LinkedIn profile 

Rewind.io

Clearco

Gong

Archival records from early days of marketing. The group working to advertise farm products here later became the American Marketing Association.

Episode 130: How to Interview Customers, with Ryan Gibson

Hot to Interview Customers with Ryan Gibson

We spend a lot of time demonstrating who our company is built around. We leave an open chair for them in board meetings. We put notices on the footer of our website, We provide automated feedback mechanisms so we can gauge how they feel, and when we hold in-person events or trade shows where they appear, we make every effort to give them swag and confirm their upcoming purchase plans (hopefully, buying from us). I’m talking about customers, of course, and though we do all these things, there seems to be one thing we dance around; the one simple  activity that could give the most intelligence –  talking to them. 

I’m not saying we don’t talk to customers. But most of that talk is anecdotal. I don’t know about you, but as a marketer, I wouldn’t go to the C-suite and defend a marketing program and budget based on a customer’s anecdotal comment. 

But done in the right way, that’s systematic and that follows qualitative Research principles, talking to customers can take the pulse of our market. We can analyze their experiences, making those findings available,  doing it in a way that would not only stand up to any Executive’s scrutiny, they’d insist on basing more corporate decisions on this information. 

Over his 20 years in marketing. Ryan Gibson has worked with dozens of businesses overseeing programs from the bootstrapped variety, on up to million-dollar budget variety.  

Using skills he got early in his career he worked in TV & Radio and film, doing a stint as reporter for Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, which got him so used to interviewing, he kept doing it and figures that he’s now conducted over 1800 of them

He now heads up Content Lift, a Marketing Strategy consultancy centred around Customer Research. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ryan is prolific on LinkedIn 

Ryan’s How to Run Customer Interviews course

Related show: “Lean B2B” with Etienne Garbugli

Wynter online panel

Respondent software

As you interview, pretend you’re detective Columbo