Name: Built to Miss: The Revenue Transformation Journey Starts with Real Alignment
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T18:30:53.050Z
Duration: 58 min 56 s
Description: Built to Miss: The Revenue Transformation Journey Starts with Real Alignment

Transcript for "Built to Miss: The Revenue Transformation Journey Starts with Real Alignment": Welcome, and thank you all for joining Argano and Varicent today today. We're thrilled to have you here and have prepared an insightful discussion for you all. Before we dive in, let's cover a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded or even made available for you to review afterwards. Please keep your microphones muted throughout the entire session. And finally, if you have any questions, feel free to submit them using the q and a function. We'll address them at the end. Now let's get started and welcome our speakers. Dave? Hi. Thanks, Ola. Yeah. Hi, everybody. Welcome. My name is David Kohari. I am, the head of advisory services and customer success here at Argano. So happy to have the opportunity to speak with Curtis today and, and all of you that decided to attend. Curtis? Yes. And hello. Really excited to be with you as well. If we hadn't had a chance to meet, my name is Curtis Schroeder. I lead the research and insight function at Vericent, an SPM software vendor. But, really, my job is to help revenue leaders build data informed strategies and and help them drive growth. So my focus is on using research to help make sense of what's happening inside our businesses and what was happening inside our organization so that we can design smarter go to market strategy. So I could talk all day about about these things. I'm really excited to get to to share with Dave and with the rest of the team today as well. I'm I'm super excited. I know Curtis and I have been looking forward to this conversation for, for some time now. So, let's, let's go and jump into it. Alright. So I you know, we'll start off by saying, hey. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Right? Everybody? No. Not not the one that you're probably thinking of. It's it's actually planning and modeling season. And, you know, it's I think it's it's almost been one year exactly since I did a webinar, last year with one of Curtis' colleagues, Hunter, from Varicent and another colleague, George, from, from RevenueShift. But we were talking about this sort of same thing. Right? Because it feels like it's an annual exercise that we all, you know, that we all go through. And, you know, if you if you think about it, you know, if you're if you're in a calendar year model, maybe sometime back in July or August, your CEO and CFO, they sat down with the board, tried to figure out, okay, like, what are we gonna do next year top line revenue, profitability wise? Hopefully, using some sort of intelligent algorithm to come up with that. Sometimes it's just gut instinct. Let's be honest with each other. But, you know, at some point along the way, once that starts to, you know, the dust starts to starts to settle from that, then the CFO has to sit down and figure out, you know, sort of step two. What what are we gonna pay for this? Right? Like, what's the compensation cost to say out and the cost to say out? How much are we willing to spend to achieve those great objectives and high level goals that the CEO and the board have have laid out for us? And then beyond that, you know, once all of that is sort of solidified, they hand off this information to the CRO and the CPO, and say, here you go. Here's the overall targets and here's our expectation. Go figure this out. Right? And, you know, as we all know, there's a lot of this in that this. Right? There's go to market strategy and alignment and territory optimization and quota setting and plan design and modeling. And it's all kind of running concurrently because, you know, as we all know, that there's a lot of interdependencies between that planning exercise and that modeling exercise. And ultimately, finally, when you've got this figured out, then you gotta go sell it to your go to market organization. Right? So you gotta go communicate it and roll it out and enable the teams. Oh, and by the way, that's just the go to market side. And from the operational perspective, we gotta make sure, you know, starting Jan one, we're ready to hit the ground running, to calculate and pay and provide transparency. And we and we all know this is exactly how this process works. Right? It's a perfect timeline with perfect boxes and perfectly sequential steps, along the way. And I think, you know, we're gonna hear Curtis talk about just how close to the mark we are here in a second because he's got a lot of great and interesting data to share with us, based on the survey that Varicent did. But I think before we do that, let's let's hear from you, from everyone that decided to join us. So we have a couple of poll questions, that we wanna put out there and we're gonna tee those up now. So the first one is, and we're gonna use quarters because we realize many of you are probably on a fiscal year and have a calendar year. So instead of months, we'll just say, like, which quarter do you start this planning and modeling process? So we'll give you a second here to, to respond. And as the, the votes are coming in, it's the the most wonderful time of the year. I I feel like there's an untapped market here for, planning process music genre and decor that we can bring out of our attics to to to mark the timing. So maybe that's another area where we we approach after this here, David. I had a jacket that I was going to wear that was covered in sort of seasonal festive, outrement, but I I decided, to go with the sweater instead. But maybe next next year, Curtis, we'll, Quick access to calculators and pencils and a sheet of paper and that sort of thing. Yeah. Exactly. I think, I'm not seeing results. Are you seeing any results on the survey? Or maybe I'm looking Not not my side yet. So there may be some sort of, functional issue, Ola, with, with with the polling process. So But I'll tell you, David. We we asked this question in in some of the survey data that I'll get at in just a little bit as well. And what I'm finding over time is that translates earlier and earlier in the process for most companies. So where we might have started at the beginning of q four in in years past that, you know, it's it's bumping into q three. It's bumping even into the the early parts of q two. So that planning process is really not a a a onetime shot anymore. It's it's happening earlier and earlier for sure. Yeah. I I I think that that's good to hear. Right? Because I think I I was curious to see what the audience would say because I think anecdotally through conversations I'm I'm having with customers, I think it it aligns with what you're saying, but there's still you know, I still run into the folks that are like, hey. We're doing it in q four. Sorry. Or even some, they're like, we're doing it in q one. But I, you know, like, I think, it's great to hear, like, you know, more and more we're seeing kind of reality line up to to perhaps some of the things that that we hope hope will happen. Let's see. I'm being told there is a way to check the polling results, but we're gonna start we're gonna start the second poll now, which is oh, actually, we had 10 people vote all all in q three. Alright. Amazing. Complete alignment that, everyone that that answered, all started that process in q three. So okay. So, let's let's try it again. We're gonna say, which of these best describes how aligned your teams are during the annual sales planning process? So, we'll wait to see how these votes come in. Kinda like Christmas morning. You get to see kind of, like, what what's what's under the tree as people start to make their votes. Real time. Right? Oh, I Right. Even sort of spread at this moment. Okay. Alright. Here we go. I've joined you again, team. I think we're we've got the issue sorted. Apologies for that. Thank you. I will. Appreciate it. Well, somebody has full cross functional alignment end to end, and I wanna know that individual. So Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Seems like you've got it all worked out. That's fantastic. That person needs to email us after, after the presentation and let us know who they are. Alright. Well, what do you think is Later in the process, reacting to changes, aligned on goals but diverging on the plans. Yeah. That's that's a lot of what we see too for sure. Yeah. Agreed. I think we're we were hoping but, not expecting someone to answer a. Right? So we're glad to see one one person did, but definitely a lot more, as as probably we expected in some of these other areas where you have, you know, you have some misalignment or some, some late starts to this process. Alright. So with that, you know, like, I would say, you know, I'm a big fan of this TV show called The Good Place. So I don't know if anyone, you know, Curtis, you and I have talked about it or if anyone on, in the webinar today has seen this. But, it's it's fantastic. I've been watching it with my daughter. And, I don't wanna spoil it for anyone, so I encourage you to go out and watch it, especially if you're interested in moral philosophy, which I know you all are. I can't wait to go check that out. But but in The Good Place in the in the show, there's this idea of the Jeremy Beramy. And this is actually how time is experienced in The Good Place. Right? So it's not a linear. It's sort of this crazy loops back on itself and, you know, there's a weird random dot over the I, that's disconnected from the rest of it. And, when I saw this, I thought to myself, wow. What a what a perfect kind of analogy for how I actually think this process unfolds in a lot of organizations. Right? Like, it's not linear. It's a, you know, sort of looping crazy process that loops back on itself. And, you know, if you're lucky, you know, we threw those same process steps on here. You know, maybe the CEO meets with the board, but then you go through a bunch of, like, iterations and loopbacks, and then the CFO sets the sit into the cost of sale target. And I love, like, that little dot is where three happens, where all of, like, the quota setting and and everything else. And ultimately, at some point, hopefully, you communicate all of this out. Right? And and I think you to me, again, it was kind of a perfect analogy for how, I I think about this process for a lot of organizations. It's not pretty boxes, you know, ending up sequentially and linearly. It's just kinda crazy, loopy, nonlinear experience. And I guess, you know, with that in mind, I'm gonna turn it over to Curtis. Curtis, I'm I'm I I think we'd love to hear more about, like, what what Varicent did and and the analysis and the survey that you conducted and and how it kinda ties back perhaps to the Jeremy Baramy, example that we're that we're pointing out. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I I put it in the chat. I had to I had to Google the Good Place and Jeremy Baramy to to figure out what that what that meant, but it it really, made a lot of sense once, once Google AI impacted it for me a little bit. So but I guess I guess for me, the the takeaway is I I think about the the study that we conducted, which I'll share more about, was that if this process feels a bit chaotic, for those that are listening, you're probably not alone. Right? That that's almost become the normal way of thinking, and and sometimes that's I I find also where the most creative and most necessary solutions start to emerge. And so when I think about this, we just wrapped up one of the largest market studies in sales performance management. We we surveyed over 1,400 executives and revenue leaders, revenue operations professionals, frontline salespeople. We talk a lot about what's holding back growth in their organizations. And and naturally, there were plenty of concerns about the the classic disruptors, the things you would expect to be in there, AI transformation, shrinking budgets, economic headwinds, all those things. But the the big twist in it was that that wasn't really what the the main headline in our data were showing. And so what came through loud and clear as we started getting into the analysis is that the biggest threat to growth as we talked to these revenue leaders weren't just the external things. A lot of it was what's happening internally, what's happening inside of our organization. So we see strategy that gets stuck or or diluted once it moves some kind of that planning stage into execution, or our teams are drifting or or competing with one another instead of collaborating, or the the incentive plans that we have are motivating the exact behaviors we don't want from our sellers or even internally amongst our our internal business teams. And so we heard this narrative that leaders are repeatedly talking about how the best intentions, how the most clever plans kind of unravel in the daily reality of our cross functional silos and misaligned goals. And so, that's a study that we'll we'll certainly make available to anybody that's interested. But I do wanna get into a little bit more of what we found. And there were five chapters within it, but a couple that I'll focus on today. The the first one was this idea of internal alignment or or maybe I should say internal misalignment. And so when we talk and and heard about internal misalignment in our research, we were describing when it's when that idea of strategy and planning and and execution don't seem to move in sync. And we're thinking about that across functions or or at those scenes or those intersections that happen between teams. And you see it start to play itself out when we think about the core go to market activities, things like segmentation and scoring, and we're evaluating our sales team capacity, and we're setting territories and assigning quotas, and we're thinking about training and development, all those kinds of things that can absolutely go sideways when teams are slightly out of phase with one another. And then it we know that those are the processes, but the symptoms that we feel are probably really familiar too. So we we we feel the effects of the bad handoffs. We feel the effect of the delays and the frustration that comes from I needed this on Monday, and I wasn't getting it till Friday. Or, even a lot of times we heard about the conflicting KPIs that are used internally to measure progress and to measure effectiveness, those kinds of things. It's just all these kind of fumbled handoffs, fumbled handshakes that frustrate our sellers. They frustrate our leaders. They frustrate our operating teams. And then we step back and say, well, why is our progress so slow? Why aren't we able to get things out on time? Why aren't we moving as fast as we want to? And so there's a a huge impact to this even though it is kind of the the standard operating model. And so what we've tried to dig into that a little bit more, and so we asked the revenue leaders in our study to put a number on the cost of misalignment. And 92% of them said that they are losing material revenue every year because their teams and their strategies aren't fully in sync inside their organization. And it we broke that down. We don't have it all listed here, but, yeah, I think 8% thought it was one to 2% of their annual revenue. 16% thought it was three to 5%. 40%, the largest chunk thought it was six to 10%. And then there was another, you know, 30% that thought it was even more than 10% of revenue. And for a, I don't know, $500,000,000 company, you're talking about tens of millions of dollars left on the table potentially. Even even a million. Even even 2,000,000 left on the table is worth acting on. Right? So when we saw this, I was like, man, that's that those are big numbers. Then I expected to see more urgent action. Like, what are they doing to solve for this? What are they actually doing about it? But what we started to see was that most leaders know the costs of these things, but they struggle to get traction on fixing the root problem. And it's not always this lack of awareness. It's actually the challenge of how do you coordinate and and focus and prioritize the change that needs to take place. And so when we asked them if they were actively addressing this alignment, only one in five of those same leaders said, yes. We are we are doing something intentional to deal with that. And so I I started calling this the the misalignment gap because we're seeing that most leaders know that they're leaking revenue because teams are pulling in different directions, but very few of them are actually investing the time or the resources to fix it. And so this is a classic example of kind of the broader narrative that we we report on in this study. We call it the status quo trap because it's things like this where the pain is super visible. The the costs are very even quantifiable, even even perceptually. Right? But without some sort of catalyst, many organizations are kind of defaulting just to tackling symptoms or we add technology on. We do some more training or whatever it is rather than thinking about how do we fix the internal system. So, David, let me pitch it back to you. If misalignment if this is true, if that's so widely recognized, why do you think it's so hard for organizations to make it a priority rather than just something that we acknowledge and move on from? Yeah. I I remember distinctly when I saw this and how, like, incredibly, like, it jumped out. Like, this misalignment jumped out at me when I saw the report. But also, like, remember thinking to myself sort of instinctively, I get it. Right? Like, I understand why they're to some degree why they're not tackling it because it it it aligns with the conversations that we're having with leaders across the business. And if you think about all of the things that you were pointing out that are important in those go to market processes, And many organizations today still, they're owned by different parts and different leaders, you know, across the organization. So getting, you know, like, getting all of those people together in a room to get alignment, it's hard. Right? And often, I think to your point, the sort of status quo is I stay in my lane. I focus on the things that I, you know, that I conceivably are within my remit and I can control because I fear broadening the the, you know, the table and inviting other people to have a seat just makes introduces complexity and introduces things that I I can't control and I don't get, you know, I don't I don't like that. I don't like, like, the losing sort of span of control over this problem. I think the other thing too, and you and I were talking about this, like, you know, some of it is just, tenure too. Alright? Like, at the end of the day, if you think about, like, what is the average tenure of, you know, a revenue leader in in an in an or in a new organization, it's, you know, it it's not it's not that long. Right? You're talking, like, maybe eighteen months, twenty four months. And so I think there is a tendency to want to focus on the things that, again, you know, like, you can control and you feel like you have a you have a sort of more immediate impact on. And creating sort of cross functional alignment, I think, falls off of that list, unfortunately, pretty quickly. Even though the evidence is clear, the impact is is tremendous. Right? That's right. That's right. Cool. Well, we're we're gonna talk more about this in just a little bit. But the other thing I wanna bring up, David, too from our data was kind of a second one of our chapters that talked about, another one of the status quo traps that a lot of organizations are falling into, and I I called it the the quota illusion. And, really, it it was based on the the premise that the quota these KPIs that we use like quota are the kind of go to benchmarks, the performance scorecards that we use in the sales world. Right? It's these are the things that's clear. It's what words visible. It's what we plan our number for every year. It's what we compensate on whether you hit this number or not. It it's most what most of us that carried a bag get grown up chasing. Like, that's this is kind of the the the the utopian thing that we're trying to to to to seek after. But if you really start to dig through this I I don't know that I ever spent any time in my career thinking as deeply as I had about quota, until I started doing this. But when we start to look beneath the surface, it's pretty complicated when you think about what quota is is the the weight that it's carrying for what it actually is. Is it is it a good representation of performance on our team? Is it a is it a fair number? Is it is it where did it come from? Is it is it the fact that we, you know, had hit a number last year? We just bumped it up by 10%. Like, the the the why and the what of all of it, you kinda go like, man, we're basing a lot of putting a lot of weight in this KPI as kind of the the Valhalla of of KPIs for our sales organization. And I think we saw some of that. So I I mentioned that we surveyed, you know, 1,400 individuals for this. A good chunk of that, I think four or 500 of them were actually frontline salespeople as well. And so to kinda give a different lens on this, we asked them about, quota and and how they perceived it and and and try to get some insights around that. And 16% of the sellers that we talked to believe that their quota was fair or equitable, so pretty low amount. 20% think it matches the the potential of their territory, and only 13% said they actually understand how their quota was set. Now I I think you could look at these numbers and go, well, of course, every salesperson's gonna, you know, think that their quota's not fair and that, you know, I should I should have a lower quota, and I should have more potential in my territory, yada yada yada, all those kinds of things. But if we actually look at the the heart behind this, and I think what kind of the signal threw the noise a little bit is that if the metrics that we're using feel unfair or they feel disempowering or they feel unclear, that can be a big warning flag for us as leaders as well. And it kinda goes back to that theme that we've talked about around internal misalignment that this isn't necessarily just about the numbers themselves, but it's about how those numbers are built, how they're how they're shared, how how they're understood in the organization. And so there there's certainly a call for for better transparency or better data, more complete view of performance, but the quotas become, in in many cases, an area of frustration and not the tool for growth or a friction point that we want. So let me stop there too, David. How how does this resonate with your experience? Have you heard some of these things from salespeople or from leaders as well? That sounds good. Yeah. I it's funny that you you said it, and you're right on the mark. Right? Like, you're, like, expecting, members of our of our teams and organizations that are, you know, paid to be creative, you know, sort of arguers. You know, I'm not surprised in some some ways to see that, like, one in five of them thinks it's, you know, thinks it's fair and the rest think it's unfair. But I do I I think it it underscores something again that we the the the thing I like about this day this data and sort of the insights that you guys are providing is, like, now we're starting to to actually capture data driven support of things we've understood kind of anecdotally through conversations with customers for years, which is true. Right? Like, if and I I remember throughout the years seeing different types of survey results, And consistently, when you survey sellers, and this ties into some things we'll talk about later, very few very very often, my plan is broken or the the calculation is wrong is low down the list of the things they care about. Right? What what's high on the list always is, I don't think my manager is great. Right? So I'm not getting enough support from my my manager. And second second or first, you know, those two swap each other is my quota's unfair. Right? Like or I don't know how it got set. And I think, you know, part of it, and we'll talk about this too, like, part of it is, absolutely what you said. Right? Like, how do we create more kind of transparency into how these numb how we're coming up with these numbers? Because they are the ultimate yardstick. Right? To your point, in every organization I've ever been in, attainment, we we dissect and look at quota attainment, you know, in a 100 different ways to try to understand sales performance. But it's striking that if that number, right, if that, if that denominator in that in that evaluation is wrong, then we're we're basically basing a lot of analysis on some pretty, you know, like, on a shaky foundation. And so, I'd I'd love that this sort of aligns again with, you know, what we've known and and what we're seeing. And I also think there's, like, a technology impediment that's existed historically to this too. Right? Like, if you think about our pretty little boxes on the slide, rollout is, like, one month tacked on to the end Yeah. Of this process. And so, when you start to see that compression, you know, it speaks back to the misaligned that we've been talking about. It's like, I'm reluctant to involve more constituents in setting the goals because that's make it more complicated, elongate the process, create even more compression, you know, at the end of this process when I have to roll out. And I just think, historically, the tooling hasn't been there to even allow people to think like, oh, we could open this up more broadly and and create an an environment where more transparency into how these goals are being set is is, offered or disseminated out to the organization. So That's right. And, hey, I just just realized that in the the copy paste of building our slide here, I must have missed that the the right chart here doesn't have the right headline. So just to be clear, thanks, Cindy, for for calling that out. But it's the the question here was, do you how I believe that I understand how my quota was set. So that's what I'm just saying that only 13% of people, believe they understand clearly how how the numbers were set, how they were, established, that sort of thing. So hopefully that provides a little bit of clarity. Thanks for calling that out. But Cindy Cindy, you're you're paying attention. I love it. So That actually, yeah, I was gonna say that's an Easter egg we just left in there to make sure people were paying attention. So we'll just we'll call it an intentional design choice on our part. Right? There you go. I'm good with that. Well, hi, David. Let me let me wrap this just by saying there there's a lot that we found in this data, a lot we found in the research that was super interesting, super compelling. We'll make that, report available to anybody that wants it for sure. But at the end of the day, what what we are finding and and what I feel like is worth talking more about is that how quickly misalignment and outdated processes and the way that we approach this planning just slips under the radar. It's it's a slow build for any organization, but the the need for it more regularly, even more frequently throughout the year, it's not gonna be a one and done kind of thing anymore when you have a COVID that hits or you introduce a new product or you have to regrettably downsize your your sales organization to some extent. Like, we've got all of these inflection points that happen throughout the year that invariably affect our ability and our need to plan. And so it's not really about this one big fix, but about fix, but about finding and addressing those points of friction before they come become baked into our processes and trying to to understand and do that more. So, David, with that, knowing that that these challenges are are common, they seem to be resonating, tell us more about how we go about addressing it. Alright. Well, I think to do that, we we have to have a little bit of a history lesson. And so we're gonna go back a 150,000 years, Curtis. We're gonna talk about, like, you know, what how human civilization where we started doing hunter you know, hunting and gathering. And then You got to peek into the the literature here, didn't you, David? Yeah. And then, you know, like, we we invented farming ten thousand years ago, and now we have hunters and farmers. Right? And then the industrial, revolution comes along and computational. And because every single presentation, there's a mandatory AI component that that we have to get that we're by law now, I think, required to insert. Here's your obligatory AI reference where we now are in the age of AI. Right? So, only kidding. Right? Like, we're not gonna go back a 150,000 and talk about sales performance management. But I will tell you, spoiler alert, they were using Excel even back then. But there there is an evolution, I think, within sales performance management, over the last twenty five years that's that's worth discussing because I think it has a lot of relevance to this conversation, Curtis, that you and I, have been having. And I wanna talk about that in a couple different dimensions. Right? So one is let's let's look at historically what what has happened in terms of capabilities and platforms from a sales performance management or SPM perspective. And then the other dimension is gonna be sort of direction and ownership, and there's a couple of of areas that we'll drill into there. So with that as kind of the background background, let's, let's go ahead and jump into it. So for anyone that's seen me present or seen an Argano presentation, this sort of conceptual framework is gonna look very familiar. Right? If you think about sales performance management as a program, generally, it has three kind of main areas, at least from our perspective. There's planning, which we've been talking a lot about. Right? Sales planning, territory planning, account segmentation, quota setting, comp plan design, expense budgeting, analysis. All of these things, right, that are sort of that planning exercise, planning and modeling exercise. And the outcomes of that that we have to communicate it out to the go to market organization. So as a seller right now, here's my target, here's, you know, my territory, here's how I'm gonna get paid. Then there's the execution piece of this. Right? The execution is truly fundamentally incentive compensation management. So, you know, this is like making sure I connect to the data and do the crediting, make sure the right people get credit and calculate it, put money into a person's checking account and give them reports so they understand transparently. And and it creates trust. Like, I understand the calculation. I understand why I got paid this way. Plus, to your point, Curtis, like, all of the ongoing data maintenance that has to take place. Right? Like, we don't live in a world, unfortunately, most of us that's static where once a year we make a plan and that plan just, you know, carries form forward seamlessly, you know, year over year. Things change. We have to adapt. People come into the organization, leave the organization, competitive situation. Whatever that is, we have to manage all that data and keep modifying it because it forms the foundation, for that ICM process. And then finally, analysis. Right? Now I have planning and execution data. How do I leverage that for insights, participant performance, team performance, often against quotas, we were talking about, or plan and program performance. And, of course, again, obligatory AI reference. Like, you know, how do we leverage sort of AI and analytics to basically make better decisions about this program and ultimately about the business. So Yeah. And and when I when I look at this, David, too, you know, I I I always have this distinction between sales performance management as a technology, as a as a provider of sales performance management solutions, and also what is happening to manage the performance of our sales organization. Right? And I think what I love about this is is I think we recognize that there's no silver bullet. I I said this kind of tongue in cheek sometimes that there's no technology that's gonna solve for bad process. But connecting this back to to misalignment, it's happening. We see the disconnect between these areas because of organizational design issues and and the kind of friction that we were talking about earlier. And so I think what I love about looking at this and the evolution of the technology and the evolution of the way that we talk about a program like this is that we're starting to see the inherent connectivity between related processes that sometimes we're solving for despite our organizational design challenges. We know that the incentives are directly connected to the the territories that we, assign, quotas that we set. They're they're all related, things like that. And so technology kinda gives us the opportunity to rethink our workflows and the connection between people process and data and and kind of identify where the value lies between all of these things as well. I think that's it's exactly right. And, you know, if you think about, like, the sort of historical perspective on this, I've been in the space for about twenty five years, which is by no means a coincidence why I wanted to go twenty five years back. But, you know, like, I I I was, you know, at the beginning. And twenty five years ago, this this would have been a one circle chart. Right? It was That was the only thing we were doing. We were trying to figure out, like, how do we do instead of compensation management, better. And it was all on premise too. Right? So, like, after a few years though, we had, you know, some data, probably sitting in an on premise database, Oracle or Sybase database at a customer. But, you know, I call that analysis one, you know, one dot o where we're like, oh, we have some of this data. We can start looking at it and making some observations. And then SaaS comes along and sort of knocks all of the infrastructure pieces off the table. And suddenly, now we have a lot of execution data across a bunch of customers, and that led us to sort of analysis two dot o. We're like, oh, now we can start to look across customers and start to, you know, see, like, compare these results. And I think fifteen years ago, planning really entered the picture. Right? So suddenly, you had, like, a conversation emerging around, like, territory optimization and goal setting and sales planning. And, really, organizations like Varicent starting to pull all of this together to your point from a techno from a capabilities and platform perspective, I can start to do all of these things in one place on a unified platform, which means I have all of this data sitting together, which means now that anal that analysis piece really starts to create a comprehensive picture of all sales performance management. And I I would argue again AI, just to insert it one more time. It's gonna change, you know, like, it's sitting on top of this data now. Right? So and it's gonna change not just operationally the people that are, like, operating and supporting these processes, but also the the the frontline sellers, as as we start to see, and I know Varicent has a vision for this as well, as we start to see these capabilities mature, I think we truly I mean, it's dangerous to say, but I think we're kind of in the golden age of SPM, Curtis. I think we're, like, finally sort of reaching some sort of nirvana state where we have all of these pieces in place, and we finally have these tools to start really truly taking a stab at analyzing this in a comprehensive way. Okay. So that's the capabilities and platform discussion. Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about revenue and operation sort of direction and ownership. So I wanna talk about this, again, in two dimensions. We'll start with the revenue, conversation first. So if you think about again, I'm gonna sort of personalize this. I have spent quite a bit of time, in addition to consulting, in, like, various professional services and customer success roles for software companies. So I'm gonna use a little bit of a software, you know, spin on this. But, you know, if you go back again twenty five years ago, you had VP of Sales, let's call it version one. Right? And this person had a bunch of hunters slash farmers running around, you know, hybrid role, trying to acquire new logos and then managing those accounts. But let's be honest, at least in the software world, it was a perpetual license model. Right? So, like, that that hunter farmer got a huge upfront check from the customer and then wasn't doing much farming, they're on to the next, you know, they they were doing more hunting than farming. And it wasn't customer success wasn't a thing, like, who cares about making it successful and operating and getting value out of it? I got all your money upfront or most of it, and I'm on to the next. So version two though is, and again, let's be clear. This was not because they wanted to. This is because we're all universally forced to. Version two, we now have to have customer success because now we're in the SaaS world, and now there's a thing called a contract renewal. And suddenly, I don't have all your money upfront. I gotta fight for those dollars at every contract renewal. So now I need both. Right? I need sales, which is focused on, you know, probably hunting mostly, but maybe has some account manage you know, still some account management function. But I need customer success. I need this part of the organization that's focused on value that's that's, you know, making sure that we're gonna get that renewal. And that's sort of version two. And I think, really, that brings us to sort of the the end state or or at least the current sort of point in maturation on this side, which is CRO, chief revenue officer. Right? Like this sort of recognition that all of this any revenue facing or revenue touching customer facing function probably needs to have unified leadership, unified strategy, unified, you know, sort of perspective. And I think, you know, if you look at all of the data, and I'm curious to get your thoughts too on this, like, more and more, this this sort of chief revenue officer role is becoming more and more prominent, and we're seeing it across industry in a lot of places, become more more and more the norm where all of these functions are sort of being brought into, you know, into single leadership. So I guess I'll pause there, Curtis. Thoughts? You know, does that resonate? Is that what you're saying too? Yeah. I I think I think it's fascinating. I think if you look even just the last five years, how roles and titles and these boundaries keep evolving. Like, who owns that SPM agenda? How how these the the ownership pieces? You know, there there certainly is a functional part of it, and there's a career development aspect of it, like how are we creating new new pathways for leadership and those sorts of things. But, I'll I'll also say that it's positive and that the the CRO or the rev ops role versus sales ops role, it's it's more symbolic of this need for alignment. I think, you know, it it is the attempt to some extent to kind of fix the organizational design challenges that we've, encountered over the last decades that we kinda designed our way into where we don't have centralized leadership. And so when you can get the transitions right, not just in movement to a new title, but the the functional transitions of the business processes to have shared accountability and ownership, that really is the the difference between a smooth Gartamooka engine and and one that stalls out on you when you need it to as much. Right? So that that ownership clarity matters more probably now than ever, I would say. Yeah. I agree. And and I think, you know, to your point on the operation side, you when I started doing this twenty five years ago, nine times out of 10, I was talking to, you know, a chief people officer. Right? Like, the person it was an HR conversation, both obviously, from a design perspective and a modeling perspective, but also operationally. Right? Like, the thought was web comp is HR. And so, you know, like, a lot of the operational teams supporting actually the ICM piece of it would work, you know, still report up through, the human resources or people office. And I think a few years in after some high profile, stories in the news, you know, people started to realize, oh, there's actually a pretty important audit piece of this that we need to be concerned with, would sort of naturally lend itself more to kind of the finance office. So then more and more I was talking to CFOs, you know, there was sort of this understanding, like, HR probably still doing the design, but now operationally, finance is is leading the charge in terms of supporting, you know, the payment and calculation process. And then, you know, I think sales operations was born out of, like, a hybrid of sales and finance. Right? If I think about sales operations, a sales operations leader sort of has the the, you know, it's like the heart of, or I should say the brain of a financial analyst, but the heart of a sales rep. Right? Like, combined to get into, you know, a a hybrid person that can that can do both because I need to start you know, like, this was sort of a recognition that, hey, we need to be managing sales, not just sort of intuitively and and from a humane through a human lens, but also, like, with rigor and pipeline forecasting and processes and all the things we needed to wrap around that. And I think that's also transformed a bit in recent years into this revenue operations role, which again, you know, I think is a further alignment with the CRO kind of, you know, so like so both of these things are happening. Right? Like, revenue is kinda getting consolidated under a single leader. Operations is sort of starting to get consolidated under a single leader. And I know many of you on the phone are probably thinking to yourself, like, okay. Great, David. Like, but I don't live in this world. Right? I don't have a CRO, and I don't have a head of revenue operations, and I haven't, like, organizationally pull all of this stuff into one place. And that's okay. Right? Because like Curtis said, this is not just about, like, creating necessarily these organizational structures, but but building alignment between the constituents that you do have to start making sure you're having the right conversations. And so, I think where we where we'd like to go next is is to walk you through, like, what are some of those conversations looking like with customers. Right? And what are some of the things that we've been discussing, with them? Before I do that, Curtis, any, like, final thoughts on sort of this this, you know, conceptually, you know, like, this this evolution that we've seen together, over time towards, consolidated revenue and revenue operations, functions? No. Just just just kind of what I'll read out what I said before that I think getting the transition right and also being willing to start small even if you don't have all the resources that you need to fully reorganize your organization. Like, there are ways to do for that, and I think that's some of the things you're gonna be chatting about. Sounds good. Alright. So let's very quickly, we're gonna take you through a couple examples. And I I would say, just as a foundation, one point I'll make is, you know, when we come in, from an organic perspective and have advisory type conversations with customers, it generally follows a similar workflow or or sort of phased approach. Right? We start with an assessment. We gotta figure out, like, where are you today, and and what are the challenges you're facing. Inevitably, through that exercise, we identify, you know, areas where technology, or process improvement could you could benefit from that. So there's some selection exercise we go through to figure out, like, okay, what pieces are we gonna focus on and what how are we gonna solve those, you know, solve those sort of discrete areas, of focus. And then we build a road map. Right? We say, okay. Like, now that we know and we've laid all these sort of pieces out, what's the right order of operations to approach kind of tackling them? Because most of the time, you're not gonna big bang something. You know? You're gonna sort of to to Curtis Schroeder's earlier point, you gotta intelligently sort of think about how do you sequence and move towards that end goal. So couple of, like, specific examples. One is, over the last year, we started conversations with a global telecommunications company. Primarily started that discussion through the CPO. Right? So HR owns incentives. They brought us in. And as we were, talking to the to the CPO and the HR team, you know, the the initial sort of thought, their self assessment was, we think we have kind of incentives challenge, but one thing that's really been plaguing us is, we are now the de facto reporting team for all quota attainment across the company. And, of course, we're like, well, that's interesting. Do you set the quotas? They're like, no. We're like, do you have Just report on it. Do you have visibility into how they're set? No. We just inherit this data because we need it, obviously, for calculation purposes. But because we are now that data store, everyone across the company is coming to us with these reporting and, you know, analysis requests. And we're, you know, we're an HR operations team. Like, we're not built or sized to have a remit as a global, reporting arm. And so through that conversation, we're like, well, who does own this? CFO and and, you know, resources on in the in the finance office. So we had to broaden the conversation immediately, bring those people in, have conversations with them. And, essentially, what the assessment ultimately identified for us is like, hey. You don't have necessarily just an incentives problem. There's some things that we can fix there. You do have a planning problem. Right? And and we need to really sort of dig into, like, how you're how are you setting those goals, and and and so as we migrated more into, like, the solutioning selection piece of this, we've started to to create momentum and interest in, like, can we solve this planning problem? And then figure out how to solve maybe some of the subsequent, you know, incentives and and execution and and eventually analysis pieces. And that's where we are. Right? Like, now we're in conversations with Varicent and the customer around this building's road map, which has, like, planning as a phase one. So bringing all of these sort of disparate finance teams into at least one platform to to start setting goals. And then phase two, you know, sort of replacing their legacy ICM solution. But, really, the ultimate brass ring is phase three. It's like now we have all this data in one place. HR team is no longer the intersection reporting, team. Like, now we can serve up this information to all the constituents that are interested in it, and we don't have to, you know, worry about, you know, the the HR team being overwhelmed with all of these requests. So that's that's sort of one one, specific example. I think the other one was, or is a conversation that's unfolding with the North American health care company. This one, we came came into the discussion through their sales operations and CRO, and quickly kind of expanded to the CPO and HR team. And and then in this case, there was an existing Verizon customer they have. They had already had incentives for some time, and they were using it for a single business unit. But, but eventually, we were able to, sort of broaden again sort of the aperture of what we're looking at. Take a look at what they were doing in a couple other business units where they didn't have technology in place. Get the sales operations and CRO excited about, like, the planning capabilities that were associated with this. And, really, you know, like, where we are now is, you know, building that road map to enhancing what they have from an ICM and incentives perspective, but also planning is phase two and eventually analysis. And to me, kind of the key themes here are, like, oftentimes, we'll come into a complex organization, and they'll say, like, we have this problem. But then, like, as you start to discuss with them and and the executives, you realize, actually, it's a broader problem. It's often not an incentives problem. It's upstream. And I think, you know, sort of the punch line that I often come away with is less and less, Curtis, it's a calculator problem and more and more it's a planning and goal setting problem. Right? And and I think that's representative of all the things that we've talked about already. Like, we've got the right people interested in solving the problem. We've got technology that can help us solve the problem. We're finally at a point where we're starting to, you know, have all of the tools and all of the things aligned to have that discussion. Yep. You're right. Okay. So let's, you know, let's sort of start to land the plane here if we can, Curtis. So I think, you know, like, if you think about revenue operations, at the center of, like, all of these conversations, or I think it's a theme that we've, you know, that we've laid out for everyone today. You know, managing kind of that CEO, CFO goals and budgets discussion, managing, you know, potentially the CRO and CPO comp and capacity conversation. But again, I don't I don't I don't look at this necessarily as, like, you have to organizationally create this. It's it's a concept, and it's aspirational. Right? So as long you don't necessarily need just revenue operations as an entity. You need to drive these discussions and bring these intersection and create this connective tissue between all of these different teams. I think the other thing that, I'd love for you to touch on, Chris, if you will, is, like, how do we measure like, how are you guys thinking about, like, how do we measure success or how do we measure in in improvement? And what are some of the things we should focus on from a KPI perspective when you're going through this exercise? Yeah. And this is another part of that that chapter of the quota illusion. I'll hit it here just kinda quickly, and we can always go back, you know, if you want somebody wants to read the report and and hear more about it. But it kind of in that spirit of centralized revenue operations, thinking a little bit differently about kind of shared metrics and KPIs, a a theme kept surfacing, of course, that is that quota is central, but it's not enough for understanding performance. Right? Like, that's what we kind of talked about earlier a little bit. And so what we tried to do is I started I started to explore some different KPIs and some different ways of thinking. And these are are not, like, transformative type thing, but oftentimes things you can do with data that you already have. And and one of them was this idea on the top here, the idea of, like, look. Instead of looking at total quota attainment, look at median attainment and team distribution as well as kind of a starting point. So instead of just looking at averages, looking at totals, you can start to get a better sense of how your typical sales reps are performing and not just the the your top 10% are carrying the number, and we think all is well. But, really, we can't scale or or adapt or adjust. And so something like this where you can actually look like what's our median attainment. Maybe there's a plus or five minus 5% around that. You see that kinda shaded gray bar. We go like, well, how many of our reps are kind of falling in around that, or where do we have this kind of wonky skewed performance, curve that kind of that that sits in here? And so you can start to spot risk and breakdowns before they hit our p and l's. The second one on the bottom is one that I'm really starting to love more and more. And with all the territory data that we have today, all this kind of focus on quota, there there is a potential in looking at kind of the equity ratios between those two things. Because in the spirit of of alignment, these all these two should be very, very well connected. And so if we actually look at what we're using to define a territory, the potential of a territory, and comparing that to the quota that we're setting, you can kind of start to get a a visualization across these two axes, for example, where, you know, how do our, our our ratios for each of our sales reps kinda fall within or outside of this boundary of of a reasonable ratio between what we're assigning and what we're what we're actually, giving them in terms of potential. And that's good on both sides. You know, for a rep that is over assigned in their territory, you're gonna be leaving, meat on the bone in terms of what you you know, what they can individually accomplish, and so there's probably potential being unrealized. And then on the other side of it, you know, if we're giving them a huge, quota without much territory, you know, there there's some problems there too. But there's something some data points like this start to speak to centralization alignment and just thinking a little bit differently with the some of the data that we have. No. I love this. You know, to me, like, I think you and I, you know, like, there's some of us out there that are true, like, SPM data nerds. So, like, thinking about, like, how how do we actually it's hard to quantify this and go after it is fantastic. I mean, I think in the spirit of that too, Curtis, like, at Argano, we're really starting to think about revenue transformation as as sort of this broader discussion. Right? Like, I think we've already talked today about, like, SPM should be a broader discussion. Well, you know, as you might imagine, it gets even broader than that. And, really, if you think about sort of end to end revenue transformation, it involves all of the things that we've talked about today, whether it's sales planning or how do you communicate that out to the organization, how do you manage incentives, how do you do modeling around that. So all of these pieces and the ongoing changes that you have to manage. But interspersed with that is obviously the seller experience itself. Right? It's like how are you managing your day to day activity in CRM and how you configuring and and pricing and quoting with with customers. And what is the right intersection of sort of sales performance management in and and how do we introduce that into the day to day lives of sellers and sales managers? So, so this is kind of a conceptual framework that we've been building. Obviously, plugging Varicent, our partner Varicent in, you guys in where, it makes absolute sense and where you have expertise and and sort of platform capability that can really drive to, optimization in those areas. And along those lines, you know, if you're interested, you'll see in the upper, corner of of, of the webinar, this register for workshop button. And that workshop really is an opportunity, if you're interested, to have Argano, come in and and have this conversation with you. Right? Like, let's understand, like, where are you from an SPM perspective, a CRM, you know, architecturally, what what do you have set up inside your organizations? And the outcome of that would really be, you know, kind of a couple of work streams. One, where we could really dig into that SPM side of things and help build up that road map that could include, obviously, embarrassing, implementation and enablement and support, But also the CRM and CPQ and financial aspects too because all of it, again, at the end of the day, from a revenue leader or revenue operations perspective, you're probably interested in all of those things. So we wanna really take a hard look at, you know, how all of those things intersect and and and how they fit together. And if you think about the outcomes, and, obviously, we'll share this material, you know, coming out of that workshop, really, you should have a very good idea of what does that future state look like from an architectural perspective as well as as Chris and I have said, what are the right kind of intelligent phases for how you would approach, moving from kinda where you are today, in terms of SPM and revenue sophistication to to where you wanna get to. So alright. With that, we're gonna bring our structured remarks to a close and open it up to, to hopefully, Ola, if we have time, some q and a. I think we have a few minutes where, the audience can ask Curtis, and I some questions. But I and before that, I wanted to just say thank you, Curtis. I loved today's conversation as well as all the preparation that we did going into it. As always, you brought some really insightful, information to the discussion. So thanks very much. Yeah. We love working with Argano for sure and, a lot of great really great work to be done with with companies just like those that are on the call with us today. So appreciate the opportunity. Alright. Thanks, David. Thanks, Curtis. Great session. If anybody has any questions they'd like to ask for either David or Curtis, please plug them into the q and a question. And, again, before you drop off, feel free to register for the workshop. It is a complimentary session that you do with David and the team, to see where you are on your SPM and your CPQ journey and all of that. I do see one question right now. It is directed for David. It's asking, what is the what is driving companies and people to have these revenue transformation discussions? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, not to cheat and use some of the content that that, you know, our discussion that we already shared, but I do think, you know, more and more, at least in the conversations I'm having, the there's a recognition that it's not a calculation problem or just a calculation problem. It's, you know, there the all of these things, as Curtis pointed out rightly, is they're all connected. Right? And so I think, you know, from if you think about, like, we've spent twenty five years primarily solving that incentives problem, but now we have all of these other capabilities and all these things we can do to start solving the planning analysis. So to me, although that's it. Right? Like, I think leaders are recognizing, like, okay. Because it can be, like, I'm I'm not even on the road map yet, and I need to get on the road map, but a lot of conversations are, like, I'm on the road map. I may be two steps in. What's next? Right? So, like, wherever you are on that journey, there's an opportunity for us to come in and and have that conversation, and I think that's what's that's what's sort of that broadening of that aperture is really what's driving our leaders to have that discussion. Great. Thank you. We have another question, for Curtis. How many survey respondents are in the revenue operations category versus, sales and and sales off? Oh, I love that. That that you want me to narrow it out on some data? That's, okay. Whoever that is, love to chat more with you on this. But no. So we had 1,400, people respond to the survey. Of that, I think a 150 or so were c suite members, 622 of them were revenue leaders, and then, I think close to 600 were kind of would fall in the sales and revenue operations bucket. Now we we kind of had a little bit of overlap in a couple of those categories because we would call somebody who's a revenue operations leader or sales operations leader. They're a revenue leader. Right? So we kinda created some slices of data to look at these larger groupings of roles. But particularly for sales and rev ops, it was about 600 people that were in that part of the sample. And what I found kind of interesting about this, I wish I wish we had more longitudinal data to to kind of look at the evolution. But, David, you were talking kind of the evolution of these roles over time. Right now, like, the the folks identified in the survey, like, about 200 or a little under 200 are classifying themselves as revenue operations leaders versus sales operations leaders. So about a third of that sample that fall into the sales or rev ops bucket are in revenue operations roles versus sales op roles. So I thought that was kind of interesting as the as teams are evolving, like, that title, that role, that function that, again, speaks symbolically and practically towards alignment across the revenue function, like, that number is growing. And so I can I can't say it with data, and I'd be careful about what I say with data, what I don't say with data? But with this one, I would assume that that number is growing from years previous and will continue to grow, as the the revenue aspect and the more encompassing aspect of those functions start to grow as well. Well, I'm gonna hold you to that because we're gonna do this again next year, and you're gonna come back and tell us, you know, like I can't wait. We can't wait. Yes. But I think just to add a little bit of of of my flavor to that too, like, last year, I I did some research into, like, the the CRO title and sort of how more common and it was. I I wanna say there was numerous articles written about, like, how CRO was the fastest growing title, Ola, on LinkedIn. So for what it's worth, if you look at, like, titles on LinkedIn, there's a clear sort of trajectory in that direction where more and more, the CRO role and and buying but, you know, corresponding to operations side of that coin, I assume revenue operations is is following along. But we'll have Curtis come back and actually give us the real data, next year. I'll hold him to it. It'll be a lot of fun. We'll get it scheduled now. Thanks, David. Thanks, Curtis. This was really, really great session. I appreciate you both for being here. If anybody has any additional questions, this is the chance. We've got one more minute before we wrap things up. Alright. Seems like you've given the audience a lot to think about. Thanks again for your time, and have a wonderful day. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Take care.