Kate McCullough:

Hey, everyone. This is Kate McCullough. I'm the co-founder of Nue.io, and you're here with us on The RevOps Review podcast. I have with me today my co-founder Tina Kung, our CTO, and she is a veteran from Zuora and Salesforce CPQ, Oracle CPQ — all the CPQs and building platforms. And I also have Max Maeder, who is the founder of FoundHQ, which is a hiring platform that matches companies with experts from the GTM space and systems and RevOps. So Max, do you want to add some color to that on your intro?

Max Maeder:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm looking forward to this conversation with both of you. So a little more kind of color into the world I'm coming out of, I've basically been living go-to-market systems and RevOps for the better part of the last decade. I started in consulting, found my way moving into talent acquisition and resourcing strategy. And then about four years ago, launched FoundHQ, which has had an evolution over those last four years which I think gives us a unique perspective and insights on the market. We really started as a pure play, essentially a freelancers’ marketplace niched down to only focus on Salesforce — so how do we remove all the friction to connect companies with a network of pre-vetted Salesforce freelancers? That has since evolved into both a hiring platform as well as advisory [functions] around resourcing strategy — How should we structure and scale systems teams, ops teams, etc.? And [it] has also expanded into executive search, and then helping companies actually staff up those teams.

So it gives us a good perspective on the ground — of things companies are struggling with, how these decisions are getting made, and ultimately, what effective and potentially ineffective solutions to those problems look like. So, looking forward to getting into all of that more.

Kate McCullough:

Awesome. You do nothing, clearly. So what we're talking about today — super excited — is Salesforce's importance as infrastructure. And you're all like, "Okay, what does that mean?" Well, we're going to break it down, and when we talk about it, [focus on] what is the impact not just to your sales team but other parts of the business — ops, CS, finance, even product and engineering. Why does it matter to you and why is it not just a CRM? So we're going to walk through this today, and go through a bunch of different questions and think through how you can actually make Salesforce work for you against your business objectives more than you thought possible. And we care about this. Nue is native to Salesforce. We have a robust platform that does massive calculations outside of Salesforce, [and then] writes directly to its objects. And a huge amount of our passion is actually for Salesforce as a platform and usability for sales reps, but it extends [beyond sales] way more than that. It's post sales. It's product teams. It's everyone. So we're going to dive into this today.

But I'm going to take a step back before we jump in and talk about one fundamental thing, about the internal culture around internal tools. So Max, I'm curious [what] your perspective is. What is the culture around tooling internally, and what do you see in the Salesforce ecosystem? You have a vast number of use cases for the different companies you work with.

Max Maeder:

Yeah. I think this topic is something we write about a lot [and] talk about a lot because our customer base really sits at both ends of the spectrum, right? So we work with very early stage startups who have a small or non-existent RevOps [team] and systems team in place, and then we work with Fortune 500s that have hundreds within each of those teams. And then that sort of middle bucket is where you start to see the paths kind of diverge in terms of how they plan on investing and scaling these disciplines.

And I think it really does come down to a pretty critical stage during early stage growth, particularly in SaaS where you look at any startup series A, series B even, [and] the team is spread thin. You don't yet have all of the headcount you [would need for certain teams]. This often means functions that will eventually be larger teams, like the internal tools team, need a place to live when it's just a few people, and it might not be the permanent place that that reporting structure actually lives. So typically for internal tools and go-to-market systems, specifically ,it falls under the purview of RevOps. And when [company] needs are relatively simple, I think that structure can work fine. Without proper systems leadership [over time], I think internal tools can fall into a routine where they operate in a more reactive capacity.

Problems arise and [internal tools teams are] basically told to go solve that problem, and they do, and they can do that effectively. While that's okay in the beginning, I think companies need to eventually develop a more sophisticated internal tool strategy and an actual product road map, so that they can meet whatever complex needs the business will have — but do so by getting out in front of them so that [those needs] don't become prohibitive and blockers. And what can happen, from what I've seen countless times, is that the wrong perception of what that internal tools team does can take root.

So in those early stages when the group is more reactive, they're viewed as admins, or as a help desk responding to tickets. And they're not really viewed as a center of internal product innovation, because that's not really the scale and scope of the fixes and solutions that they're delivering. But then an organizational culture can form around that perception. And at that point, I think it becomes really difficult to shift how the value of the internal tools function is viewed, which then impedes investment in it, and therefore the capacity of what [the team is] eventually able to deliver. And so it can become self-fulfilling in that regard.

I think in the context of this, perception really is reality. And so I think Salesforce, as soon as possible, needs to be in the hands of a team that can shape the perception of its value, can evangelize the function, can market features internally and really drive innovation around the tool and a lot of that does come down to, yeah, how it's positioned, viewed, perceived internally. And because again in those early stages when it is a bit more of [a] tactical, reactive, build-things-on-the-fly type of discipline — if that takes hold and sticks, it's difficult to reposition it for what it could be. And the ways that you can extract [the] maximum value from internal tools spend and go-to-market system spend.