Kate McCullough

Hi everybody. We are here with RevOps Review again, and today we have Lisa Kelly, who's co-hosting with me, ex-Talkdesk, LogMeIn, NICE inContact RevOps guru. And then we also have Christina Liu who is ex-Zendesk. Christina, can you give us a little bit about your background?

Christina Liu

Of course. Hi everyone. Christina Liu here. I am currently the Chief Accounting Officer at Confluent. It is a data in motion company. We went public mid-last year. Prior to Confluent I was the Chief Accounting Officer at Zendesk. Was there for close to eight years. Joined in the early days when the company was less than $100 million revenue run rate. And the next seven and a half or eight years have been an amazing journey to grow the company to over a billion in revenue run rate and 10X the size of employee base. And of course, went through a lot of the different pricing and packaging changes, new product changes, upmarket, enterprise focused. And so looking forward to an interesting conversation today about RevOps.

Kate McCullough

Thank you. Yeah, one of the things I'm most excited about, Christina, is that she's just done this whole journey and has lots of wisdom to share with hyper-growth startups that are starting the journey of sticking in their tools. And she brings this unique finance perspective to the RevOps side of the house in terms of the bridge between sales and finance. And I know that Lisa in her background has experienced this from the RevOps side of working with CFOs and all of the different considerations that you have to have from sales, to CS, to finance, to RevRec, and the different pieces and parts that really, really matter, and then if you don't get right early, might explode later. So to kick off the conversation, Christina, I wanted start with a broad question which is, what does finance really need to care about? Why do they need to care about sales tools and processes early in a company's growth?

Christina Liu

That's such a broad question, Kate. Maybe two or three points I can think about. One is that when you're early, you're doing a lot of things for the first time, and without realizing it you are setting the cadence of how you do things in the future. So of course, the foundation is very important, whether that's tools or enablement or process. I think the first time you're doing a lot of the things as an early company, it's important to reflect on that and think about the scalability. And that's something that finance cares deeply about because it plays into your cost structure when you become a bigger company. And commonly, once a company reaches product market fit, sales is the largest cost in your P and L. So of course finance cares about sales, sales, efficiency, and the tools and process and everything that is there to support the sales process to operate at a high level of efficiency so that we can scale.

Christina Liu

And on the accounting side, having been the Chief Accounting Officer for a number of years, I of course care really about the quoting process and the billing process, because that data directly feeds into the revenue process. Later on I'm sure we're going to talk about the tools available out there. Regardless of how good your RevRec tools are, if you get dirty data from your upstream process, which I've experienced a lot, a lot of lessons learned, then your downstream RevRec tool is useless, or you end up spending a lot of manual effort to clean up the data and to build the unnatural processes to clean up the data from upstream. So from accounting and RevRec perspective, I care deeply about the quoting process and the tools that enable that.

Lisa Kelly

I would say there's been a lot of situations where I've come in and seen a lot of pain being given to the accounting team because of the tools that have been chosen in the beginning part of the sales process, like how the transactional pieces end up causing a ton of pain downstream, and we've had to fix a lot of that. So when you think about revenue recognition and what's important there, which tools do you think should come first in a rapidly growing organization to accommodate RevRec's needs?

Christina Liu

Well, I think there are, like I said, a number of RevRec tools that are out there and pros and cons between these different ones, depending on how much customization that you are willing to do and you want to do and you want to maintain. Excuse me. But going back to my earlier point of the quoting tool, sometime, at least from my experience, it was an afterthought, I guess. It was not really paid attention that it deserved in the early part because we were small. We were just trying to do whatever it takes to close the deals, and nobody really gave a lot of thoughts on the process and those on the capability and the flexibility of the quoting tool.

Christina Liu

Going back to my earlier Zendesk days, it was very much product-led growth at the initial stage and the very typical trial and buy experience using credit cards. I don't think any of us really spent a lot of time to think about in the future how much complexity we could build on top of that, especially once we started to go up market to work with some of the enterprise customers. And our own customer base grew as well. Even if we didn't want to target enterprise customers, some of our SMB customers started to grow and started to have specific needs. And then that over the years put a lot of strain on the upstream tools, especially around quoting, and we ended up building a lot of the band-aid solutions, if you will, because there was always a trade-off between speed and scalability, and it wasn't really a choice. It was just all hands on deck trying to get this done, trying to get that done.

Christina Liu

And over the years before I realized, you kind of have this spaghetti web and cobbled together process and a lot of these backdoor solutions to compensate for what the tool is not capable of doing. And all of that really became issues of revenue recognition in the later days. Even if we wanted to implement some new features in the revenue recognition tool and also in the 606 adoption, trying to cut our data in a different way, we realized, oh, that data's not available because of the upstream systems not being able to be flexible enough to cut data in the ways that we wanted or link data or... It was just, there was a lot of the gaps in between the quoting process and tools and also the revenue process and tools. So not answering your question very clearly...

Lisa Kelly

No, you are.