RevOps That Works: Pricing Guardrails & Process Alignment

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Howdy. Welcome back to another episode of Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing.

I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We're here at the CellWell conference, and I have Westlyn Whitaker, and she is an outsourced chief revenue officer that helps with revenue operations. I'm excited for this episode because I just recently got my HubSpot certification and revenue operations, and it's starting to be quite a buzzword that's floating around. Those came on the scene not too long ago, and sales and marketing have been integrated,

and now you're pulling in finance, and you need to know what those numbers are when you're selling. I'm excited to have you here. Thanks so much for having me. Why don't you just define for the audience what revenue operations is, and then we can start it from there.

Awesome. So revenue operations is I define it because I think that there are a lot of loose definitions, but the way that I define it, it is the backbone of your company. It is the integration of sales, marketing, customer success, finance, operations. It is the glue that connects all the tissue together. So oftentimes, we're looking at sales, and we want to see what the numbers are doing

in sales, but we're not thinking about all of the processes and all of the pieces and all of the things that have to go into that. So essentially, what we do is we bridge the gap between all of those departments that aren't talking. We put in place processes. We help define KPIs.

That's essentially what we do. Marketing people got to learn the finance lingo, and salespeople need to understand what are the dollars and cents to what they're doing, and then finance needs to get visibility of all those things that are happening. And if you can speak that language as a marketer or a salesperson, you're going to have a lot more success with the C-suite because this is the language of the C-suite.

Yes, exactly. Really understanding where you as a salesperson or as a marketing person, I know that I need to close business, but if I'm sitting in front of a customer and they say I need a 20% discount, you need to understand what that 20% discount means for your organization. Because finance, they look at bottom up. They're like, okay, we've broken even.

Now this is our profitability as a salesperson or even a marketing. You're thinking top down, how much can I discount? And so a lot of times that is broken within organizations and companies don't really know how to fix it. Like they keep throwing money and tools and systems, but it's really making sure that you have smooth processes that flow from one step to the next step.

Let's start to break that down, like maybe take an example and start to break it down so people can just reflect on that and understand what you're saying. Because when you say, I'm going to give a discount of 20% or whatever it is, you don't know how that's affecting your cost of goods sold. And those numbers, like you said, are just given out there. Don't give a discount below this point, but based on the product you sell, there could

be different price points based on that. And I've seen a lot of times organizations wanting to get the deal so bad or the RFP, they want to get it so low and they're not talking to finance and they don't understand all the numbers and they bid something at cost or below cost. And then there's, okay, we got to sell this other thing or here and this is like our loss leader getting the door, but it really shouldn't be that way.

I've also seen on the marketing side, many times websites, people are building websites and then there's all kinds of things that get added without change orders and it adds to the cost and it eats away at the margin and you get in a rough situation where you're talking to the clients and hey, I'm trying to run a business here or we're trying to run a business and getting those numbers right. I think that's so critical as knowing your numbers.

Absolutely. And when we think about how do we, because when we're working with organizations for like, we're building a house. So let's build this house together and building the house really starts with finance or even before that, maybe with the operations, right? What does it cost for us to produce this widget?

What does it cost for us to provide the service? Because sometimes you're like, oh, it's just people and we're paying their salary anyway, but how much of a person's time has to be allocated to this job? You start there with that information and then finance adds all their financial models to it and then you say, okay, this is our cost. This is how much it costs.

But then the executive leadership says, that's great. You want to make 60% margin on that. Okay. So you want to make 60% margin. And so for sales, what they need to understand is, okay, how low are you willing to go? Is 30% okay?

Is 40% margin? That conversation needs to happen. And then on the marketing side, we need to understand what is the cost to acquire a lead, right? So if the value of a customer that we're getting is $100,000 and we put $10,000 in marketing, to acquire that customer, is that okay?

Or do you want it to be $1,000? If you don't know your numbers and there's not a process, because a lot of times everybody knows their numbers, but there's not a process that makes this easy. So a salesperson gets an opportunity to get a job and they just get really excited. And instead of consulting with the right people, they just quote. One of the things I've seen in marketing a lot is you get to a cost per lead, right?

Or a cost per customer, CAC, right? And basically it works. It's not broken. And then people get bored and they want to fix it or they want to get that number looks to be too high. Maybe it is $10,000, but you're closing a million dollar deal who cares and that's working.

And they're like, let's see if we can get fancy and get this number down more and then they break something. Also, these numbers are just like, ah, that's like when you started talking, my sales brain kicked on and I was like, no, you have to know the numbers to understand what's going on of what the widget costs and what your company is trying to do because it's going to eat that way at margin, which will eventually affect your compensation structure.

And I think that for leadership teams, the key for them is to equip your salespeople with their discount authority. Say you are able to discount with no approval up to 15% between 15 and 30% has to go to your manager. Anything over that has to go to the executive, right? And again, that's a process.

And that's a process that most people don't even have in place. It's like, what can I do myself as a salesperson versus what else needs to happen? Because one thing that I recommend with organizations, a lot of times we have salespeople that live in their little bubble and they don't actually know what happens in the manufacturing plant in the field, right? So we need to get them out of their bubble and they need to go see that it takes two

hours to load up this truck to fulfill the customer's order. And when you make a change at the last minute, it takes another 45 minutes and that puts everything else back. Or like you're trying to rush somebody to break the line and then you got to have people that work later. Yeah.

That's overtime. And that's cost. If you understand how the machine works, you can better see how you fit in. And that's really what Revenue Operations is about to get some visibility across the organization around what's happening. I just recently trademarked a term myself.

Okay. LLM visibility and AI discovery framework are two things that I'm building out. You also have belief selling trademark. So I would love to hear more about that. Yeah. Belief selling is the framework that I use when I am working with organizations and specifically

teams. So belief is an acronym and I'll walk you through the acronym slowly. And so B stands for break barriers. E is in power mindset, L is learn continuously, I is implement boldly, E is execute consistently, and F is fuel others. And so it seems like a multiple step process, but really what this is and the reason why

I have belief selling is to have something different within the industry because I feel like as adults, we learn differently. And the thing is when we are learning new things, we have our preconceived notions, we have the way that we used to do it, and we don't want to try anything new. So before we can learn a new skill, we have to break the barrier. And what is a barrier?

It is the mental stuff. It's the internal stuff. It's the stories we tell ourselves that we're not good enough or we're not smart enough or we're not ready. And so when we break those barriers, that's step one. Then we have to say, OK, I've broken it, but how am I going to make sure that I don't stay

stuck? And then again, as salespeople, as humans, we don't want to try stuff over and over. Oh, I got it. I did that discovery grade that last time. So I'm good. I don't need to try that again.

I don't need to practice. So it's essentially a framework that I walk organizations through when they're really trying to get their team from just barely hitting quota, missing quota, to executing consistently month after month, hitting those goals every single month. So that's what belief selling is. Let's use it as an example.

Let's pretend we have this fictitious organization here. Yes. Describe how that imprints on that organization. OK. The way that it is actually implemented within an organization is it starts with the first thing that we do is we go in and we're assessing and we're evaluating organizations.

So we want to see where the gaps are. We want to see where the holes are. We're actually going to assess and see what self-limiting believes. And those are stories that you're telling yourself that are keeping you stuck, what those are. And once we figure out what's happening within the organization as a whole, then we boil

it down to the individual level. And so each individual gets their own training coaching plan. And then as we're moving through the next step, the embracing growth, it's now we're going to teach you something new. And the teaching something new is delivered in micro trainings. So nobody's sitting in a room for eight hours.

You're getting no more than 90 minutes of training at a time. And there's no more than 30 minutes of an instructor actually teaching to you, right? Because you have to practice those things. You have to learn how to do the new skills right then and there. And so we work with the leaders. We work with the teams.

And as we're looking at the things that are broken based on the evaluation, we're building out their processes. We're saying, Hey, this is broken and it's broken and we can fix it. If you invest here, it's broken and we can fix it. If you just reallocate what somebody's doing to another thing, right? And so we help them with their people problems as well as their process.

And then we make sure that they're continuing to do it along the way. Awesome. So I want to go back to revenue operations and say, okay, I'm a salesperson. I'm hearing this. I need to be talking to finance. I need to be knowing my numbers, but I don't have as good of a handle on that as I should.

How should they, and also this goes for marketers, how should they navigate the organization to get those answers better? How do they have those conversations? How do they open up to get more visibility? Because this is not maybe being brought into the organization top down where it's a culture. There may be navigating the waters to try to get some of these answers so that they can

do their job more effectively and sell better. Like how from the salesperson standpoint, should they be viewing revenue operations and from the marketing? As a salesperson, honestly, I don't think it's your responsibility. I really think this is a leadership thing. This is on sales managers, marketing managers, VP of sales, whoever the leadership teams are.

It's on them to have this information for the salespeople because they're the one who have the pool within the organization. They can go to the VP operations and say, OK, how much does it cost to produce this widget? You're really telling me it takes 25 hours to produce this thing. OK, so walk me through it. They can challenge them in that way.

Whereas if a salesperson did that, they say it takes 25 hours. OK, great. And they're done. They're not going to push back because they're superior. So this is really an integration at our leadership level, where we need to have our leaders cross-functionally speaking to each other. And then they're flowing that information down to their team.

And they should give their team cheat sheets. And what I like to say everybody is, but every deal is so different. We make custom automation. We're custom worth it. I'm like, OK, great. If more than 20 percent of what you're doing is outside of the box, you're doing something wrong. It's you should have make your cheat sheet that's 80 percent of the time.

The 20 percent is fine. But that's the exception to the rule, not the rule, because there's really no way that you can scale your business. If everything is a one off, like there's no way. So give them that cheat sheet of the 80 percent of the time when they can when they're quoting this thing or that thing, what the cost are, what the lead time is,

what all the things that they need so they can speak in front of their customers better. Because this is way before we even quote, right? So when I'm having a conversation with someone, I need to ask them, for instance, let's say I'm selling some kind of capital equipment and I'm trying to figure out when they're going to place an order. So what we don't want to do is say, so when do you expect to make a decision?

When do you expect to place an order? We don't want to do that. Right? What the way that we do that is so based on your current timeline, when do you need to have this thing in service? They're like, oh, OK, I need to have it in service by the end of the year. And so your brain should back Kackle and say, OK, our current delivery time is

about 10 weeks. So that means we should be moving forward with a contract in the next two weeks. Does that work for you? That's how you slide into the conversation. And that's why having that information is so important. So let's contend you down that.

I love that. So how do we have more conversations as salespeople where we're bringing finance considerations into it? Because that's where you're speaking to the C-suite at this point. And that's where you can get decisions made a lot faster. And typically those people are on the buying committee as well.

So you got to be able to speak to them. And I think that things have changed a lot. I haven't been in oil and gas sales in a minute directly. But I don't feel like salespeople are equipped to have those conversations. Yeah, they're really not. And I think that it's this really goes back to fundamentally how you develop

your sales team, right? What is their onboarding process? What is their ongoing training process? A part of their onboarding needs to be they're sitting with somebody in finance and they're understanding how these financial models are built for those products or services.

They don't need to understand the financial models of the company, but it's specifically to their product lines or their business lines. And so when they're sitting in those conversations with a potential customer, they always want to know how much it's going to cost me, how much it's going to cost, like how much it's going to be. And sometimes salespeople fumble with that because one of the things that we

assess when we're working with organization is the fear of discussing money. You would be surprised at how many salespeople don't like to talk about money. So when they're hit with that question, they fumble and they bumble. But if you know hardcore, I know based on what they're saying they need, it's going to be between 25,000 and 100,000. Just give them a range, but you should know that information because you

should be so tight with your numbers. You should know exactly how much wiggle room you have. You should know in that lower number, that 25,000 is not the base model. The 25,000 is the model that you think is most like the cheapest that you would ever give them or the least expense you would ever give them, but not the strip down because they're going to be like, Oh, 25 grand.

I got that. So you need to make sure that 25 grand is actually a real solution. Yeah. I feel like when we started working with a number of private equity companies that are starting to move into the space, right? They're starting to buy up some of these companies.

They know their numbers and they want you to know their numbers. And when we're talking marketing and sales, you got to be able to talk on that level because that's what they understand. And they're just, they're looking at spreadsheets, right? And they're just like, Hey, like, this is a business. Let me see the components.

And they don't have as much like attachment to maybe people, there's no emotion. It's just, there's just numbers and salespeople make, there's a lot. And, but sales is emotional. Buying is emotional. And so there's a lot of attachments to things that when a third party works at things, they just say, Oh, here you go.

Okay. What are some other things in this discussion that we haven't surfaced yet that you feel would be valuable to discuss in this conversation? I think that really in the oil and gas industry, one of the things that I see is there's a lot of product knowledge training, but there really isn't a lot of sales skills training, right?

So we focus a lot on our products, our services, our technical aspects, but we don't really teach people how to sell. And I think that a lot of times what happens within this industry is people get to a certain level of growth and they're like, what's not working? And they're like, we have this one person that produces $30 million a year, but we can't get anybody else to that level.

And I'm like, because it goes back to the documentation. What documented sales process do you have? What documentation do you have a best practices? So I really think that when organizations are struggling in their sales, they really need to take a lens and say, you have all these ISO standards, you have all of these SOPs for this and that on operations and finance.

But what do you have in sales? Are there any SOPs in sales? Are there, is there any documentation in sales? What do you actually have? I totally believe that successful salesperson has a process. They have an algorithm.

They have certain things they say, they have certain things that they follow. And it might be in their head, right? It's about getting it out of their head, getting that out there and have other people running that same playbook. And there is some, like if someone's doing something successfully, they might not want to share that.

Like marketing will go in, we'll be like, all right, what are you doing? And a lot of times they uncover some homemade thing that's not approved that they're using or they're saying to get to the next level. But if you bring that to marketing, you start getting people to see it. You can then scale that across the organization, which may be at odds with what that salesperson wants to be the rainmaker, but as an organization and

service to the organization, you want to replicate that algorithm. And when I start talking about replicating the algorithm, of course, I think AI, that leads to my next question. How do you see AI? Because I'm seeing AI dripping to everything. Okay, I've seen it in accounting.

I'm seeing it in sales. I'm seeing it in marketing. So from your perspective and viewpoint, where are you seeing AI start to digitally transform the business? Where are you seeing people insert with success? Where maybe if there's, you've seen someone do something and it hasn't

quite been right. And I would love to hear kind of stories on both sides of the aisle of good and bad. Yeah. So I think that one of, so one of the things that I'm passionate about, and I think just even saying this is controversial is humanizing AI, right? So teaching your AI bot or whatever your tool is, or whatever you're doing,

how to sound more human. Because when it's, so the bad stories are people just using it just as is. Like they're sending cold emails, they're spamming people. They're using these AI tools that will automatically email people, a gazillion messages, or send a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn. That is not how we use AI.

The way that you use it, and so specifically in oil and gas, because I think that since it's a non-tech industry, it had the adoption is a little bit slower. So I really recommend like sales teams and organization is a great research tool. And most salespeople are not even doing research anyways. So when I'm like, just do some research before your sales calls, like you can use it to do research before your sales calls and then ask it to give you a

question or two to ask, right? Use it to prep you. Have your, there are all gazillion meeting recorders that do AI transcriptions. You can have that connected to your CRM tools, or you can upload that transcript into AI and say, what should I do next? Use it to help coach you along the way.

And there are a lot of things that have built in AI. And I say, embrace it, right? If you can get AI call summaries, embrace it. Like you mentioned, doing something with HubSpot or HubSpot Partner. And one of the cool things in HubSpot is in the deal matrix now, it shows you a summary of the deal, right?

Whereas before you would have to go look through 55 million emails, but you just see the deal summary. So embrace it and try it and don't be afraid to use it, but don't have it replace humans. So write your emails and then you can have AI edit them, but don't have AI write them and then you edit them.

Like you still need to be in there so that people know that you're still human. You were talking about all the spam and the overused of AI and outsourcing your brain to just have it do it for you. And you need to humanize it. We typically on the show talk about a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. So I would love for you to just share what you're seeing happening on LinkedIn.

Maybe it's something really great that you saw that stuck out in your head. Or maybe it's just something absolutely horrible, but go into specific detail about what that is that you don't have to call out the company. Spam is an issue and LinkedIn has been working on it and it's quite noisy. And it's actually against the terms of service for all of you that may be using it. And if you get caught, they will ban your accounts.

Also don't scale it up really quick. If you're going to use it because in the data, you can see it pretty easily, but from a LinkedIn tip or fail of the week, what would you like to share? Okay. So I actually have this great tip and it's something that I can say we do within my organization.

I have a process where if somebody checks out my profile, I send them a note. I'm like, Hey, thank you so much for checking out my profile. Okay. Was there anything that stood out to you? Something like that. Actually last week, the person responded, they're like, yeah, our sales team is

really struggling. We need help with strategy. Here's my phone number. And I call the person and when in less than 24 hours, I closed a six month contract with them to work with their organization. Thou short revenue operations.

And the thing that I want to say here, so I want to, I want to give that, but now I want to give a little backstory. So I write content for my ideal client. My ideal client is not very active on LinkedIn. They look at stuff, but they don't like, they don't comment. They don't share.

This person had the basic LinkedIn banner. They had not posted and I don't know how long they don't have a company, actual LinkedIn company, and I didn't even know how he found me. But the thing is he's been consuming my content and there was enough on my LinkedIn page for him to know that I was the person he wanted to work with to close something like that in 24 hours.

And so the tip that I have is don't write for likes, don't write for comments, write for your ideal client and make sure that your profile is such that when they do land on there, they're like, I need you. I love that. Let's build on it. How do people find you on LinkedIn and know more about what you're working on?

I'm on LinkedIn just at Wesleyan, so just Wesleyan, no ass day. And that's the best way to find out more about me or on my website, transformsales.com. Transformsales.com, everyone go check it out. Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGN, the world's largest and most listened to podcast

network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to OGGN.com to learn about all our other shows and don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. The show has been a production of the oil and gas global network.