Chris Strom:
Welcome back to another episode of the RevOps Hero Podcast. Today for our show, I have on Brandon Dith-Berry. He's the head of revenue operations for a company called Zeni, and he and his team are running the go-to-market systems across the entire company, marketing side, sales side, customer service side, but also the financial ops, and product ops, and those teams and units all connect with him and his team as well. And today on this episode, we will be talking about all that with Brandon here, and learning from his experience and expertise in this area. So Brandon, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Chris. Really appreciate that you've invited me. I feel like this is a really special moment for myself, because this is probably one of the first podcasts that I've officially done. So thanks for the opportunity. It's exciting to be here.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Absolutely. First off, we'll talk about revenue operations or RevOps in general, since it's a hot topic, and widely used term right now, but it can get defined in so many different ways, and it can touch a lot of different parts of a company. So when people ask you what is RevOps, what do you tell them?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Well, first of all, it's always a fun question. It's probably the number one most asked question that I get on a day-to-day basis. What's funny is it even happens within my own company. So that's really fun to answer this question, and I think I've answered it a different way every single time, but now I feel the best definition for revenue operations is we're essentially the team that acts as the connective tissue, the integrative team between all other teams, to bring efficiency to the organization as a whole. And part of what happens when you bring that efficiency is you start to get those gross margins actually become much higher, because you're creating that operational efficiency to help everybody do their jobs faster. So what actually happens is people are working smaller amount of time for the hours that they're paid, and then you get higher gross margins.
It just becomes that operational team that helps everybody put in more work in less time. Right? So that's one portion of it. But then the other side of it is we are the team that brings insights to the executive teams, and then all the other leaders at the organization. So we collate all the data across multiple different teams, and we're able to then derive insight from all of that data analysis. And we're a combination really between operations, data ops, and then also simply just being a team that aligns all the other teams, and can be a liaison really between the go-to-market teams, and then whatever other teams you have in your organization.
Chris Strom:
So you define it as really the connective tissue between all the other different departments and functions?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Yeah. And I like how my CEO Swapnil says it. Every time we talk, he always says, "RevOps is the backbone of our organization." And I love it when he says it, because number one, it shows me that he trusts us to have a big impact to the overall operations, and just the company at large, but also he knows that we're playing that critical role that keeps the company running like a well-oiled machine.
Chris Strom:
Interesting, the backbone of the entire company. So thinking about that, especially at your company where it's really such a foundational part, a backbone part of everything across the company, when your function is connected to everything in one degree or another, how do you determine your placement in the company structure? Do you report directly to the CEO? Do you report to the sales director, the marketing director, the finance director?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. So I report to the CRO, which she was previously Megan Prince, our CRO, and she previously was just the VP of sales. And as we started to grow as a company, we realized there really needs to be a leader over all revenue, all new bookings, and also retention, and the retention revenue. It's not just about having somebody over just the sales department. We need to have a holistic view of our revenue generation as a company. And she shifted to a CRO role, and I was under her. At the start of this year we actually made the transition, and that's when I also became the head of RevOps. But a couple months after that is when she assumed the role of CRO. And that's really what RevOps should be, is it should report to a revenue leader.
Now, I know a lot of other companies, they don't have a CRO. They might have somebody who is either the CMO, or the VP of sales, SVP of sales, as long as there's somebody who understands that revenue is not just net new revenue. There's also other aspects, other teams that are responsible for generating revenue, and those various channels and teams should be optimized to be able to generate that revenue. And revenue operations, excuse me, should really fall under that leader who has a holistic view of revenue generation processes at the very highest level of the company.
Chris Strom:
And when she moved from being the chief sales officer to chief revenue officer, that included of course the sales aspect of it, but do the marketing teams and the customer success teams all report to her as well now?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. So how it works right now is our customer success teams and our marketing team still reports to the CEO, but it's about having somebody who can be an advocate for all revenue streams. And although she might not be the direct supervisor over marketing, and over customer success, she is still held to a number or a target that is based on total revenue generated. Instead of it being previously as a VP of sales, as it being a net new bookings, ARR or something like that, it's more so about total revenue generated over the quarter, over the whole year, and then also being able to project that growth as well for the following years.
Chris Strom:
So total revenue is the net new revenue, plus maybe revenue retention goals, or revenue, what do they call it, when you add in upgrades and downgrades to get the total net dollar retention.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Exactly. Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Okay. So historically, both you and her came from the sales function, and then your scopes were expanded beyond the sales function to incorporate the other aspects of the company as well?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. So actually how it happened was I reported directly to the director of revenue operations, and this was last year. And what happened is he moved into a director role as director of FP&A. So he's over financial planning and analysis. And then I moved under Megan, Megan Prince, the VP of sales. And before that move, the director of revenue operations reported to the CFO. So it was under a finance branch, and then transitioned under sales with me becoming the head of revenue operations. And then sales then, the sales leader essentially became head of all revenue by getting moved into a CRO role, which I thought was a really smart move from Zeni as a company to do, but also just to see that move is very smooth in that transition, the way that it worked. So it felt very natural to have all of these pieces put into place over the last couple months.
Chris Strom:
So RevOps historically has also been very closely connected to finance even before the restructuring. So that brings you to where you are now, where you described, you're basically running the systems connecting the whole backbone of the company across all these different functions. So yeah. Let's talk a bit about what that looks like in real life in terms of the systems you all are running, and the different departments, and how and why you connect them together. Can you tell us about the system architecture that you all are running between the different departments, and the platforms you're running on them?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. So what we have for platforms is HubSpot is our CRM. That's what our sales marketing customer success team uses. But we also have our financial operations team. They are the service team essentially for our customers, because all of our customers, they're backed by a full finance team. So we have financial controllers that work at the level of the finance operations team. They find a lot of the customer data in HubSpot as well. And they're utilizing that platform for customer data. And then we also have Chargebee, which is our subscription management platform, and our billing team runs that platform. We collaborate a lot, just making sure that the data is integrated between those two platforms. We recently just built an hourly sync between Chargebee subscription data and HubSpot. So that's currently being piped into HubSpot on an hourly sync. And then in a couple of weeks here, we should actually have an instant sync being built.
We use a tool called N8N, and that is what we're using to run that integration. And we use a collection of HTTP requests, REST API requests to be able to pull the data from Chargebee, and push it into HubSpot. And then we also have a proprietary platform called Cockpit, which is what our product team has developed, that will in the near future become that central source of truth for customer data. That houses a lot of product information, how our customers are using our Zeni platform, but also what plans they have, which pulls from Chargebee. It has health monitors. So we're able to see what's the health of our customers based on their cashflow, and a number of other components that we were able to collect, and then collate, and then figure out what is the risk of them churning, and all of that.
So that's in Cockpit. And Cockpit has a lot of other information that I don't think I can share exactly what it is, but it's a lot of really first party information and data about the customers that can help us. And eventually, what's going to happen is we're going to build a integration between HubSpot and Cockpit, to be able to bidirectionally sync data back and forth between those systems. And RevOps, again, we act as that connective tissue, that integrative team. We're working really closely with the product, to be able to pass that data properly back and forth between the platforms, just like we're doing with Chargebee and HubSpot. So we're acting as that team that essentially is able to work with the other teams to collate all of that data between all of the systems, and then we'll be able to run data analysis, and all of that information that's in each of the systems.
So that's the primary tools. We also use Mixpanel that I am currently building an integration with HubSpot for right now. That's going to pull in product activation data from our Zeni platform. Right now, because we don't have the Cockpit integration fully running, I'll have to pull that product activation data from Mixpanel. So Mixpanel is another platform that we're using. And then within HubSpot itself, we're using a lot of custom code actions in workflows. And we use a combination of custom coded actions, and also custom formula, data formatting, things like that, to be able to run a number of different Python scripts and programs that help us to clean the data, run calculations on our HubSpot data. Some of those actually pull in enrichment from our enrichment tool Apollo. And Apollo is also pushing data into HubSpot as well. So yeah. It's just a complete, excuse me, interconnected system where we have everything from the sales side of lead gen integrated with HubSpot, and then we're just going to continue to improve on that with the product information, and the customer data as well.
Chris Strom:
So the Zeni platform itself is basically Software as a Service with a financial services component as well?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Yeah. So how it works is we have a financial platform, and we call that the Zeni platform. We have a dashboard within that platform. It has a number of reports that are really easy, quick and easy ways to see how your finances are going as a company. It's really beautiful the way that the team has developed it, but essentially, it just gives you a snapshot into the finances. It can tell you your burn rate, cash flow, cash in bank, all of those things. And then in that platform as well, you have transaction management. And you can actually see where's my money going, and what category of that transaction is that. And in the background, we actually have AI running on the platform. So it's an AI driven platform. The AI is able to auto categorize, and it's a supervised AI. So we have a full team of engineers essentially supervising that categorization, and making sure that it's accurate.
We're then also on the customer side, working with our customers to make sure that categorization is accurate. And with that combination, we're actually able to categorize a lot of transactions really quickly without any human intervention. And I believe that we're currently at a 90% accuracy rate. It might be even higher now. And traditionally, you would have a bookkeeper having to manually reconcile the books, figure out what the categories are, make sure they make adjustments. But with the AI component, it's actually doing this all in real time. So you're actually able to close your books faster. And that is just a portion of Zeni's service.
We have a full finance team that backs every single customer. They have a financial controller that is assigned to them. They have a full finance team such as a team lead and accountants that are all helping close the books. And then we also have fractional CFO services. So if you need an additional layer of a support, we actually have fractional CFO, and we have tax services as well. So it's a whole entire finance ecosystem that's just all on one platform, and it's pretty cool to see. And also as somewhat of a data nerd, it's really cool to see just how much data we have in terms of the financial data, and financial health of a lot of startups and B2B companies.
Chris Strom:
All right. Cool. So then in terms of the system architecture on your end underneath it, people sign up for the Zeni service, and they become users in the Zeni platform. And then the Zeni platform that you're creating, it has its own databases where you're creating the user records, and all of the financial data, and usage data for the users in the Zeni platform. And then as the Cockpit tool, you described an internal tool you built to basically query and dashboard the Zeni app user data?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
So I didn't build it. I definitely need to say that.
Chris Strom:
Oh. Yeah. As in the Zeni, the product developers.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. The product team developed Cockpit, and it essentially is just a backend part of our Zeni platform. And I think right now, we're at a point where we're working really closely the product team as a RevOps team, to figure out ways that we can utilize that data that's in Cockpit, and HubSpot, and combine that together to get better insight and data analysis on this first party data that we have within the actual Zeni platform. And what's great about Cockpit is it's very clean, and it's a centralized place where a lot of my coworkers and the teams, they can go in into this really clean, easy to use dashboard, and have an understanding of what are my customers that I service, or what customers have this product or not. And they're able to then really quickly see a very holistic view of the customers that are on our platform, with a real-time insight into how their customers are doing when it comes to their finances.
Chris Strom:
So all of their financial data as processed through the Zeni app is logged in Cockpit, and that's what your finance team is using to work with the customers to provide the other services as well.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Do, a one-way sync, or a two-way sync between Cockpit and HubSpot?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
So that's something that we're currently building, but it will be a bidirectional sync. So any changes made in HubSpot will get synced into Cockpit, and then any changes in Cockpit will then get synced into HubSpot.
Chris Strom:
Okay. And what's the goal of syncing the Cockpit information back into HubSpot?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
So there's a lot of information that is more first party data about customers that we don't currently have in HubSpot. It's not where the teams naturally put that information, or a lot of that data is actually in real time is calculated by the Cockpit platform, and it's not anything that anybody would put into HubSpot initially. And we're then going to be able to take the data that our platform is running for calculations, and straight from where our customer data is coming from, and pushing that all into HubSpot. Now, there's a part of that is the security and compliance of that customer data. We're not going to be able to push that data into HubSpot from its original numbers, or things like that. What we are going to do is we're going to anonymize it. So we're going to anonymize the data in a way that puts it into a range, or a bucket, instead of having it as the exact numbers, or the exact value that we have on the Zeni platform.
And really what we're doing with that data is we're able to run automations in HubSpot to either push campaigns to essentially figure out which customers don't have certain products, or maybe they, for the success team, maybe we determine that there's a certain risk that we can identify on the account. And in HubSpot, we're able to run automations to then send notifications to our customer success team and our service teams, to be able to notify them, "Hey. This customer is at risk. We need to be able to do these things, and this is how we need to process this in HubSpot." Eventually I can see that happening more so built into the Cockpit side of things.
But right now where we're at with the engineering resources that we have is we want to make sure that we can pivot really quickly, use the data that we have in the platforms that we have, build the integrations that make sense, and be able to have these processes in place that we can actually generate revenue off from them, and then also service our customers better. So we're using these integrations that we're building to essentially be able to run automations quicker, and not have to wait for Cockpit to be built out in its full entirety to be able to leverage. So it's just an iterative process where we "Crawl, walk, run," as my VP of marketing says, you start with the crawl, and what you can control, and what you're able to build now, and then you iterate, you get to a walk phase, and then eventually we'll be able to run, and hopefully that's with Cockpit.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Yeah. As you continue to build out your internal systems more, they'll have more capabilities, but you're utilizing the other systems that are already built out in some areas, to help you get running quicker. So that's the integration between HubSpot and Cockpit. And I think you said, are you using an ETL tool to manage that?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. So we have a couple different tools that we use. We use Make. Make.com, that's one tool. And then we use N8N, which is another integration tool. They both function somewhat similarly. There's just how they're built is different, right? So it's different use cases.
Chris Strom:
NAN, I've tried out Make a little bit, not a whole lot, I don't think I've heard of NAN though.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Yeah. N8N, yeah. N and then eight, the number, and then N, and I don't even know if that's how you-
Chris Strom:
Oh. N 8, not N-A.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah, N8N. And I don't even know if that's how you say it. Maybe it's nation. Maybe that's how you say it. But yeah. I think I actually heard about it through a community. I think it was the RevOps Co-op, which is every single node that you have in that workflow, you use an operation per each of those nodes. So if you're allotted, say 25,000 operations, then if you have 5 of those nodes, or 10 of those nodes, it's billing you for every single time that one of those nodes goes off. And depending on the scenario, that can be okay. Sometimes that's actually you have a lot more operations to use that's allotted to you in your account on Make. So you can run certain scenarios that you don't have to worry about using a lot of those operations. And as an example, Mixpanel has a native integration with Make, and we're using that for the Mixpanel integration versus N8N, where we would have to build all of those out with API requests, which that's going to take a lot longer to do.
And we have the Chargebee integration running on N8N, because we're doing that hourly sync, and we don't want to. That one actually has 10 to 20 different nodes, and we would be billed for every one of those nodes in Make. Now it's different. It's just every time that a subscription needs to get, or even just a batch of subscriptions needs to go through that workflow, we're just getting charged for the one time that all of those subscriptions are getting pushed into HubSpot. So that's the big difference between the two platforms.
Chris Strom:
So basically, they're both middleware platforms. They exist to sit between other systems like HubSpot, and Chargebee, and Mixpanel, and then your own natively developed Cockpit. And then you use them both depending on both the needs, as well as the billing for how they work.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Like you said, Mixpanel, it has more native integrations with Make, and that's part of the reason why you do that?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Chris Strom:
I'm sure with Cockpit being your own internal tool, there's not going to be a pre-built integration for that. So is that one of the ones where you use N8N, basically do custom API calls to it?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
So for that one, we are going to leverage the product team. We didn't have a native API server or anything built in Cockpit, and our platform. So we had to actually have the product team custom develop the API components of the platform, and make a connection between HubSpot. They have a native connection actually between Chargebee already. So they have to custom make those connectors. And then from there, we can customize, "Okay. What fields do we want to pass data between?" So for that scenario, we're not going to use any middleware. We have to use the platform itself, and connect it via API and REST APIs between Cockpit and HubSpot.
Chris Strom:
Oh. I see. Okay. So since Cockpit's your own app, you write the API connections to HubSpot directly inside Cockpit. You don't need a middleware in that case?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yep. Exactly.
Chris Strom:
Okay. But you're using N8N for connecting to charge between Chargebee and HubSpot.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
So that's between all those different systems. That's quite a bit of technical architecture work, and also planning technical architecture, and just straight up development, and coding work too. So I'm assuming it's not all of that isn't falling on your head, is it? Are you doing all of that, or are you working with other internal teammates, or outside contractors, or things like that?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. No. It's funny you mention it. That's our current RevOps team challenge. Right? So I'm actually actively looking for a technologist, somebody who can do the development work. And yeah. I do all of it right now, and that's what's been really fun honestly. I love doing this stuff. It's what I did back at RevPartners as a RevOps developer, and as the manager of revenue operations that was primarily my role is to do the technical work, to do the integrations, and things like that. And I do actually have a couple of RevOps analysts, and they're fantastic. They do a lot of the heavy lifting for all of the other components of RevOps, because it's not just about the integrations, and making sure the data's passing between platforms.
There's so much more to RevOps that we manage that, I oversee that, but with the help of my analyst, Chaian Lavesh, they're cased in India, they're able to do a lot of the project management, the support requests. We have a support request system set up. So people can submit requests, and they manage all of that. I also have somebody on the BDR team who does a lot of lead generation. So they support the RevOps team by doing lead generation, and also taking on any sales requests. So I couldn't do it without my whole team supporting me. And that does free up a lot of time for me to focus on building these integrations, and working with the teams to make sure that the data's passing correctly.
Chris Strom:
So when it comes down to the actual planning, and building the integrations, it is predominantly you doing it all yourself?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. And I do have-
Chris Strom:
Even down to writing the Python code, and the workflow actions, and the API calls?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. And I do have my RevOps analyst, Lavesh, who we're really trying to move him into a position where he can start doing a lot of the scoping, and the management of those projects himself. I think once we have that technical developer that's on our team as well, what's going to happen is that part of what I own and do is going to get shifted and transitioned over to Lavash, and that developer. So the hope is that then I can focus more on the strategic side of RevOps where we look at what's the six-month roadmap going to be like, what projects are going to be really important for the next couple quarters?
How do we actually look at the data now that all these systems are integrated? How do we look at all of this data, and collate it, and build analysis around it, and then really use it for deeper insights into the business, how we're performing, what's really going to move the needle on revenue generation for the company? And that's ideally where we're headed, but we have to get all the systems aligned, and the data really needs to be in a place where we could even build analysis. So it's the phase one, right? It's the crawl before we walk. So yeah.
Chris Strom:
So we were talking about before the episode here, nobody goes to school for RevOps. Almost all of us come in from a marketing background, a creative or writing based marketing background, and move into this technical RevOps role. Or a lot of people come, start out as salespeople, as end users in the CRM, and moving more into a technical role. So since basically everyone in RevOps is coming into a field that they didn't go to school for beforehand, how do they learn all of this stuff, planning out the system architectures, and the API calls, and even planning out custom code writing?
Brandon Dith-Berry:
I had a lot of development, and front end backend development experience. And that helps with where we're at right now for the needs of the business. But I think a lot of RevOps teams don't necessarily have that technical layer, and that's okay. I think that what happens is that's a great opportunity to work with a consulting company, a technical company, where you can have that extra layer of support on the development side. And there's so many great RevOps companies like RevPartners where I used to work, where they do such good work to figure out the needs of the business, and prioritize what matters, and then build that all out with you, and make sure that everything's running smoothly. And luckily, just from having the experience working at RevPartners, and being around such really incredible and talented RevOps strategists and consultants, I learned a lot from being at that company, as well as the more technical side of things with the integrations, and the API calls, and things like that.
So I realized not everybody's going to have that experience, but I think what's great is the community, and just learning how to do these things with the people in the RevOps community that's just easily accessible on LinkedIn, and communities like the RevOps Co-op, places like that where you can really glean from the experience and learnings that other people have in the RevOps community. So I'd say that with various different backgrounds, what makes RevOps such a great field is you can really come at it from many different angles, and with various different types of backgrounds.
And it's really the core principles are just knowing how to bring people into the same room, and bring alignment, and communicate the value of going after a particular goal that's across the go-to-market teams, and then being able to get sign-off on that, and then be able to take that whatever it is a project, or a particular initiative, and drive that all the way to a delivery of a project, or being able to bring insights based on that agreement. And at the end of the day, like I was saying earlier, RevOps is the connective tissue. It's that integrative team that aligns every other team, and just make sure that's going to be what moves the needle for revenue growth at the company.
Chris Strom:
Cool. Well, I think that's probably a good place to wrap it up here then. So yeah. Brandon, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show with us here, and share what you've learned, and your expertise from the real world situations that you've done, and are continuing to do even as we speak here. So thanks so much for coming on here, Brandon.
Brandon Dith-Berry:
Yeah. Thank you for having me, Chris. It's been a pleasure. Yeah. I look forward to more conversations down the road, and talking more about how cool RevOps is.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Absolutely.
