The Advent of RevOps in Europe with Toni Hohlbein

Jordan  00:00

Hello everyone, this is Jordan, the owner and CEO of Greaser Consulting. On today’s episode, we’ve got Toni, who is a co-founder at a company called Growblocks. Listen: fascinating individual that I bumped into recently at a project, a European-based conference. He is beating the drum strong right now for RevOps. And is, I think even mentioned this in the podcast when you listen in, he’s really like a rising star right now. A lot of people are starting to tune into his work. He’s doing a lot of great things around running to that revenue number. And what does that mean? So listen, this is a really interesting conversation today, on RevOps and Europe, a little bit of Toni’s background and story. You know, as most of these things go, we get a little bit sideways talking about paid ads and some strategies that, like Google, for example, used in the past. So anyway, listen, just lean into this one. Enjoy. Toni is a really good guy. I highly recommend that, when you’re done listening to this, you go follow him. He’s gonna have a lot of great insight for you. Have fun.

Intro Jingle

Say you want some clarity in sales and marketing and SEP. Well, we have just the remedy: our podcast, RevOps Therapy. Yeah.

Jordan  01:28

Hey, crew, I’ve got Toni with me today. Toni, introduce yourself.

Toni  01:33

Jordan, thanks for having me. Hi, everyone. So I’m Toni. I am the CEO of Growblocks. And before that what I’ve been doing actually, I’ve been, been finance guy, then I’ve been a RevOps guy. And then I ended up being the CRO, actually, for two B2B SaaS companies. Both of them actually I exited in the end. So it was like two super cool journeys. One for I think 150 million, the other one for around like 200 million. And after those two journeys, I was basically like, “hey, you know, how difficult can this be? Let’s build this myself.” And that’s what I’m doing here at Growblocks right now. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Jordan  02:09

Yeah, just so everybody knows, like, just real quick, what is Growblocks? Where are you based? You know, for my US listeners here, they might be saying, “Hey, this guy sounds like he might be from somewhere else. Give us a little more context.”

Toni  02:24

So I’m originally from Germany. I am sitting right now, though, in, in Denmark. So it’s a little bit north of Germany. Actually, for everyone who doesn’t know that. And Growblocks? What is Growblocks doing? So what we are, we’re kind of addressing a pretty simple question. Which is, while, while budgets are really great for managing costs, what is it that you’re actually using to manage your revenue? Right? And once you start thinking about this, like, “hey, wait a minute, this whole budget thing, all of this is based on revenue, but what actually sits behind that line item? How does it actually come to be? And, you know, how does, how does that need to be planned and so forth?” That is the problem that we’re solving at Growblocks. And we’re currently, you know, we are one, one and a little bit years into this journey; we have a couple of customers, couple of venture capital. And yeah, you know, happy to, happy to chat more, if someone reaches out and wants to kind of figure out how to plan their revenue and execute their revenue in a better way.

Jordan  03:19

Well, so here’s what folks listening today may not know. So Toni and I first met getting ready for a conference for Project Day. It was a European-based conference, European-based company over there. And I didn’t know it at the time, but when I bumped into Toni, I thought, okay, he was, he was teaching me some geography, making sure that I know where things are out on the map. And, you know, we had a good time, had some good laughs, did a conference together. But you know, I did some investigating. Toni doesn’t even know this. But after the session, I did some investigating: “Who is this Toni guy?” And you know, Toni is kind of like a rising star in Europe right now, legitimately pushing this RevOps motion really hard. If you find him on LinkedIn, you know, he’s got a lot of great content coming out. And so I reached out to him and said, “Okay, listen, we got this sort of rising star in Europe, thinking about RevOps, and, man, I want to have him come on the show here, on the podcast, and talk a little bit about how he even got to where he is. Because from what I understand this whole notion of RevOps, even though it’s, quote, unquote, new in the US, it’s like really new in Europe right now. Is that right? 

Toni  04:31

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, so really, sorry. Did you want to, do you want to add something?

Jordan  04:36

No, I was just gonna say like, it’s really new. And you’re sort of one of the folks that are spearheading it right now. So I’d love to hear, like, your journey. Where do you get started? And how did you get to this place that you’re really beating this drum right now?

Toni  04:48

Yeah, no, absolutely. So my journey, my journey started as kind of a finance dude, an FP&A guy. Early on in a company, we were at 10 folks maybe. I had some previous experience from venture capital and, and what you learned there is the number side, the spreadsheet side, and some of these finance pieces. So that was brought in and Falcon.io back then to, you know, start managing some of that stuff. And as we went through this, there obviously was a “Oh, okay, we’re running out of cash, Toni, let’s, let’s go and do some venture capital investments here,” which we then end up doing, and what you need for that is usually this, you know, it’s, it’s not a budget; it’s a spreadsheet with a bunch of, “hey, this is where we want to end up maybe. And hey, this is how that maybe is gonna work out.” Basically, it’s a spreadsheet that’s trying to tell a story of, “hey, listen, investor, this is for sure how are we going to be a unicorn in you know, 5, 6, 7, whatever years,” right? The problem with those spreadsheets is that all of them are basically, they’re basically bulls**t, all of them. It’s really, it’s a piece of … it’s a total big guess. But the problem is, you use it in order to sell the company, and you discuss it seriously with those investors; those investors, by the way, they’re all in on the game. They know, like, wait a minute, that’s probably not exactly going to happen like that. But once you then place the check and the investment, and you have the first board meeting, you need to kind of show up with this plan and be like, “hey, you know, as we discussed, this is what we’re shooting for.” And that’s also what the investors are expecting. But the thing is, at that point, you kind of talked yourself a little bit into a corner, right, you’ve set up those expectations. And now the rest of the organization needs to follow up and actually execute this thing. Right? And that is a little bit also then how my journey went, actually, so I was, I was the one with the spreadsheets, I was the one in those investor meetings, kind of explaining this, and “hey, this is how it’s gonna happen.” And, and my boss obviously was owning those conversations. It was not, you know, me necessarily, but then actually, this was, I think, I’m not sure if it was after the A or the B, my boss was basically like “okay, cool, Toni, now that you build all of those plans, and those spreadsheets and have all of those cool assumptions, you know, now I want you to actually go execute. Go away from this finance thing and become this other thing.” And I’m not a salesperson; it’s not like I jumped on the phone. I wasn’t like a VP Sales or anything like that. I became something else; we didn’t really have a name for it back then, I think, for a short period of time, my title was legit, Special Operations Manager. That was my title back then. And you know, as, as it so happens, you know, I do some of the CRM stuff, I do some of the planning stuff, commissions, targets, all of these typical sales ops things. And then, you know, as, as, as we went through this, it dawned on us that “Oh, I think other people are calling the sales operations actually.” Right? And then, you know, the, the story then continued that, you know, I was doing this a lot for the sales folks. And that started to work kind of well. But then more and more realized, wait a minute, marketing kind of has the same needs actually. And wait a minute, CS has the same need. And, and all of them are starting to get like envy, ops envy, right? I see this happening a lot. We had someone actually in marketing, that was kind of marketing ops person. And what then happened was this weaponization of ops, so was VP marketing, “hey, can you give me this report to kind of prove the point that we didn’t want to make that battles the sales guy?” And the sales guy was like, “hey, sales ops, can you give me this report so I can battle the VP of marketing?” And, and we realized, “hey, this doesn’t make any, any sense, right? I mean, this is SaaS, this goes all the way through. We need to take all of these resources together into one thing; we need to pool it. And I still remember… so this is my co-founder, here at Growblocks. So Olafur and I, we were sitting in the meeting room here in Copenhagen. And we were like, okay, so there’s sales ops, marketing ops, a CS ops. Are we going to call it commercial operations, or are we going to call it revenue operations? And we both looked at each other just like, I think this revenue operations thing, this is never going to stick. Let’s, let’s call it commercial operations. In this company, it’s still called commercial operations to this bear. And I apologize for that, by the way.

Jordan  09:17

Well, so what’s really interesting about that is just, just the concept of evolution, so to speak, not happening in a vacuum. And what I mean by that statement is, you know, you look across the pond, they’ve been calling it RevOps for years, right, and here, here you all are in Copenhagen. You know, sitting in, in this, I just envision you in some small dark room somewhere, thinking through, scoping for the world here. What is this new thing that we’re gonna bring forth? Commercial operations. Lo, lo and behold, it exists somewhere else, right? 

Toni  09:52

No, absolutely. And the… so I mean, obviously, kind of I’m going much, much deeper on this whole RevOps thing and I’m also doing realizing so yes, there was RevOps. And that may be the thing for the, what, the last 7, 8, 9 years or something like that. And then apparently before that, there was something called go-to-market operations or revenue, something like that was actually here before doing some kind of similar things, but not with the same spin, I guess. And so it’s, it’s, it’s obviously a new idea. But it’s, but it’s really much more packaged in a new way, actually, kind of that, that’s sometimes how it feels. There’s a lot of, a lot of these issues that, you know, operations, in general, is addressing, which is really tooling in the beginning, as boring as it sounds, but that’s usually the starting point and the data, the process and so forth. I mean, that problem has existed for longer than, than seven or eight years, right? I mean, this is basically since, since, you know, people bought software to manage their go-to-market.

Jordan  10:55

So curious about how the European market has really taken hold of this idea. Because you’re like, you’re right, thinking about how marketing over here is really territorial, right? Sales is really, success is really territorial. And you have all these folks sort of fighting for resources. And now all of a sudden, you’re going into organizations, and you’re saying, “hey, instead of fighting for your own resource, just give it up and put it over here.” Like, that’s not an easy conversation. Right? And so how, like, how is that being received? 

Toni  11:23

So… I think the… so, no one wants to give up resources and even the most rational of VP of Sales and VP Marketing, I think they always find reasons to argue against pulling it under one umbrella. I think the push needs to come from either, hey, we now have a CRO or person that oversees the whole thing across and ideally, not the I’m an elevated VP Sales, CRO but someone that ideally owns marketing, sales, and CS together, and then that person has a very specific…

Jordan  11:57

So hold on one second though, are you talking about, like CMO reports to CRO situation? Like what exactly are you saying here?

Toni  12:03

Yeah, so I think on the, on the CRO side, there are obviously many different setups out there. Right? And the… lots of feelings how that, you know, should ideally be. My own setup that I had twice, in both companies basically: I had a VP Marketing and a VP Sales and, and a VP CS, and, you know, some, you know, regional ones as well. And that worked really well. And then they obviously have, you know, I think and I think this can work and the reason why, why it does work really well at and, you know, I would want to even say for my, in my situation was I came from a revenue operations background and perspective, right? I was not the “Oh, everything needs to be optimized for sales, and everything you need to do to build around sales” which I sometimes see those kind of CROs kind of doing it. And the point that you’re bringing up is like, wait a minute, you know, another C-level rolling into another C-level. I think that can fall either/or. I think marketing usually is the one that breaks away, and then you have a sales and CS, kind of CRO setup. But what I really don’t like: it doesn’t change the problem of these two roles being still not fully aligned, actually, at the end of the day, right? You will still have a CMO that pushes more for potentially things that are not making sense across the cross-revenue stream. And this is, this is kind of the job description of a CRO right, and a CRO that does oversee the full revenue stream. They do need, they do need a team that helps them actually to manage that. And that in many times is then you know, revenue operations, right? And if you have someone like that, I think the unification of RevOps you know, that previously was sorry, marketing, sales, and CS, that then rolling up to the CRO that makes like total sense.

Jordan  13:46

But I’m thinking about your specific path, though, right? Quite frankly, it’s an odd one, right? You’re, you’re the spreadsheet guy. And then all of a sudden, you’re actually in charge of doing the work. Like, that’s a really odd transition. I can’t say that I can, can think of anybody else who went from well, actually, no, there’s one other person I can think of, who was sort of the finance person who became, like, grew into that sort of CRO situation. Okay, but usually, to your point, it’s a VP of Sales that sort of rises up, okay? Rarely, I can’t even think of a scenario where somebody would come out of marketing, but then shift over to like a CRO title. I can’t say that I’ve seen that happen. Success and then shift over to a CRO title. Like, usually, it’s sales going in some other direction at some point, right? And so like, is that the only path that you really see is like, we got to pull all these finance folks, get them into this CRO type of thing, sort of follow Toni’s lead and like, here’s why you’re gonna think really strategically about all of this, or is it really if everything kind of, from these different buckets can fall under this umbrella. Like there is a path from marketing; there is a path from success. There is a path from sales. 

Toni  15:00

So I think that’s true. I think there’s a path from anyone; I don’t think it’s blocked necessarily. I take a little bit of offense of you calling me the finance guy that ends up being the revenue guy. You know, I see myself as the RevOps guy that then was the CRO in the end. No, but…

Jordan  15:16

Well, Toni, just so you know, I mean, I still see you as the finance guy, you know, the person who’s always the pain in the rear that you can’t get budget passed that wants to fight you on everything.

Toni  15:26

So to answer your question, who is, who is good for this role and who is not? And, and I don’t think it has nothing to do with you know, which which team you grew up in; I think that will, that will always give you a little bit of an edge in that specific silo. I think the really important piece is your openness to understand the other parts of the revenue function. I think that, that is the, that is the important piece here. If you are a VP of Sales with an elevated title, that is and I’ve seen this, by the way, that is optimizing everything around sales, meaning, hey, let’s choke those leads to make them only super high-quality. So my, you know, sales guys have an easy time selling the stuff, and let’s allow everything into our customer base, you know, I don’t care necessarily about you know, the churn, you know, per se, you know, basically optimizing everything for sales. I think that’s the wrong setup actually. If you’re the CRO, you need to detach yourself and you come out of the sales role in to detach yourself a lead for optimizing for your, you know, your buddies, if you will, and need to see like, okay, how can I optimize the whole thing, and that sometimes means you need to relearn some of the things that you have spent a decade or more, you know, reinforcing, like, “Hey, this is you know, sales is my thing, and I need to protect against the marketing guy, against the CS guy.” I think if you can detach yourself from that, I think then anyone can actually be, a be a great CRO.

Jordan  16:50

But how do you do that? Because it’s human nature to optimize toward your bias. Right? So like, somebody, you just say, you need to detach, you need to detach. Well, you know, that sounds fantastic, Toni. But like, realistically, how do you detach? Right? I came up in sales; it’s everything that I know. I think through this vein. In order to be qualified to be a good CRO, and that standpoint, or in charge of RevOps, like, what is the appropriate way to round out in marketing or success? Or even, you know, talking to the finance guy, heaven forbid, right? Like, like, how do you actually get enough skill, awareness, knowledge, you know, in some case, even like some political sway, right, within your organization that people will say, ah, like, like, they get that scope?

Toni  17:39

So I think maybe it’s less about detaching yourself than it is about attaching yourself to something new. Right? And, and that then might be the full revenue piece actually, as, as a metric, if you will, not necessarily the new base or something like that. It’s really the renewed stuff at the end of the year, or basically the ARR that you’re building up, right? And if this is what you’re optimizing for, so number one, you will understand. And I think the trying to understand the other departments is the really important piece here, by the way; you will understand well, there are some limitations in Google Search, Google paid search, right? When I was coming out of sales, and, you know, basically, the sales ops guy, I was always looking at the marketing folks and was like “guys, why aren’t you just spending more money on ads? I don’t understand why you’re making it so difficult. Just buy some more leads, how difficult can it be?” Well, turns out, it’s much more difficult than just that, right? It doesn’t actually work like that; you have, you know, a specific amount you can spend on Google search, and then it just ends. People don’t understand that Google search ends at some point, and you can’t just add more on that, and then need to get really creative, what else you’re gonna do, when usually, this is when then, and this is where some of the dysfunction that comes from usually this is then when the CMO suddenly starts, “hey, let’s do those webinar leads. And let’s mark them MQL and send them to the sales guys. And oh, wow, 100 leads only resulted in one opportunity, well, you just need to work them harder,” right? That’s where some of those, this was some of those, those contracts are coming from. And if you have, as a, as a sales leader, in that case, also as a marketing, if you don’t want to understand the other parts of the, of the different silos and of the part of the revenue, I think that’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible for you to become a great CRO in that sense, not saying that I necessarily was. You know, I’m from Europe, I’m not, not… what does it call to…”

Jordan  19:26

You’re not able to talk about your own greatness. However, I would like to just say this publicly from somebody… Toni’s just a fantastic leader. So you Europeans can take other people’s praise, right? Okay. That is okay. Yes. Yeah. Right. So, listen, Toni was fantastic. This is… hold on Toni, where’s that list you sent me? I want to make sure… 

Toni  19:50

No, but so again, right? It’s I think it’s more about attaching yourself to, to a different metric. And then, then basically thinking okay, how can I optimize for that thing and then organizing the rest of the silos, if you will, to optimize for that over time. And I don’t know, I think I think if you go in with the premise of where you come from sales, you’re biased towards sales. And therefore, it’s going to be difficult for you to understand this other stuff, I think, I think that will block off a lot of avenues for basically everyone and basically saying no one can be a good CRO. Right? That, that will then be the, the inverse of that argument.

Jordan  20:29

So Toni, I’m gonna take this conversation sideways for half a second, just to tell you a story. The other person that I said I knew that came from a finance background and went to CRO was actually one of the most responsible folks for taking Google public back in the day go, okay. But the reason I’m bringing this up is you were talking about paid ads. And I was talking to… her name was, was Anna, I was talking to Anna the one day. And she told me, and I don’t even remember this, like back in the day, you know how in Google, there’s like the top section of the paid ads. And I can’t remember if there’s always like two or three or whatever. But there’s like a certain number, this was back in what 2004, that there’ll be whatever number of ads. Every time Google was about to have a shortfall, like maybe they weren’t going to hit their number or whatever else, what they would do is on like any search combination, that would work, whatever that next layer 1, 2, 3 paid ads, and then it’s always the first organic search, they would do one extra paid ad, and actually put Google is that next line, like the last line item, because people were so trained, AD AD AD, organic, AD AD AD, organic, and they’ve clicked the Google button thinking that it was like the first organic search. And she said immediately, within two weeks, they’d be above and beyond the number. So I mean, just think about like the monopolization of like search and whatever else in the programming of humanity here that you could literally just hit the number by saying, “well, listen, if we’re gonna miss, let’s just pretend like we’re the first organic search, even though it’ll say ad and then we’re going to hit a number.” Can you, can you imagine that power over paid ads?

Toni  22:13

I mean, now that you said it, I can, I can very much imagine that actually. What, what I often see that people can’t imagine, which is, you know, the other perspective is, wait, Google is such a massive company, they have, you know, so much traffic that makes so much money on ads, how can, how can they ever run out of leads to send me? That, that is, that is sometimes the, the alternative that I’m seeing, and then I kind of need to, you know, have a conversation and remind people well, if you’re working in B2C, and if you’re selling sneakers, the, you know, Google will never run out of leads to send you. It’s really just a game whether or not you can acquire them, you know, for the right amount of money. In your B2B niche of a niche of a niche of a niche, where you’re, maybe have five people waking up every morning to think like, “oh, let’s Google, let’s Google that problem. Let’s see what comes out.” There is not suddenly going to be 10, 20, 30 or 100, people coming out of this; it’s going to stay those five, unless you do, and unless something big happens unless you do demand gen, unless you have like, you know, Corona, or something else happens, right? And, and I think a lot of people struggle with the realization that there’s a cap on some of these things, actually. And, and once you realize that, then it becomes a “Okay, wait a minute, what am I going to do now then? What is the other thing in marketing that we’re going to do now in order to kind of send more demos and so forth?” Right? And so this is, this is what I’ve been running into a lot actually.

Jordan  23:36

Did you know… I… This might be totally false. But I read something about two or three months ago that said, among Gen Z, Tiktok has more organic search than Google. So instead of like going to Google and saying, you know “how to set up RevOps in Europe” or whatever, like, Gen Z is going to Tiktok and saying “how to set up RevOps,” and you know, whatever. And they’re going to Tiktok as the major search engine before Google. And so anyway, I know, we’re gonna really sideways on this. But I mean, I’m just fascinated by how such a large, massive company that has just owned the market for so long, all of a sudden, something that began with like dance videos, right, is becoming something that’s beginning to eat their lunch in the next generation. And so finding some vague way to loop this back into our conversation. You know, in Europe, as I’ve talked to different folks, people have been living off of spreadsheets forever. And so I, we have a mutual friend named David and like he, he’s doing all this like tech work, tools, whatever. And he’s going into these organizations and, and like they’ve never seen anything beyond a spreadsheet before. It’s like the first time, and so going from a place where spreadsheet is so heavy and that’s all you know, to now you’re talking about, “hey, we’re gonna do this revenue operations motion; we’re going to, you know, I’ve heard you talk about how tools just don’t really matter. But the point is they’re in there. We’re also going to revolutionize even the way that your organization works.” Like, how difficult is that conversation with folks when you sit down for the first time and, and you’re like, “Hey, listen, it’s not just tools, like, we’re actually going to change your job titles, we’re actually going to change the way that you think.” Like, are people receptive to this? 

Toni  25:29

So first of all, I don’t think, I don’t think Europe is alone in the spreadsheet hell, by the way, I think that’s a thing across. Also, when you think about Airtable and their success, you know why they were so successful? Basically, a little bit better of a Google spreadsheet that then took over the CRM, your accounting, your bookkeeping, your, you know, invites, you know, all of these things. This is what Airtable basically did. So, so there’s a bunch of, there’s a couple of unicorns you can build just with trying to replace something that you know, is currently built in a spreadsheet. Right. And I think then in the, in our flipping to this RevOps, I don’t know the rise of it, the revolution, I don’t know, whatever, you know, word you want to attach to that?

Jordan  26:11

I think, sorry, it’s “commercial operations”. 

Toni  26:14

There you go. Yeah. Let me, let me educate everyone here. It’s actually called commercial operations. No, I think the, I think the realization is less so we need someone to do some of the ops stuff. I I think, you know, maybe Germany is a bit behind, potentially. I mean, Denmark is a bit more mature on the B2C, sorry, B2B side, actually. But, but generally speaking, I think people are waking up to “Okay. You know, does the VP Sales want to roll out HubSpot or want to integrate HubSpot to Outreach or whatever?” And there’s very clearly no, the VP of Sales does not, does not want to do that at all; there’s no one that can do it. And, you know, my, my go-to line on this is, you might not have someone in the organization that’s called sales operations. But someone in the organization for sure, is doing sales operations for you right now. Right? So I think, I think the basis of that, I think that’s less so new, I think what is more, so a new thing is, and this is what I’m trying to push most of the time is, so you have those, you have those really skilled, let’s call them consultants, you know, some of them actually come from management consulting; some of them come from finance; some of them, you know, come maybe from, you know, other go-to-market functions. And they basically, they have to roll out those tools in order to roll out those tools, they need to understand the process, and they understand end to end how this whole thing actually works. And once they achieve that, once they master that, it feels kind of wasted to only use them to roll out another tool in turn. And actually, you know, what some organizations doing and much more so in the US, by the way, and you know, increasingly so in Europe is to realize, okay, wait a minute, actually, these these these people here that understand the full process… Why am I not using them for quote-unquote, higher-level tasks? Why am I not using them for revenue planning? Why am I not using them to figure out you know, how to set up this budget? Why am I not using them to figure out hey, can we actually achieve the 3x? The 4x? Whatever we plan for next year? And if so, how would that plan actually look like? Right? And this is the whole conversation about strategic RevOps. Really, you know, what it, at the core what it means to me, that the stuff that you learn being the operational, tactical RevOps, use that stuff in order to do more stuff on top and, and for me that that thing on top is a leveraging your answer and funnel understanding, you know, the engine is in front of you, you can have X-ray vision through it, you see, which, you know, screw is loose and you tighten, and what happens if you tighten it too much. And I can tell you right now, as as, as RevOps turned CRO, when I was sitting in those exact meetings when I was sitting in those boardrooms, no one gets this; no one understands the engine, as you might do as a revenue operations person. And if you do one, if you leverage that, in terms of, you know, bigger level tasks, I think it’s, it’s a massive, massive opportunity for talent. And when I finished this pitch, to kind of C-level or to other people that are you know, willing to listen, everyone was like, “Oh, wow, you’re totally right. Yeah, you know, why? Why am I only quote unquote, using them to roll out you know, HubSpot and what have you?”

Jordan  29:19

So we’re running up on time, but I want to, I want to ask you one action question. So you finish the pitch, and they’re like “yes, let’s do it.” Okay, so Toni with Growblocks, you go in there and you’re working with an organization like, like what’s the, what’s the first, second, third step? Yeah, we got to move a little quickly here. Like yeah, you just bought in; what are you doing next? 

Toni  29:41

So I think it’s, it’s a bit different for for Growblocks really what we have. What we are doing is basically kind of helping you to build your revenue engine end to end, kind of that’s all from traffic to leads to opportunities to churn; we have that then as a, as a product, right? And then you can use that to do your revenue plan. And once you have your bottom-up revenue plan, and then you can understand, okay, so what needs to happen, you know, when and if something is going off? How much is it going to go off? And really the, the impact that people realize, and we’re kind of still on the product realization journey, if you will, the thing that people will take away and you know, really see like, oh, wow, you know, this, this is, this is what we now need in our lives. And it’s pretty stupid and pretty boring, but it’s actually monthly and quarterly business reviews that are actually valuable. You know, that, that is the stuff at the end of the day, when you think about it, everyone talks about MBRs and QBRs, and how important they are. Guess what; no one is actually doing them. And if they’re aware, you know, first of all, they probably will be pretty late: two or three weeks into the month. And that is that’s, that’s difficult. So, you know, go by Growblocks…

Jordan  30:42

Or you’re sitting in there on something and everybody’s talking, and everybody only listens when they’re speaking. And everybody else checks out.

Toni  30:51

No and the other thing is like, oh, you know, my number is two is three leads fewer. So you know, I don’t believe anything that’s written on the stack. But I mean, that, that has massive impact that RevOps can actually deliver today, in many cases, but they don’t. And I think that would be an action item, if someone is listening and thinking, how can I be more strategic? Well think about setting up an MBR, QBR setup, especially for your go-to-market function. And the second that, maybe the first thing that’s going to happen, is the CEO and the CFO are going to knock on your door. And number one, hey, can you send me that deck? And number two, can you add me to the invite next month, right, and suddenly, you as RevOps have like, direct impact direct interface to C level. And suddenly these guys don’t see you as the system admin anymore. Suddenly, they see you as like, okay. You know, I was about to cuss here, actually, they, you know, f**k, they see you actually, as someone that can impact the revenue and can tell me something that I didn’t know, they can tell me something that the VP of Sales didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me. Right? And suddenly, you’re playing a completely different field.

Jordan  31:53

Toni, listen, thanks for coming on today. How do folks get ahold of you.

Toni  31:58

Follow me on LinkedIn, Toni Hohlbein. It’s a German name; it’s difficult to spell probably. Add Growblocks; that’s probably gonna find, you can find me. A colleague of mine also doing a show ourselves. We will have Jordan on that one. You know, eventually, we’re talking about everything revenue, mostly revenue leaders, revenue operations. That’s really our, our main…

Jordan  32:20

How do they find that show?

Toni  32:22

Go on, go on Spotify, and, and search for The Revenue Formula, The Revenue Formula.

Jordan  32:29

The Revenue… Okay. Listen, crew, I do mean this. As I’ve sort of navigated some different countries working in the EU, and in, gotten into some different circles over there, actually, in the last six months, Toni’s name keeps popping up. And so my point in saying this is like, this is a guy that you want to get ahold of today. Because six months, two years, whatever from now, I mean, the chasm may just be too far wide for folks like me to be able to reach, reach out there. Is that enough praise for you, Toni?

Toni  33:04

Certainly the… Oh yes. He’s going to be too successful that really drives the urgency. I love that one. That, that’s something you only got on your show. I love it, Jordan. Thanks.

Jordan  33:15

Yeah, exactly. All right, crew. Thanks for, thanks for listening in. Toni, thanks so much. Always a good time chatting with you. I’ll see you.

33:23

Hot dog. That was a great episode. Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about Greaser Consulting or any information you heard on today’s episode, visit us online at www.greaserconsulting.com. Be sure to click the Follow button and the bell icon to be notified on the latest here at RevOps Therapy. Thanks and see you real soon.