Tell Us About Your Background and Your Current Role
My name is Katie Cooper, and I work at Muck Rack, helping organizations find the right journalists to pitch, report on media coverage and prove the value of their work.
ā
I've been at Muck Rack for 3.5 years, started as a Sales Operations Manager, and eventually moved over to focus more on analytics and reporting as an FP&A manager on the Finance Team. I was in charge of the project to bring on a new CPQ and help overhaul our Quote-to-Cash system.
What Initial Challenge Led You to Look for a Solution Like RevOps?
One of the initial challenges that led us to search for a solution like RevOps was that we wanted to keep our team focused on winning deals with the right contact information and not manually correcting errors. So as we grow in scale, some processes can't grow in scale with us, and our contracting process, using Google Docs, was one of them.
What Were Your Search Criteria When Potential Assessing Solutions?
Our search criteria were threefold:
- We needed a solution that worked within our existing systems
- It had to work within our Sales and Customer Success Management workflow.
- We needed to create a level of automation in these workflows to eliminate the manual entry of dates and terms as much as possible.
Our CRM is
HubSpot, and we needed a contracting solution that could write to and read from fields on Contact, Deal, Company, and Line Item levels.
This includes custom fields.
ā
RevOps really stood out in the ability to handle the technical and business requirements we had within our current system.
ā
And at the end of the day, at the time, it was the only one.
How Did You Decide On RevOps As The Right Solution?
Our evaluation process of RevOps involved some initial technical scoping and a week-long user trial.
I set up some templates for our Sales and CS teams to use, and a number of them were given access and asked to run through many common scenarios.
We sell into SMB mid-market and enterprises, and they all have different sales cycles, speeds, and requirements. So we needed something that was going to be able to work for all of our customers and all of our teams. At the end of the user testing period, we proved enough value that we secured the budget and moved forward with RevOps.
How Are You Using RevOps Today?
Today we are using RevOps for our new business contracts, renewals, and upsells outside of renewal.
In short, we're using it for everything.
We're using it when it refers to our Web terms and custom MSAs, and we're also using it to track and give transparency to our approval workflows and requesting notable exceptions.
That then helps our teams in the future understand why specific contract terms may have been altered the way it was or other special exceptions like that, basically tying the story of the way around the contract to the actual contract itself.
What Has Been the Impact of RevOps on Your Company?
The impact of RevOps on our company has been immediately very large.
Previously, we had about a 16.5% rate of deals being closed with inaccurate information that needed to be updated later. Maybe that was because a rep put in the wrong end date or didn't get their price quite right. But, since everything was manual, everything was up for being put in incorrectly, which is not the world you want to live in.
So in today's world, we have almost nothing that needs correcting because of manual input errors, which is excellent.
And now that we have line items in HubSpot that have some custom values pushed in from RevOps, we can automate transaction creation and invoice from our finance system to our customers.
So it affects many people and many teams and has saved us; saying a lot of time is an understatement: It was probably 2 to 3 hours every day of cross-checking deals with contracts to ensure that things were closed, and now we are checking our contracts before they go out through RevOps, which is a much faster process.
I would say, overall, I probably spend maybe 10 minutes throughout the whole day doing contract checks when necessary. But a lot of the integration guardrails that we have right now do the job of most of the checking that we were doing.
So again, 2 to 3 hours a day saved; pretty incredible.
Creating a Collaborative Deal Desk With RevOps
We love the
Collaborate feature in RevOps.
This allows our sales reps and customer success managers to give additional context to special exception requests; maybe payment terms, building frequencies, discounts, and term adjustments, and tie it into that order form so that there's instantly that context on what it is and why it's needed.
We also have the transparency of: "Yes, this is approved. It's going through the correct approval chain," allowing us to take some of our very noisy, Slack notifications away and move this whole approvals and communication process into RevOps.
It also helps when someone goes out of the office or on vacation and gets sick. Life happens, allowing someone to step in quickly and cover, whether for the individual rep or the manager and pick everything up seamlessly.
