Share this article
Learn from the brightest minds how to predictably and efficiently grow revenue.
Related Content
Lessons in Scaling Cybersecurity Sales with Dean Hickman-Smith
This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, Guy Rubin, CEO of Ebsta, speaks with Dean Hickman-Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at HackerOne on Scaling Cybersecurity Sales. In this episode, Guy and Dean explore the evolution of sales leadership, the power of community in B2B sales, and how AI is transforming sales enablement and performance. Dean Hickman-Smith…
Building High-Converting Teams with Sean Murray of LeadIQ
This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, Graham Smith speaks with Sean Murray, Senior Director of Sales and Sales Development at LeadIQ. In this episode, Sean shares his journey to tech sales, discusses his approach to building high-performing SDR teams, and explains why quality outreach trumps quantity in today’s sales landscape Sean Murray is Senior…
Transforming Productivity Metrics with Mike Perrone, Chief Operations Officer at Prodoscore
This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, Guy Rubin, founder and CEO of Ebsta, speaks with Mike Perrone, Chief Operations Officer at Prodoscore. In this episode, Guy and Mike discuss data-driven productivity scores, bridging employee flexibility with executive accountability, and how to empower sales teams through actionable insights and tailored coaching. Mike Perrone is Chief…
Always Be Planning – A Look at Zero-Based Budgeting and Change Management with Kimberley Haley, VP of Revenue Operations at Talend
In this episode of the Revenue Insights Podcast, host Lee Bierton is joined by Kimberley Haley, VP of Revenue Operations at Talend. They discuss the concept of ABP (always be planning), zero-based budgeting, and internal change management to retain customers and stay ahead of the competition. They also discuss best practices to follow to succeed in a dynamic business environment.
Kimberley Haley is VP of Revenue Operation at Talend, a data management SaaS company. Kimberly’s career spans the entire bandwidth of Sales and Revenue Operations, and she has also worked with companies like Dun & Bradstreet and SimilarWeb. Kimberley’s also had a seven-year stint with Thomson Reuters in London. She brings her diverse learning and deep topical insights to this podcast.
Kimberley’s book recommendation: Sink, Float, or Swim – Sustainable High Performance Doesn’t Happen by Chance – It Happens by Choice by Scott Peltin and Jogi Rippel
Time Stamps
00:24 – 04:25 – Kimberley’s story
04:53 – 08:48 – Zero-based budget and always be planning (ABP)
08:49 – 10:40 – The four pillars of revenue management
12:30 – 14:18 – Motivating salespersons in a tough market
15:03 – 18:25 – Learnings from ABP
20:44 – 28:42 – Driving internal change to adapt to ABP
30:41 – 33:40 – Codifying the ABP process
33:41 – 36:51 – What would you do differently
37:19 – 38:44 – Kimberley’s book choice: Sink, Float, or Swim by Scott Peltin and Jogi Rippel
Subscribe to the Revenue Insights Podcast:
Transcript
Kimberley Haley: Instead of the old ABS Always Be Selling, we should take on the mantra of ABP Always Be Planning. I said to the team now, we probably want to get quarterly views of this stuff and readouts of how things are going so that when we get into planning even next year, we’re not trying to pull together and scramble 60-page text on one of our territories are going to look like.
Lee: Welcome to Revenue Insights. Every week, we’ll be joined by revenue leaders from some of the most successful and highest-growing companies. Together, we explore how they built their revenue teams, the journeys that they’ve been on, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Revenue Insights is brought to you by Ebsta. We’re a revenue intelligence platform designed to help revenue teams to build more pipeline, close more deals, and retain more customers.
Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of The Revenue Insights Podcast. Today, I’m joined by Kimberley Haley. She’s the Vice President of Revenue Operations over at Talend. There, she has spent the past two years overseeing all go-to-market operational functions, having previously worked at SimilarWeb and Dun & Bradstreet. Kimberly, it’s wonderful to meet you.
Kimberley: Hi, great to be here. Good to see you. Finally, at last, we connect.
Lee: We’ve been trying to do this for the past month, two months, I think, and us going to events. I think you’ve been in the midst of annual planning. It’s finally come around. Actually, that’s probably something that we’re going to dive into a little bit more today. Before we get into it, though, Kimberly, I’d love to know a little bit more about your story and how you got to where you are today.
Kimberley: Sure. Well, my story is probably similar to a lot of revenue operations leaders where it was not one linear path, it was a little bit more like this, where it included a lot of different roles in different cities. I started my career in a typical sales role back in Boston, Massachusetts, working for Reuters. Then I moved out to San Francisco and took on more of a customer success-type position. Then I had that just, I think it was more of a personal goal to live abroad. I had that desire to move to London, personal desire to move to London.
I was fortunate enough to get a customer success-type role right around the corner from you at Thomson Reuters. Then it was just happenstance that I stumbled into sales ops at that time, because we were rolling out Salesforce there in London, and they needed some assistance on the customer success side. I put my hand up and said, “Sure, I’ll help out.” That started the journey through sales operations. It was first Salesforce rollout, then Salesforce metrics, and then reporting on that.
Then all of a sudden it was, “We need to redo our pricing model and manage our discounting. Can you help us with that?” Then that rolled into more of a commercial operations deal desk role, and it just evolves from there. I think that’s how a lot of people take on their revenue operations career that they just get some experience and then lo and behold, you’ve had a little enablement, a little sales operations, a little bit of deal desk, and you have now a revenue operations organization. That’s been my path.
I left Reuters when I moved back to New York, and then went to a smaller startup, a SaaS-based startup, and took that journey from there. It’s been a little circuitous but here we are.
Lee: It sounds a lot like many marketers that I meet in the sense of they just seem to fall into that and then you go on a pretty crazy journey from there. Getting to where you are today at Talend, and we alluded to it at the beginning. I think something that’s super relevant around this time of year is obviously annual planning, preparing go-to-market strategies for next year. It’d be great to hear a little bit more around what your annual planning process looks like and what I’d be interested to know is perhaps three core parts that go into that planning process.
Kimberley: Sure. I would say since I joined two years ago, it’s definitely evolved. That partly, I think, is we have some learnings from the year before and we’ve applied them. Then the second thing is we’re now a private company. I think maybe public and private potentially approach planning a little bit differently. I would say overall, I’ve been through the top-down planning, the bottom-up planning. This year, we’re trying a zero-based budget planning, which is basically you’re starting from scratch at the beginning of the year and you made no assumptions that what funding you had last year you get again this year and you build business cases towards what you need.
Which has been really, really interesting because we all get a chance to hear from the product organization, the sales organization, the marketing organization, our engineering team, all of the funding asks that everyone has so that you can really understand how the entire business needs to be run. I have to say some of my requests after I heard, say what product I was requesting, I was thinking, “Maybe mine is not as important as theirs because that’s going to drive revenue a little bit more directly than some of the asks that I have.”
It helps you actually have a better view holistically of what’s going to get prioritized and why, and then you can go back and help your team understand that as well. I think that that was a really big change that we had this year that I thought was very fruitful.
One thing I also learned that I was talking to my team about was by the time people start asking us in revenue operations for data, which is about the August timeframe, it’s too late.
I said to them, “Instead of the old ABS, Always Be Selling, we should take on the mantra of ABP, Always Be Planning.” I said to the team, “Now, we probably want to get quarterly views of this stuff and readouts of how things are going so that when we get into planning even next year, we’re not trying to pull together and scramble 60-page decks on what our territories are going to look like but we have a one-page view because we’ve been monitoring it all the way through the year.”
I think that’s my other big learning from this year, is that you really want to be planning in advance and anticipating what is going to happen so that when you get into planning, it’s not too late, you’re on the forefront.
Lee: The concept of zero-based budgeting is really interesting. I’d like to dive into it a little bit more because I’d be interested to know what was the motive for it. You talked a little bit more around what it is, but I’m curious to know why you made the decision to try out zero-based budgeting. Also, what that process looked like in terms of starting to use it as part of your annual planning process?
Kimberley: The big why is because we previously, like many other companies, probably had the other typical planning process where we were handed essentially an expense envelope and then we had to fit within that. That included your quota caring reps and then you had to figure out your support roles on top of that. That got really difficult because it wasn’t strategic enough for us to think where should we put the reps. Where are we going to get growth? What kind of growth are we going to get from different theaters? Then what support roles you really need? What’s critical?
For example, are we going to be selling more using an indirect channel or a direct channel? If we hadn’t gone through this process this year, we wouldn’t have thought through the funding we might need for an indirect channel like enablement for our partners. That’s critical. That’s a role that we really need if we’re going to be leaning in more to the indirect channel method. If we hadn’t gone through the zero-based budgeting, we would have never thought through more strategically what we need to do. That was the real reasoning for it.
The process was great because we all got the same template. Every group got a template and it was like a value-based discussion. Are you saving costs, are you generating revenue, are you mitigating risk, the three value drivers that every company should be thinking about. We all had to complete that. Then just strategically think about why we actually are asking for this resource or this tech piece of the tech stack and what it’s going to drive. It was a lot more strategic than last year, which has been great.
Lee: It sounds a lot like I had a guest, Sonny Kumar this week. He was talking about a mental model, which was going back to basics. It sounds very similar along those lines of often, particularly in larger business you’ve got all these costs coming in and going out. Often it’s why are we spending the money on this and what value are we actually getting from it? It sounds like, correct if I’m wrong, that’s the process that you’ve really gone through of scrutinizing what’s going in, what’s coming out, and what value you’re getting from it. That’s obviously gone into your planning for this year. Is there anything that has really stood out from that process, that really stood out to you, “Oh my God. Why are we allocating budget here when in fact it should have been going over here?”
Kimberley: I would say there has been a really healthy conversation around the balance of innovation. We had some real conversations about if we don’t do this, then we will not continue to innovate, going forward, forward growth. Not just catching up to our competitors in some cases but really thinking about three to five years from now, if we don’t do this now, we won’t actually move forward in three to five years. That was a very different conversation there. Then how we balance that out with customers and customer support, better customer experience, making sure that we’re giving existing customers what they need every single day.
That really just took all of the noise away. Those were the two themes that we spent the time on. As an example, it was about investment into a customer portal to better the customer experience. Then innovation that we’re not going to maybe see a return on this year, but the following year if we do it now, it will accelerate growth for next year. You have to weigh what’s more important to you and how far out of your thinking.
Lee: It’s then a question of prioritizing the thing that’s going to deliver you the value. I think that leads nicely onto something else that we were talking about pre-show, which is making decisions based off of the current climate. Something that we were talking about beforehand. I know from your experience, you’ve worked at this is that have gone through hyper growth but also gone through industry contraction as well. Something that I wanted to ask you about is, at times like they are right now where they are contracting, what’s your approach to that? What are the key areas that you are looking into when that is happening and what advice would you give to other leaders in this situation?
Kimberley: It’s different because you have to think about a couple of different factors in your modeling versus how you might not necessarily consider them to be as important. For example, attrition is a big concern. We’ve come off a year of the great resignation, and if you hadn’t factored that into your modeling last year, that may have affected your attainment this year.
Thinking through how you handle that for next year, that wasn’t a conversation that we really worried about because we had our average benchmark attrition rates in our model, and that was that. That was after the great resignation that everybody went through that now changed our conversation. The other conversation, the big one for next year is how to motivate the salespeople in a down market. The conversation is real. It’s not necessarily about more quota equals growth in this kind of market. It could mean lower quota, could mean better attainment, which would mean more growth.
That’s a very different conversation. It’s getting people used to that concept of, well, maybe we lower quotas to help drive attainment because it will motivate and it will lower that attrition. There are different factors now that you have to think about that maybe weren’t part of the modeling or part of the concern before.
I think the last piece, so those two, and then the third is making sure, again, from a sales perspective, that each salesperson feels like they can be successful in their territory. We’re doubling down on our propensity-to-buy model. We had a good one and this year we’re going to make sure we have a great one so that they target the right accounts and they feel confident in the territory that they’re given.
Lee: It’s a really interesting one, particularly around lowering quotas to keep reps motivated. I’m curious to know on that point as well is something that we were looking at beforehand was often you might have the same amount of leads coming through or even likely even less. Obviously, with a lot of those leads where budgets are tighter, it then becomes even more challenging to actually close those deals at the end of the day.
I’m curious to know, is there anything that has gone into your annual planning process in terms of helping support reps in order to be able to work with potential customers that are tighter budgets, they want to see faster time to value, they want to see more of ease of use given the current climate?
Kimberley: Two things that again, changed for this year that weren’t as big of the part of the conversation last year, number one is what we can do to help drive adoption. We have offer professional services. We’re a pretty highly technical sale while we are in as a service company because we offer continuous value. It’s still a pretty technical installation. One of the conversations was how we leverage our professional services organization in ways that we may not have done in the past. The second thing is looking at our marketing spend and wondering what can we do there to maybe change the dynamic.
Probably a lot of people, there’s a lot of shift to the digital model and so we have a lot of incoming leads. Those are generally for small business and that’s how you get the new logo engine going and that’s been successful. What we’re looking at is do we take some of those dollars and move them more to ABM and perhaps that will help us in the enterprise space and we just change the dynamic a little bit. Those are two different things that we’re looking at, I think for this year.
Lee: Adoption I think is an absolutely huge one, particularly in terms of your lifetime value, but also reducing the amount of churn that you’ve got. You mentioned professional service in particular, is there something that as a business you’re starting to planning to roll out now going into next year? From an adoption perspective?
Kimberley: Yes, actually we’re really excited because it’s been about a year in the making. We use Gainsight for our customer success organization and we are rolling out some measurement scores just to identify customers and their health. Are they happy with us, are they satisfied, are they adopting, are they using, and all of that? We will fold into a risk score so that we will have more insight into any potential retention issues because in an industry contraction or in a market contraction, I shouldn’t just say industry all industries [chuckles], what I’ve seen in my past lives is that this is the time that customers are really evaluating what’s important to them.
You have to make sure that you are differentiating and that you are sticky. We’ve really spent time making sure that our customers continue to be happy with us and developing ways that we can get ahead of that. This year actually, for our CSMs, we’ill be compensating them differently. Our compensation plan is going to change and it will bring in two of those factors. One, the health score that we’re launching through Gainsite, and then the second is adoption because those first 90 days statistically are critical. If you’re not fully rolled out within 90 days, that poses retention risk, that poses upsell risk. Making sure that we focus on those two metrics are going to be two new things that we’ll introduce in our commission plans this year for them.
Lee: The risk score. I’m really fascinated by. Absolutely love the scores, I like scores like that, like an engagement score as well. It’s very close to my heart, I’m curious to know what actually goes into that risk score. Obviously, to people listening, they may not have access to it, and by the sound of it, it’s taken you guys a little while to get that developed and set up. What are the factors that you’re looking for that go into that risk score? I think you touched on there in terms of time being one of them. I’d love to understand, assuming, of course, that you can talk about it as if it’s
Kimberley: Yes. I will say one thing that I’ve learned is that it is evolutionary, so you have to start it, that’s my first learning from this year is that if you don’t put one metric in there, then you’ll never get started. The health of the health score gets better the more metrics you add. I believe usage would say the first one. Then there were other components of around the number of visits or the number of engagements that were had with the customer through the year that gets added to it, and then the number of logins gets added to it, and so on and so forth.
It’s a lot for us right now because we can track those product items. Those were the first piece. I know that there are plans to expand from there, but those were the critical ones to get in there. I’m hearing that it gets stronger and stronger the more you add the metrics.
Lee: Absolutely. I completely agree with starting small, starting with what you know, and then building on top of it and inevitably making it more complex over time. I guess the follow-up to that is then now how do you plan on rolling it out to your customer success teams? What does it look like in terms of their day-to-day? I think you touched on the commission structure, but it’d be great to know a little bit more of that enablement approach.
Kimberley: Yes. That was one of our learnings from planning last year that you have to prepare everybody for this kind of change. We actually adopted the ADKAR model. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that but that is essentially– It’s a learning, it’s a change management model is what it is. It’s A-D-K-A-R and that’s an acronym. It essentially is talking about you have to accept something, you have to be aware of something, you have to know about it in order for you to adopt it.
My first year here, we just jammed commission plans, territory plans, everything in January and said here you go. We learned that that’s not the best way to do it, especially if you’re making such a change with say with the CSMs, and it’s all good. I think they’re going to really like it but they need to embed it in their day-to-day work. What we’ve started to do actually is have management sessions as early as now. That’s why planning ABP, you have to always be planning, meaning you always have to get in front of the managers and say, “This is coming. Here’s some information for you to put in front of your CSMs.”
We invested in Highspot last year which has helped us tremendously so that we can just put things out there for them for learning, but getting in front of them in and starting to prepare them as soon as we learn about it is the big learning that I took away. It is hard to make time for communication. You’re so busy doing planning, doing all of those things. Our team is just cranking out models and territories, and all of that, and commission plans.
If you don’t stop to manage the change management, you’ll really regret it. That I learned the hard way in the past, and so we’re trying to get ahead of it by at least starting with the managers for them to understand and then start to roll it out. Our sales kickoff in January, it’s more of a reinforcement and motivation about the change, and less about teaching them about it so we’re trying to do it this year.
Lee: Yes, I completely agree that. The communication is often the bit that is very easy to let fall by the wayside. Particularly from my experience, you spend a lot of time building out plans. In my world, it’s marketing and yours it’s for the whole go-to-market function. You’ve spent so long in it that you understand it so well that you just make the assumption of what you’re rolling out then everyone understands, but obviously, that’s like, “Okay, we’ve got a risk score now coming out.
I don’t really understand how that’s the ,” because they lack the wider context. Communication then is so important at that point. How do you plan on approaching it and probably more generally, in terms of communicating what those plans are to your teams?
Kimberley: That’s a great question. We have evolved our communication. This one I think is another one of those areas where you’re probably constantly learning how to do it best. Especially two to three years after COVID, the ways that you may have communicated before don’t work anymore because people are tired of the longer zoom sessions, et cetera. We’re trying a couple different things. One thing is my enablement team have built a center of excellence around communication, where they’ve established very simplified streamlined communication methods.
This has helped tremendously because salespeople now know where to go or the entire revenue organization including CSMs, et cetera. They know to rely on these four points of communication. One being an automatic newsletter that we send that just has hyperlinks to everything but at least it’s a summary, and they can just keep that in their folder. Then the second thing is, as I mentioned, we invested in Highspot last year which just houses everything.
We’ve had to be pretty rigid about taking things out of Salesforce, putting it in Highspot. Highspot has to be the place that everything lives because you can update it and just to know that you don’t have to store it on your desktop anymore, it’s right there. That was a pretty important game-changer. Then the third thing that we’re actually rolling out next year is an LMS and a learning management system is going to help us be a little bit more modern in I think probably be able to scale a little bit better in our communication because you can do short two-minute snippets on, here’s the risk score and what goes into it instead of an hour-long enablement session that you have to schedule for three different time zones.
Lee: Something that I’m really keen to pick up actually, that I made a note of when you were talking earlier, you were talking about the compensation scheme for your customer success teams. Actually, something that we touched on beforehand was commission structures for AEs as well. As part of keeping them motivated obviously, commission is a huge part of that. Appreciate that you might not be able to talk specifics of what you’re looking at going into your next financial year. How are you looking at those commission structures with the current climate in mind and potentially no quotas and what role is that really playing in how you’re planning?
Kimberley: Probably like a lot of people out there, it’s pretty critical. Like I said, the conversation is a little bit different in terms of, what can we do to motivate the entire organization, not just the salespeople, but to motivate everyone to do whatever the role is. For example, we’re simplifying, that’s one thing that we’re doing this year that I think is going to help things and simplification is in, “Okay, SDR your role is good quality pipeline and conversion.” Making sure that the metrics are focused on that, and getting rid of any noise that may have been in the plan outside of that one thing. Then for the account exec or the salesperson driving new business. That’s two ways with existing customers or new logo. Really just focusing on that piece.
Because you can get complicated when you say, “Well, this year we had this product strategy, so you’ll get an extra bonus if you focus on that product, or we had linearity if you focus on that.” That can tend to confuse and distract. When you really need to be honing in, in these types of economic conditions, I think it’s about simplicity and really just about what the core role is meant to do and making sure that you motivate those three things. That’s what we’re doing.
Lee: The bit that really stands out to me is the simplicity of it. You’re not the first person that I’ve spoken to either that is taking a much more simple approach to it. It makes me wonder at times when it is more of a growth market, you start adding layers of complexity to it. Where’s the actually keeping it simple. I’m curious to get your perspective on it is keeping it simple, actually, does it obviously make sense from a times of contraction, but does it make sense to maintain that at times of high growth as well? If you see what I mean because I’m wondering whether it actually warrants the additional complexity that you start to add to it when it is in a growth period.
Kimberley: I know. I think that’s where sometimes these market or economic contractions happen for a reason because it level-sets you, it brings you back to the core. It makes you really evaluate what’s important, and yes, I think it should probably sustain you. You just tend to get excited and add things as you grow and then you ever you hit a point where you say, “Ooh, got to pull it back a little bit.” Here we are doing that exact thing. I think it’s healthy for businesses to have to do that every couple of years. Unfortunately, it’s not great what forced us to be doing this, but it’s a good exercise to go through. It’s like cleaning out the closet.
Lee: Yes, absolutely. It needs must-right and keeping what’s essential and really clearing away everything else that you’ve got. I’m curious actually to go back to somewhere where we were at the beginning, but everyone’s annual planning process tends to vary depending on the needs of the business and the structure of the business. I’m curious to know probably in a fairly, let’s keep it fairly simple, your process from at the very beginning of I’m guessing to use your phrase, always be planning. What does your process look like when you are always be planning? Is it any data first and then start to take insights from it? I’m curious to know what it looks like for you.
Kimberley: I think I would love to be able to provide a step-by-step to-do list on this because if I could, I would use it myself. Unfortunately, at least I think right now, it’s almost a lot of it is simultaneous, but eventually I would hope it becomes chronological. I would say the first thing really is to start your market segmentation and addressable market analysis at the macro level.
We did start that in April, generally speaking, looking at our three theaters where we do business and what the addressable market is. Not the distribution mediums yet. Let’s not think about how we’ll sell it, but let’s look at where we’ll sell it and that was the beginning. I think probably everybody starts there as well. Then moving into the things that you can constantly track in the revenue operations team, that gets a little bit more specific to the revenue organization.
A big general and then you get a bit more specific into how is the performance by the different distribution methods, direct sale, indirect sale? What territories are performing better than others? How much new business versus existing business is each territory selling? What’s the account penetration? Are there types of prospects that they tend to hit because that will tell us if we should be capitalizing on some sales plays?
You start to whittle it down to then, I think a growth trajectory, a growth rate, a growth percentage that will then drive what quotas would be. That’s I think the ideal state right now. We’re almost there where we definitely started macro and then the simultaneous piece existed with the finance team working through the business case process and us working through what we think we can deliver from a quota and growth perspective.
Lee: I think you did a pretty good job sayng, as you said, “I don’t really have a step-by-step process.” It sounds like you got a pretty clear way of how you approach it. As you say, I think it really does vary by business and obviously the different teams that you have and the regions that you’re going into, but at a very basic level actually, you make it sound certainly very
Kimberley: If only.
Lee: It’s very true. To take us in a slightly different direction because your careers obviously years at Talend, SimilarWeb before that, a number of other SaaS businesses. Looking the past two years, if you could take what you know now and what you’ve learned over those two years perhaps from those annual sales planning, but be more holistically, and you go back in time, back to when you first when you first started there, what would you do differently?
Kimberley: I would spend more time understanding the tech stack and the value and where we have duplication and where we need to invest for improvement. That is– I really like to tell the modern sale and that is the modern sale. If companies are not paying attention to AI-driven tools, you could potentially fall behind.
It can get so unruly and I think we’re at an inflection point right now in revenue operations where there is a role to be created. I’m sure a lot of people like our organization, we have a couple of people devoted to the tech stack, but I’m not even sure that we’ve got it quite right in terms of measuring value, having the time to evaluate the most modern AI-driven tools, you need someone to stay on top of that.
Wow. Making sure that your CRM is clean and easy and efficient for the teams to use it like a CRM, and then making sure your customer portals and your customer communication methods are all efficient as well. It’s going to drive the full customer journey. I think looking back, it was one of those things that we looked at renewals and we just got it off the plate, but I would really probably looking back, spend more time on that. That’s what we’re going to try and do next year, is put a strategy around the tech stack. It’s getting a little bit out of hand.
Lee: It’s an ongoing battle as well because the more tech that you add in, the more tech debt that you have, the more complicated it becomes. It sounds, you should probably take a similar approach to it to like your zero-based budgeting, of going back to the root cause of it and the root situation of what do we have, who’s using it? Are we actually getting value out of it? Obviously, the challenge becomes, is it cause or effect? Often it’s hard to attribute, going to the numbers that you’ve got to tech that you’ve already got, what I was thinking was–
Kimberley: are doing it too. This is what they’re probably doing with our services, so we all have to, I think that’s a great point, following that same zero-base budgeting approach to that and maybe that’s to going to get it under control for sure. You know that that’s what customers are doing with any service that they have. Probably next year too, they have to find the value of it, so we’re all conscious of it.
Lee: I know it’s a challenge for a lot of our audience as a lot of people that I speak to. Once you’ve cracked it, we’ll get you back on the podcast so you can tell us all about it.
Kimberley: It sounds good.
Lee: Last question, Kimberley. I’d love to know what would be the one book that you would recommend to other revenue leaders.
Kimberley: I’ve been thinking about this one, and I think you can go in a couple of different directions. You can go down what’s the best reporting metrics type book, but I was thinking about the evolution of the revenue operations role, and especially during planning.
This is a bit of a thematic book that I’m going to tee up. What I realized is that this revenue operations role is just the central point to so many things during the planning process. If you are not agile and nimble, you can tend to get too wrapped up in a particular direction and not be successful, but you also have to take a step back, be unbiased, fair, and balanced to every part of the organization.
I was thinking through in my past lives, what book helped me get there and my book is my recommendation, I have it right here, is the Sink, Float, or Swim book because it is all about sustaining your leadership, like what you can do to take care of yourself, how you can stand out as a leader. It’s like personal taking care of yourself and then professionally what you can do to get ahead.
It just gives you some really good snippets about making sure that you can have 12 hour day, as long as you take time for yourself but then also how to approach meetings most efficiently to be most productive. We’re the central point of a lot of things when it comes to planning so we have to be able to be there and be present and be productive for everybody. There’s a lot on our shoulders so we have to take care of ourselves.
Lee: That’s a wonderful recommendation. I’ll be sure to include a link down to the show notes. I know you’ve just held it up to the cameras. I’m conscious that anyone listening to Apple Podcasts be like, “I can’t see the
Kimberley: Oh sorry. I’m sorry.
Lee: That’s fine. We’ll include a link in show notes so they can go and find it. Kimberley, it’s been so wonderful to have you on the podcast. Long last, we finally made it happen. If anyone wants to connect with you, learn more about what you’re doing over at Talend, where can they connect with you?
Kimberley: Please. My contact information is on my LinkedIn profile. Kimberley Haley.
Lee: Wonderful. We’ll put that in the show notes as well so tey can easily find you. As I say, it’s been fantastic to have you on. Thank you so much. If you are back in our neck of the woods in London at any point, it’ll be wonderful to meet up, and maybe we can do round two of this in person.
Kimberley: That sounds great. At the Griffin Conference Room Two, as we used to call it.
Lee: Exactly, Kimberley, thank you so much and to everyone that’s listened to this week’s episode, it’s been wonderful to have you listening. We’ll see you next week.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to Revenue Insights. If you want to learn more, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll deliver every episode straight to your inbox. If you have any questions, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn. Our links will be in the episode notes. See you next week.