Episode #76 You NEED These Top 3 Revenue Ops Tools to Crush Remote Sales 🚀

🎙️ In this special Christmas episode, Adam and Dale pull back the curtain on the must-have tech tools shaping modern revenue operations. Whether you’re a sales pro, marketing guru, or ops strategist, this episode delivers the insights you need to level up your game. 💼✨

🔑 Key Highlights:
 • Top 3 Tools That Drive Success:
1️⃣ HubSpot: The ultimate all-in-one platform for sales, marketing, and customer success.
2️⃣ Attention: Revolutionize your sales calls with conversational intelligence.
3️⃣ Aligned: Simplify complex sales deals with a collaborative deal room.

💡 Discover how these tools streamline workflows, shorten sales cycles, and align teams like never before.

🚀 Why Watch This Episode?
 • Get the inside scoop on tools used by industry leaders.
 • Learn how to evaluate and implement the right tech for your business.
 • Stay ahead with future-focused strategies to dominate in remote sales.

👉 Tune in now and share your favorite revenue ops tools in the comments!

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

We could not do this without you.

See how Sendoso can help increase pipeline, ROI, and customer retention.

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you!

Struggling to understand why your revenue isn't growing at the rate you want?

Take your free GTM Gap™ Self-Assessment to uncover reasons why and what to do about it.

https://revenuereimagined.typeform.com/gtmgap

Transcript

00:00 
This is the Revenue Reimagined podcast, where we talk about what else, all things revenue, with the best senior leaders across sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps, so that you can scale your business by reimagining how you think about revenue. 

00:15 
I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zielinski. As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time, and we're grateful that you're choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes, amazing giveaways, and the tactical advice on how to uncomplicate revenue. 

00:32 
Let's get to it. Welcome back to a very special, somewhat subdued episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. Why am I subdued? I mean, if I'm going to be honest with you, it's just Dale and I today. Merry Christmas, y'all. 

00:52 
Let's be a little happy, but we don't have a guest. So we're going to try to make this a little bit fun. And what did we think we were going to do, Dale? What are we doing today? I don't even know why I'm here. 

01:03 
You told me we have to record, and I was like, shit, I have to spend Christmas with you. Yeah, so we get so many inquiries, and we are talking to so many vendors and technology people, and everyone wants us to try their tech. 

01:19 
But what we have to figure out is what tech is really being used, the tech that is most valuable. And so what we thought we would do is put together an episode all around kind of our top three techs that we're using at the current moment. 

01:37 
So December, 2024, these are kind of the things that when we talk with our clients, we bring this type of tech to them to have conversations. And I'd say probably what, 75% of the time, they're adopting things that we're saying. 

01:54 
We'll sprinkle in a little bit of additional tech that we've been looking at. outside of these these top three. So let me set the stage a little bit. Most of our engagements are what we'll call for lack of better terms for everyone to understand fractional engagements. 

02:12 
We're actually functioning as the executive revenue leaders for the company, sitting in board meetings, running teams, and ultimately owning the tech stack. And while we're not signing the PO, nine times out of 10 with our clients, what I found is if we recommend tool A, B, or C, which we'll talk about, the next thing is literally go get a quote, implement it, build the training, and get it done. 

02:38 
So because of this, it's really important to us that we're dogfooding our own tools. Everything we're going to talk about today, not only do we recommend to our clients, drinking our champagne, but you can eat beautiful drinking our champagne. 

02:55 
We recommend to our clients and full disclosure. We are partners, we get a kickback, I am not hiding this, but we use all of this. And that's really important because I've always said, we don't do paid posts, right? 

03:08 
You will never see Dale, me, Jay go around and say, oh, go use, you know, this cool tech product because it's the best thing in the world and they paid me $700 to post about it. Anything that we post about or anything that we recommend at any time, a client or a prospect could say to us, show me how you use it. 

03:25 
And we could log into our exact systems and show you exactly how we use it. And PS, we pay for every single one of these products. We do not get them for free. And I think that's really important. Whether you're taking our advice or anyone else's are people recommending products that they actually use and that are good enough that they're willing to pay for them and good enough to put their name on it to get the value for their clients. 

03:52 
So a lot of people are building. That's why you recommend me to all your clients. That's right. Now I get it. That's right. Just a little Christmas gift for everybody. Adams, Adam's time. You can, you can hit them up. 

04:04 
But I think it's really important that you're like the people that are recommending the technology are along or around long enough also to be able to implement it, get it running, you know, make sure that you're getting the value out of it. 

04:19 
So not just we're not just recommending technology and then like, we're gone. A lot of the times we're recommending the technology in the beginning of our projects when we after we do a tech audit, so all of our engagements, we do a tech audit, we see what what central gaps they have. 

04:36 
If there's gaps that technologies that we've used, then we'll start recommending it. But then we'll implement it. We'll also be using it in parallel with our clients. And so that we know that there one set up properly to using it properly and three three getting the value out of it properly. 

04:55 
So and we and we let Adam negotiate all the contract. So if if you have to, every single one, every single time, have Adam negotiate, I'm not the best at a lot of things. I will tell you, there's no one out there who can negotiate tech better than I can. 

05:10 
So with that, there are six things we look for when we're looking at tech for our clients. Ease of use, time to value, right? How quickly after implementing this, are you actually gonna see some value from it? 

05:25 
What's the support like? PS, I negotiate premium support for free, but no one wants support to be, oh, you know, they'll get back to you in a week. So what's support like? How could it integrate into your current ecosystem or the ecosystem you're trying to build? 

05:39 
What is the cost effectiveness of that solution? And and this one's really important to me, what's that company's vision for the future? How are they adapting to the go-to-market landscape? Dale, is there anything else that you look at that I didn't have on that list? 

05:57 
I think the only other thing I try to look at is that the engagement like the engagement from even from the sales to what's happening with success and service like that entire process is going to tell you a lot of what you're going to need to know not only about the tech, but are they going to be able to give you the potential new features that you kind of have like, are they flexible in the way of when you ask them, 

06:22 
do they have something and we'll always know like if they can do some kind of feature functionality. They tell you the truth or not, because I think a lot of times people are overselling their tech. No, never. 

06:36 
No one does that. And so I think when we will a lot of times when we're evaluating tech, we may back channel to make sure that what we're seeing is actually what's happening. And we do that through many of the community channels. 

06:48 
In fact, we we've interviewed a lot in podcasts with a lot of them, like Jared and Jason and a lot of people that use stuff and talk about them in communities such as Red Genius or pavilion. Who are Jared and Jason? 

07:02 
Kidding. I'm kidding. Alright, let's get into a little bit. Let's let's talk tools. So I think, you know, when you're looking at bridging the go to market gap, you start with stabilization, as we've talked about, you have to go to foundation, which will pause there for a second, you have to build from the ground up, you can't say, I want to sell a product and instantly scale it right. 

07:25 
And a lot of founders will start with, oh, I want to go hire six reps to fix my problem. And we beat that to death ad nauseam. But part of this also is what CRM do you use? And I was talking to a founder, God, it had to be a couple of weeks ago, it was just a consult call. 

07:43 
They were new newly funded. So seed seed funding got a couple million dollars, going to be an SMB product. And he's like, well, I'm gonna go buy the enterprise version of Salesforce. Why? I don't understand. 

07:57 
And Salesforce is a great platform. Don't get me wrong, but why are you going to start with PS yourself and the enterprise version of Salesforce? So for us, 97-ish percent of the time, I just didn't want to have a round number, 95% of the time. 

08:17 
HubSpot's what we're recommending to our clients. It's what we use internally. We have used Salesforce. We have used HubSpot. We've used Pipedrive. We've used Sugar. We've used, I forget the new one. 

08:29 
I think it's Atia or Atia or something like that. And I keep coming back to HubSpot for several reasons. Dale, why? Why do I have this love affair with HubSpot? Well, originally, it was just because it was free. 

08:45 
I do like free. So when I do think, and when I say free, I mean the free version of what. So we've run our business for a while on the free version. We've just started. going for a year version, but, but I think there's a, there's, there's a, there's a place in time that, you know, as you're starting your business up and you're getting up and running, like minimizing your costs where you can and just getting something into a system of record. 

09:08 
So I think that's the first part. I think the second part is because you can build just about anything we need or anything a client needs from a ground level perspective inside a hub spot. And I also think the second part that I always see that you do really well is the foundational elements, like how do we build the foundation within hub spot so that you can build on top of it. 

09:30 
So if there's complex workflows or other things that we may need to outsource outside of our expertise, but we, and I think the biggest challenge I've seen when people implementing hub spot is they don't know what they're doing, they don't understand the infrastructure. 

09:46 
So like 800 workflows running that are overriding each other and templates and, and, you know, sequences. And it's like that I find over the last year with the hub spot implementations, most of them might have just been fucked up. 

10:04 
And so that process has been like, we've learned a lot through that. And the reason I think I see for this over and over again is without fail, every instance of hub spot that we go into or every instance of hub spot that we build from the ground up, that we don't actually control that build. 

10:23 
Everyone's a super admin. Everyone could do everything. So I want my reports and workflows. Dale wants his reports and workflows. Jake wants his report and workflows. You know, the other people want theirs and you have all these completing workflows. 

10:34 
We're working with a client right now. I literally have been heads down for five hours today, Dale, auditing workflows, because one workflow will do one thing and then the other will pull it back. And then it will show on another report. 

10:45 
And you can't run a business like that. But here's the difference with Salesforce workflows and process builders and PS. And I want to thank you for your support. don't say this often. I am both a HubSpot and a Salesforce admin, right? 

10:59 
So I understand my way around both. Even with being a Salesforce admin, their workflows and process builders are so complicated that nine times out of 10, I have to outsource that. I cannot figure out how to do that. 

11:12 
HubSpot has made it so simple to build, to refine, to create from the ground up or to change that arguably anyone with a little bit of RevOps chops, even Dale, can go in there and build a report or build a dashboard and figure it out. 

11:29 
So that ease of use- I usually don't do that though. I usually pretend- You send it to, you create a click up task for me. That ease of use, that ease of implementation is incredibly easy. The ability to create dashboards without needing to reach out to an admin. 

11:46 
Imagine like you're a VP of Sales at a Series B company, you should, but you don't have a VP of RevOps yet. I promise you, you're not building dashboards and reports in Salesforce. Yep, 100%. And even if you're building them in HubSpot, you're probably building them wrong, which is a lot of what we saw, you know, we'll go in places as you're saying. 

12:06 
And we have a couple of examples. But one, one that always sticks in my mind, I think will always forever always wanting more top of funnel. I want more top of fun on one more top of funnel. I don't know how many damn more flows that they have. 

12:18 
They had 300, 300 leads in there that hadn't been touched. 187 overlapping workflows. Yeah. So it's like more than I've ever seen. You don't need more leads. You got to fix the process and everything that you've built that's completely wrong in the beginning. 

12:32 
Yeah. So our, our, our number one CRM tech right now would be HubSpot. Yep. 100%. For sales, for marketing, for success, for content, you tie it all together, whether you are a smaller company and that dude, like they're even doing great things in the enterprise. 

12:53 
But you have one system of record for everything. And I think the last part of this, one of the biggest reasons why I like HubSpot a lot as well is because of the integrations to some of the other tech that we'll talk about here in the next, the next part. 

13:08 
All right. Let's talk, let's bring up a controversial one. One of the things that every sales team needs who is selling remotely is conversational intelligence. And I feel like this space has become incredibly commoditized over the past, probably 24 to 36 months. 

13:30 
Gong used to be the leader in the space. They probably still are the leader in the space. If I'm being honest, you know, when you think of CI, you think of Gong. I used to be the biggest fan boy in the world. 

13:41 
I wanted to work there. I applied there. I interviewed there. I loved all things Gong. And I think Gong's done a lot of good, but there's so many new players that have come out in the conversational intelligence space that it's arguably hard. 

13:53 
to know who to pick other than this one's this much, this one's this much, and this one's this much. What have we looked at? And ultimately, what have we landed on? And this is one that I would say I think we have 100% success rate of this product being used in all of our clients. 

14:10 
Yeah, and that's a that's a tension. So we've looked at Gong, we looked at chorus, we looked at all the even symbol, when, yeah, all of it. And by by far attention, and, and we have good relationships with the founders, and we're able to get like insight into what's happening with some of the stuff. 

14:32 
But their technology has been super solid every single time. Every time we get on with a client, and we're like sending recaps, like, how can you send that information so quickly? How do you remember, like all the things that they want. 

14:46 
And as soon as we go into a client and either, even if they do have gone, we've actually had some replacements with attention. Um, but if they don't, it's like one of the first tools we bring in, um, cause it probably will have some kind of CRM, but we are definitely bringing in a recording technology for a hundred different reasons, including. 

15:09 
Including what? Oh, I'm supposed to say it. So listen, y'all conversational intelligence, call recording technology is a commodity. It's a diamond dozen. Let's be real. You could fucking hit record in zoom and you could record your calls. 

15:24 
That is not why you're looking at an attention or a gong or a wind or anything else out there. You're looking for the deeper things that it could do. So if you just want to record, attention is going to kill me. 

15:38 
But if all you want to do is record, hit that record button in zoom, put it in the cloud, call it a day. What you want to be able to do as a revenue leader, a success leader, a sales leader, a services leader, you want to be able to get the insights from your team, right? 

15:53 
Attention allows you to set up custom scorecards by team that allow you to rate your reps and rank your reps based on any number of areas you want. The easiest example I could give you as a sales rep. 

16:07 
We are big fans of the spice methodology at RR and we literally have scorecards built out. How good did Dale do at uncovering the situation, the pain, the critical event, the impact, the decision criteria, and it's going to rank and give improvement and it's going to learn and it's going to get better over time. 

16:28 
That's number one. The two other things that I think are even more important. All of that information that we just gathered about Spiced. Dale, you remember the days when you and I would sell and we'd have to after a call take 45 minutes to update all these notes in Salesforce and put in the situation and the pain or med pick or whatever it was you were using. 

16:47 
I remembered it wasn't that long ago. You don't have to do that anymore. As soon as you're done with your call, all that information, whether you're using Salesforce or HubSpot, maps right back over, and it's all in the proper field every single time. 

17:04 
And then what's your favorite part, Dale? People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part, gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results, just thoughtful. 

17:17 
Sandoso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for Sandoso competitor, and I could tell you no one does gifting better than Sandoso. 

17:30 
If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit Sandoso.com. The recap, part of the recaps, but one of the things I like the most about it and what I hear a lot about is the ability to shrink the time to set, to close. 

17:46 
because you have a lot more insight into what's happening. So within those recaps that will drive that time to close. You have all of the things that, um, that you have for that deal, you can bring them back up. 

17:56 
You can take snippets out. Like let's say you forgot, you know, that they talked about pricing or a competitor, you can go in there just like you would chat GPT and just search for that piece, pull it out, pull that, uh, and, and the, the recaps that we're putting together in the quickest amount of time is in the format you want. 

18:19 
I'm a huge fan of like a certain format. We put them in that format. You don't have to go edit them. Like what would literally take me probably an hour, cause I'd have to like look through all my notes and then I'd have to like rearrange stuff. 

18:31 
Like I just like pull it out of attention and put it into the email. I modify a couple, like three or four things, make sure it's formatted the way I want it. And then I shoot out the door. One button, one button recaps that are formatted exactly how you want. 

18:47 
And we do have a very specific way that we format our recaps here. Um, most of our customers have adopted that. If you want that format drop Dale and I a DM, um, on LinkedIn, we'll be happy to give that to you. 

18:58 
We won't even charge you for it. Um, I'll charge Dale for it. So everyone who asked for that recap, I'm going to bill Dale $10. Um, so blow it up. Um, so fast, faster sales cycles. We talked about, um, the true deal insights. 

19:13 
So I love the fact that I can go in and literally across the entire spectrum of calls, ask questions like, why am I losing deals? How often does pricing come up? What, what, what objections are we hearing the most? 

19:26 
What's the biggest product request that we get all of these insights you can get. You can score in stack rank, not only reps on individual calls, but also across the entire universe and compared to one another, which is something that's really cool. 

19:41 
And then ultimately this is leading to, um, faster ramping every single. that I've seen, this leads to faster ramping. Because when you build out that new higher score card, you make sure that your reps are actually adhering to your sales process. 

19:58 
Yep. So and then I think, as we move and try to like, close this, this episode off a little bit, we move into a technology that we've looked at many of their competitors, we've used several of their competitors. 

20:13 
But this one is near and dear to my heart, because it does a lot of the deal room pieces. And that's aligned. So many challenges, especially in the enterprise space. So we're talking at least $50,000 and above on deals, probably more like six figure plus annual AR deals, where you have multiple decision makers, you're talking to many people, you have a mutual action plan or joint engagement plan, 

20:38 
you got emails flying around deal cycles are six, nine, 12 months in length. Align does a really nice job to enable you to get everything in one place, share it across all of your different constituents within the go-to-market motion and allows your... 

20:56 
Constituents. Can you spell that? Constituents. I'm not saying I could either, so that's okay. And allow the customer to engage with you in real time in the platform. So to me, that's one of the most exciting things because I've always done these little deal room things or like spreadsheets to kind of help people together, but enabling customers to not send me an email or have to call them or if they have a question on a proposal, 

21:27 
you can just say, hey, look at the proposal. I put it in XYZ and they're able to go in. And oh, by the way, they've ended up sending it to somebody else. And now we have the visibility of what's happening amongst many different people in that organization. 

21:42 
So it's super easy to use. It's super easy to set up the time to value super short. You can get aligned up and running in 10 minutes, 30 minutes. We add it up and running super quickly. Yeah, I'm a huge fan for a couple of reasons. 

22:00 
Number one, I love the team. I think the team over there is solid. They're putting out incredible insights on how to use the product in various different ways. And they're just kind to people. Number two, when you're working these enterprise deals, you think you know who your buying committee is. 

22:17 
You think you know who your stakeholders are. And we were working one of our biggest deals with one of the biggest companies that we've worked with. And it was very interesting to get an alert that the Align Room has been shared with this person. 

22:31 
Now it's been shared with this person. Now this person we didn't even know existed, just spent an hour and 20 minutes going through it. And these are the type of insights you need to truly craft a multi-threaded multi... 

22:45 
by channel sales process with everyone who's involved in the deal. And that doesn't mean you're going to go around and say, hey, Dale, I saw you were in the aligned room. My name is Adam. Nice to meet you. 

22:54 
Like probably not the best approach. But there are ways to use this data to not only understand who's in the deal, but when you're sharing presentations or you're sharing call recaps or you're sharing assets, pretty important to be able to know like, hey, Dale spent 37 minutes on these three pages. 

23:12 
That's probably what's important to him. And I'm probably going to address Taylor my presentation to that on the next conversation. It's visibility into the buying process. Like you've never seen before. 

23:23 
Yeah, and one last piece. And so there's two things I think this helps with from a revenue perspective. It's time to close. You definitely get time to close and you can increase your deal size because you have better visibility into what they're really looking at within any problem statement and then being able to pass that over to the CS team. 

23:42 
Like. Everybody has visibility into what has happened through the sales process. I think one of the biggest challenges go-to-market teams, especially CS teams, is a sale, especially in the enterprise. 

23:53 
If sales has been running a deal for six to 12 months, there's a lot of conversations. There's a lot of nuances in the sale or in that relationship that you don't know about that we can start capturing through the aligned room and you can kind of have a, while you still want the CRM as your source of truth, these nuances don't get put into HubSpot or Salesforce and you want to make sure you're capturing them and getting insight and getting feedback within that process. 

24:22 
So I've been super impressed with what they're doing. I've been a big fan for a long time of doing mutual action plans, joint engagement plans, and being able to share them with the client so you can map their buying process to what you're trying to accomplish. 

24:37 
And so anyone doing one last piece of this, just prior to getting on this call, one of our clients actually used the aligned room and just closed one of their biggest deals. So it was a big RFP with a big tech company, a farmer company, and it just took like forever. 

25:00 
But we knew who was in the deal. We knew who was looking at the processes and just been awarded the deal. So this stuff works when you actually execute and implement it properly. I love it. So top three, HubSpot attention aligned, but I know that we have some honorable mention for some other platforms that let's do three honorable mentions. 

25:23 
We have a bunch of them. All right. We have a bunch of them. I was like, I'm looking at a list and I feel like we have so many, all right, you pick two. I'll pick two. All right. You can go first with number one, Dale. 

25:37 
My first one that I'm going to go with is tech debt. I got that someone brought me on to. One of the clients I work with is using it and using it really well, and that's grow.ai. So enabling kind of role-playing with tech, role-playing through that process. 

25:59 
They actually just announced, I think a big fundraise. They're looking to do some work over here in the US. So grow.ai, grw.ai. Yeah, might want to spell that right. If you put grow.ai, you don't know where you're going to wind up. 

26:16 
All right, my first honorable mention, excuse me, goes to something that's near and dear to my heart. I used to lead sales for a swag company. So gifting is something that I find is underutilized, normally done completely wrong, with no sense of how or why. 

26:36 
So my first honorable mention is going to go to Sandoso. It is the only way that we gift at RR. It's the only way that we encourage our teams to gift. Being able to not only get the insights as to when you should be gifting, how it's accelerating your deal cycles, all sorts of various different reports you could run related to gifting and just the overall marketplace. 

27:00 
And again, I'm gonna go back to the kindness of their team. I absolutely love Sendoso. Yep, awesome. This next one, we've done a little bit of work with them. Once again, an amazing team, great tech as they're growing up and that's copy.ai. 

27:18 
So they're doing some amazing things of being able to try to scale, go to market, scale messaging, scale ICP and buying personas. So they've done a really amazing job. We've worked with them with a couple of clients. 

27:33 
So copy.ai is my next one. This is hard for me because there's two, two that I wanna throw out there. But I'm gonna give my last honorable mention to SendSpark. I'm a huge proponent of video. I think it is underutilized in every way. 

27:52 
Anyone who's ever seen me post about a job that we're hiring for, I always say like, send me a video. And there's so many technologies now that you can use to de-anonymize website visitors to understand at a company and a person level who's coming to your website. 

28:09 
And then most people are sending this generic, shitty email that follows up with whatever. And SendSpark allows you to not just do videos like you can with Loom, but do videos at scale that look super personalized with the use of AI. 

28:25 
So if someone comes to your website, for example, you can de-anonymize that, turn around and run it through clay, make sure that you're enriching it, get it, making sure that they're in your ICP and then send out a video that looks super personalized. 

28:38 
Hey, Dale, Thanks so much for checking out the website. It'll have Dale's website behind him, probably a picture of me going like this, and it looks super, super organic. So my second honorable mention goes to Sendspark. 

28:51 
And I heard you throw a third one in there, but we'll see if anyone catches it. We'll see if anyone gets it. I did not throw a third one in there. So there you have it, our top three tech tools of 2024, four honorable mentions of 2024. 

29:07 
But what did we miss? What tools do you love that we need to go check out? Please do not pitch us for 27 partnerships, but tell us what tools we need to be using with our clients that aren't on this list. 

29:20 
We'd love to know what they are. It's adamat or daleatrevenue-reimagined.com. And you all have a merry, merry Christmas. Have a great Christmas, all. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

29:34 
As we say at the end of every show, give more than you receive, reach out to someone today and offer your assistance. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter at revenue-reimagined.com for your chance to win today's giveaway, member-only exclusives, and actionable tips delivered directly to your inbox. 

29:50 
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