Jared Robin Reveals the Secrets Behind How He Skyrocketed RevGenius

How did RevGenius grow into the biggest B2B community in just 3 years? What did an unconventional early sales career have to teach about how to succeed as an entrepreneur? What skills are critical for B2B pros to master in the age of AI? On this episode of the OneShot podcast, we sat down with Jared Robin, co-founder of RevGenius, to chat about the secrets of value-based selling, building genuine trust with buyers, and why this one sales skill has been critical to his success.

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About our guest:

Co-founder of RevGenius, a thriving community of 40k+ revenue professionals, Jared Robin is redefining B2B GTM collaboration. In under three years, Jared has forged the flagship online space for learning and networking for B2B pros. Jared also hosts the Revenue Today podcast, advises SaaS giants like HockeyStack and TestBox on community-driven GTM strategies, and invests in visionary founders. Passionate about community, AI, and the revenue space's evolution, Jared brought his A game to the OneShot podcast.

Key Take Aways:

1. How to sell on value and differentiate in a crowded market, plus how Jared’s unconventional early-career experience was the best preparation for a career in sales and entrepreneurship he could have asked for.

2. Why building trust with buyers is integral to success in sales: Jared shares the actionable tips he used to build rapport and connection with his buyers that led to years-long relationships.

3. How Jared built RevGenius into one of the largest communities in the world using tactics lifted straight out of the sales playbook and his experience as a salesperson. 

4. Why collaboration and community is the future of growth and how to leverage your network the right way to get people talking about your business.

5. How AI is reshaping the revenue org and what salespeople need to do now to get ahead and capitalize.

Loved this episode? Checkout our list of SDR Influencers you should follow!

Transcription

Gautam Rishi: Hello everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Super excited to be joined by Jared Robin, who is the co-founder of RevGenius, which I'm sure a lot of you here have heard of. We're going to be talking about all things sales, rev ops, current state, future state, pre old state. But Jared, I'll let you introduce yourself and thanks for coming on.

Jared Robin: Hey, it's an honor to be here. I'm really into the tech you're building and what you're doing in space. And I'm Jared, for those that don't know me, I'm a co-founder of RevGenius. We're a community of about 40,000 now. Every time I get interviewed, it's a number higher. Sales, marketing, rev ops, customer success professionals that are collaborating on the future of business to business go to market. I previously have 15 years sales experience and all of that stuff, half in SaaS or media and related, other half in logistics. So I'm excited to chat today.

GR: Nice. Yeah, before we get on to RevGenius, which I'm really interested about how it started, how it expanded, what you're doing with it now, I always like looking through people's LinkedIn profiles where they started their careers, knowing what they're doing today. So I saw you started off at FedEx, then you went from FedEx to like, it looked like a super early stage company, seed stage company. Then you kind of went into a growth marketing role, then you co-founded a business. So you can kind of see the path. I can kind of see it. And it's that whole Steve Jobs, you can't connect the dots, looking forward only backwards. So how did you kind of, what was your journey? Like starting with FedEx, that type of selling into tech. How did those first few years look like for you?

JR: Well, what you don't see on my resume is that I was one of the first 50 employees of a company called seamless.com or it was seamless web at the time that became seamless. It was bought by Grubhub. I was only there for three months. Why did I leave? I was inside sales. I wanted to get to field sales. I was tired of cold calling office managers on a coil phone like an early edition of Salesforce. It was just really boring. And the product was killer, right? But what we were charging for didn't really make sense to me. So like everybody now nobody pays for, well, all the fees are baked in, right? Like, and you're using these food delivery services. But at the time we asked, uh, like accounting firms and law firms to pay an extra 15% on top, why you ask? Cause we were giving them accounting software and I'm like. It's a food ordering platform or making money on the other side. Like I'm cold calling an office manager. Like I believe in the company and then I made a suggestion. I'm like, I think you guys could grow faster. Not that my suggestion was it was taken but they did do this. Not that I'm the reason I'm like, I think you guys could grow exponentially faster if you just take this stupid thing away and just say like what we're making it on one side of the marketplace and we'll actually they make it on both. They just bake it on a per order basis. But yeah, I left after three months because I really needed validation and it was hard working for an early stage company as the first company out of school. So I went to FedEx. I wanted to be like a pharmaceutical or medical device sales rep, and technology wasn't going to get me there. But field sales at FedEx would. So, uh, I was there for like seven years and. I learned how to sell at FedEx. We had a pretty basic sales process. We had a really recognizable name, but we had a product that was perceived as a commodity. When you're selling something that's perceived as a commodity, that's when you really learn how to sell, even if your name is recognizable. Why do I have to switch from UPS to FedEx, or DHL, your European, to FedEx? It's the same shit. And me having to show why there was value there, even at the same price or even at more expensive, really helped build some chops. Plus it was a hustle. So that was exciting.

GR: How do you like, I agree that everything eventually becomes commoditized at some point. 

JR: Perceived to be commoditized, I want to say. It's commoditized if you sell just on price.

GR: But yeah, like, you can see, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and like, so something like FedEx, I know, who are you selling to? I've never liked being in that industry. So I'm assuming you're selling to large retailers, a great customer, right? Let's spend loads of money. So in that example, surely it's a cost. I would think if I'm going to move from UPS to FedEx or whoever, how do you... Are they only moving because it was like they're pissed off with their existing supplier, they've screwed them over.

JR: So great question. So I handled a variety of industries. I handled Gilt Groupe. Remember the online discount, like high-end retailers, during its peak? And they were big UPS shippers. I handled some fashion accounts, some PR accounts that just needed to get merchandise shipped fast. I handled… like children's sock, some e-commerce, all of that. So how do you get people to switch? All right, I mean, one, you have to know who you're selling to. It's very relationship driven, first and foremost. Like when the competitor, and here's the tricky thing. They don't sign until they're at the millions in ACV.

They don't sign annual deals that they can't get out of. And frankly, I'm not sure that they could ever not get out of it, right? So like if you're in a six figure deal, they can leave at any moment. All right, so a six figure deal for many of the people that are listening is like a great deal. I think ACVs are going down in general with SaaS. So how do you sell? How do you protect against that? 

So the competition was selling on price. I had such good relationships that the CFO or whoever my contact was would just fax me what they sent. And I'm like, depending on the account and all this, sometimes I would match the price and be like, hey, are you going to stay? And sometimes I wouldn't even need to because they would have seen the value already. Now going into an account, how do you differentiate other than price?

They always want to get a good price, but here's a couple of things that are worth it. So like, I would take the invoice that they paid and use it essentially to see where they were shipping to. Right? Like, there's different zones in the US. Zone two is the cheapest, it's near you. Across the country, it is more expensive. 

International, every country is a different zone, right? And they'd be like, oh, I'm getting 65% discounts with them. I'm like, okay, let's see how, let's break it down. What are you actually getting? Do you realize the 65% zone you're getting like nothing? Like I could give you zero discounts there and 5% more in what you're actually using and they could net out to being like half the discounts, but you'll realize double the savings. So like, so like being smart like that with pricing, 

But also mode optimization. So what I mean by mode optimization, if they're like that, I had one client or prospect that became a client that was shipping a hundred overnight envelopes, zone two, zone two delivered overnight on ground. And they'd say we have sixty five percent discounts overnight. I'm like great you're at $13 an envelope if you shipped it ground with zero discounts you'd be at $6 and save 50% I don't even need to give you any discounts.

Oh shit. Like, so like optimizing like that. Also, operations. Like if we could stay out later to pick up more packages that day, they were going to arrive a day quicker. Right? So like if UPS left at 5pm, I'm like, how many packages after 5pm do you have that go out the next day? 200. Holy shit. What if we could stay out till 7pm? Again, same price or more? That's big. And then home delivery, we used to deliver on Saturday at no additional charge on ground. So.

If you shipped it overnight Friday, gilt groupe, your package will be delivered Saturday instead of Monday. What would that do for your customer service calls that were coming in? What would that do for the email volume coming in over the weekend and stuff? And you could break it down. So those are just like a few ways to sell on value and then just being on top of everything. It's hard. It is really hard because your account executive account manager, customer success in one.

GR: And it's, I think that you could touch on some of the fundamentals that most good salespeople have, which is relationship building, like, you know, actually building a good relationship. Like the first thing they teach you in every sales job, people buy from people first, but yeah, the value based selling, putting a dollar value on something, which is in your case, like what does a Saturday delivery mean to you in terms of email volume, call volume, delivery, customer service, increased orders. You're in the millions and millions of dollars for some of these companies. So yeah, I think in modern day tech sales, where I think a lot of people are, yeah, I think it's getting back to that intangible, tangible cost savings, business benefits. It's hard sometimes because people have taken it too far. I will save you six minutes doing this piece of workflow, and it kind of dilutes the whole business case. 

JR: I think I yeah, and I think I think being trustworthy is killer. So like I actually handled it. A consolidator or reseller, right, like that used us and DHL for gilt groupe. I brought that client to FedEx and later acquired them. Guilt groups like, you know, we want to look at 200 packages a day to Canada, like this little like.

That could have been a hundred, two hundred, five hundred thousand dollars of business just for this little opportunity. I'm like, I want to bid on it, but I'm going to also give it to my client cause there's a 50% chance we're going to get it through them as well. And I'm going to get it, but like, I just want what's best for you. Coming in and making them a hero. Like, like that was big. 

Our sales process was ready. REDDDI. The first step was research. Okay, and this is big, like even today. Second is engagement. And engage didn't just, we think of engaging like sending a cold email or something, and sure, that's what it is. But it's really connect. It's connected with the person at a deep level. When you walk into an office, cold call or not, you notice things. Notice a Manchester Jersey on the wall or something and really connect deeply. I remember my director giving me feedback like oh You missed the red sox thing on the wall Then the 3 Ds: discover ask questions Develop a solution demonstrate that solution and then implement sounds a little simplistic there might be some things missing there, but like

It worked and he was the most important thing. And today we say you don't have any, I love gap selling. I love Keenan. I think he's one of the best sellers in the game. You don't have to like somebody to buy from them. I agree with that. But like, if you're selling a product with a lot of upsell potential, like, let's look at Salesforce or HubSpot or, you know, lots of that potential.

I think you do have to trust the person to buy from them, if that makes sense. If you're just buying a widget or you're buying a data product, not a Zoom info that has a whole slew of products, but just a SaaS company with one product, it's a little different. And I wonder why we have so many people. We've optimized the process so much.

SDR, AE, account manager, CS, on one account that could be doing 25K ACV. It's like, I get it, but I think that there's an opportunity to handle things more, and a net new dollar out of the same account is worth the same, I believe, as a net new dollar, period. It's probably, it could potentially be worth more. But anyway, thanks for that tangent.

GR: And I think that, yeah, and I think like some of those things that we, yeah, the sales processes and the frameworks and again, I think everyone, it's saturated, everyone's doing it. And so I'm more interested now, you started off FedEx, I know you went to a startup, kind of fast forwarding now, before we kind of talk specifically about the state of sales. RevGenius, like you started as an AE, sales guy basically. How did you, like how did this community, like everyone knows, like I've been in sales for 20 years, like I just assume everyone knows RevGenius. How did you start this? Like what did it start as? Was it just like a LinkedIn group or you had a few people asking a few questions? Like how did it start?

JR: It's a great question. So you mentioned my plight earlier, like, uh, you didn't use the word eclectic, but you kind of inferred that it was a bit eclectic, right? But I went from a fortune 100 company to a seed startup. I was president's club. And then I was almost out of a job because we didn't even have a product that worked, let alone product market fit. Right? Like, like give me a product that works to try this shit. And then everything in between. So to say that I had not just eclectic like companies that work for, but like experiences in sales and having to be crafty, having resources, not having resources, having arguably the best product in the world, not knowing your name.

It gave me a lot of empathy towards the journeys of folks in tech, especially because tech, we have everything. The beginning, the later bad managers, good managers, etc. So I found myself without a job at the beginning of COVID. And frankly, I didn't know the direction I wanted to go. Like I'd been like the first boots on the ground head of sales, you know, like building out teams, player-coach.

Do I just want to be an enterprise AE for a bigger company, make a really good living and work up from there? I'm like, maybe. But there were no jobs available at the beginning of COVID available. There wasn't the downsizing that there is today, or maybe there was. It was close, man. It was a tough, tough market. And I knew I had to be seen on social media.

We're talking about three, three and a half years ago, right? 2020, March, let's say, or beginning of 2020. I just lost my job running sales at a marketing agency, like a smidgen before COVID started. And all my interviews, I went from like 12 to 15 interviews a week to like two. And I'm like, and it was because the opportunities were drying up, right? Like I was the same person. So I became active on LinkedIn. I followed Justin Welsh's first LinkedIn playbook. It was ahead of its time. It was perfect for the time. And from there, I started meeting people that were also trying to be active on LinkedIn. They're also salespeople or marketers, etc. I threw four of us in a group, Galen and I, the original co-founder of Ravgenius, we're like, okay, let's start something. I don't know what it is. And we both came to the table with like a couple ideas or something. We put four of us in a group.

She's like, I think it should be something educational. I said, I think it should be an influencer marketing agency. Because I started feeling like the beginnings of this coming from the B2B2C world. And right now you're seeing that start to pop off, but I would have been too early on that, I think at the time, right now is the time. I think it's still early, but I'm like, okay, your idea first, then my idea second, because I feel like that. And then we're like, you know,

How does education look? We didn't know it was gonna be a community. We had these four people in a group. We called ourselves the Four Musketeers. We're like, there's so many emails and so many digital events and events, period. Why don't we just create the Eventbrite for sales and marketing events and have a single place for all of them? So we're like, okay, every Sunday night, Galen would take the lead and I'd help. We'd create all of our favorite events, put it in a Google Sheet.

and give it to these four people in a LinkedIn chat. And then we're like, invite your friends. The only rule is they have to have a vibe. Like we wanted to create really good energy and the four people grew to about 25 or 30. And realized a couple things. One, I don't think they were going to that Google Sheet ever. Unknown, but like I was trying to like to circulate a little and they weren't really like.

Over the moon, necessarily to have a centralized spot. And the second thing that happened was our LinkedIn apps on our phones kept breaking every day, meaning like you'd be in LinkedIn and would just shut off and you'd have to go back.

And the reason why was because the engagement was absolutely through the roof. Like it was like rapid fire back and forth, people supporting others. And I said, okay, I think these people are telling us exactly what we need to do. And like, what is it? I guess it's a community.

Took a look at the landscape. There's four major communities or community like businesses. One was for senior leaders only at the time that was paid. One was for senior leaders only at the time that wasn't paid. One was a content site that was tremendously valuable, but content first, which I, you know, looking back, I love them for it. And then the fourth, we didn't really know what it was.

Was, like what it truly was. I'm like, is there really no open, inclusive community first space for everybody for no money? And I said, I don't think so. But by this point, the members, we have the name RevGenius, we named the chat RevGenius in LinkedIn, and they're yelling at me to open up a Slack. So I opened up Slack and I started acquiring 1,000-3,000 members a month within the first 30 days.

GR: And that was just word of mouth, referrals, people inviting other people.

JR: So, you know, the funny thing is, and I almost put a post on Twitter about this today. And the main reason, and I'll tell you on this podcast, the main reason why I'm holding back is because it's very executable, but it will ruin like, like social. So people think, so a lot of people grow their following and they drop a link to sign up for their newsletter or community or course or whatever, and they do very well with that. Grow the list into the tens of thousands.

And we certainly got some from that. I reached out to everybody directly, Gautam. I SDR'd myself, targeted folks in sales, marketing, RevOps, CS, maybe from certain companies, maybe as members of other communities that had it on their profile, and reached out manually on LinkedIn to all of them. I didn't use automation, and I did it intentionally.

Automation would help me scale it. Like this is not scalable at all. But I was convinced and I copied and pasted, right? Like I copied and pasted from a Google Sheet to be fair. I didn't spend two minutes writing a unique message, let alone, and maybe I changed one thing here and there. But I wanted to, automation becomes the most apparent. It becomes pretty obvious on the outbound, but it becomes even more obvious when you have a positive response and there's a gap in time. Right? So like if somebody's like, yeah, I want to join. I wanted to write back within five minutes and be like, I got you. Let's go. Introduce yourself and I do think that that's part of the secret sauce because if I automated let's say a hundred invites. Ten people said yes, which was roughly the percentages that were saying as probably 10 to 20 to be honest. That 10% included cold connection requests as well, to be clear. People that connected with me already, I think we're probably closer to 20 or 25%, which is crazy. And I just wrote, “Hey Gautam, thanks for connecting. I want to shoot you an invite for an inclusive sales, marketing, RevOps Slack channel called RevGenius What's the best email to send an invite?

You would have said, I heard a RevGenius, here's my email, right? Like it's, it's so simple. It's not brain surgery in the least. Did I get nos? I got way more yeses, way more yeses. I did get a response. And here's the kicker. If I got no response one month later, I would send the same message. Gautam. I would, I would, I would copy and paste the same. Yes. I tried a question mark. I tried a bump.

I want to spend a little time because it's a free community that I believe has so much value. I'd said the same thing and I'd get an apology. Sorry, I didn't see the first one. So that was part of it. Part of it was creating and I said, if I myself reach out to 300 people a day and 30 of them say yes, over the course of a month, I myself am acquiring a thousand people.

Now, if word of mouth takes over, that's where it goes to 2000 or 3000. I had an intern once doing the same thing from her profile. Not scalable. But some of the growth loops we had, like ambassadors just wanting to get as many signups as they could. We'd reward them with t-shirts, sweatshirts, stuff like that. We took a page out of the Morning Brew.

Um, I thought that they were very good with their referrals, uh, people adding it to their LinkedIn profile. I, I don't want to say we were the first to do it, but we might've been the second or the third, like, like we were early with that. That was, that was a big growth loop. And those were some of the core things, but that's essentially how we grew.

GR: That's like I love like I've got a similar story like and it's the sales background It's the like AE background SDR background like it's having that skill set that you were just like I Can just outbound this I know I'm capable of getting 10 people a day 20 people a day I know if I contact a hundred people if I send this message, I know I can get 10 people and over three months I mean when I was starting OneShot I needed to get funding. And then you go on Google, how do you get VC funding? And everything you read is like, you need an introduction. You need a warm introduction to a VC. So you either have to know someone. That's everything I read. And I was like, I don't know any VCs. I don't know anyone who knows VCs. So I did what I knew I could do, which was cold prospect. So I looked at every pre-seed investor, B2B enterprise tech, looked at similar use crunch bases, and found a list of about 100, 150. And I would probably say I got a 30% response rate. In terms of not knowing anyone, it's just head down, super clean email, look at one of their past investments, put it in the subject line, but it's that SDR mindset.

JR: You don't even, so what I found, and running growth for Portion, I was trying to get art galleries onto our network. What I found is when you have a no-cost offer. Honestly, no cost, not even like two steps to a cost like no cost I offer, it's pretty damn easy. And also, when you have a no cost offer to people that aren't used to receiving emails, art galleries are not used to these kinds of emails from an individual. I was booking 25 meetings a week. Like, I'm like, hey, do you wanna get on, my email was this. 

I essentially scraped everyone off artsy and I and my pitch was I'm creating artsy on the blockchain we're going to we're going to give you more distribution and if we sell anything it's just a percent of the sale and frankly in the beginning we're not even going to take that do you want to meet they're like yes so I remember closing, like contract signed, I don't know, 80 art galleries in a month? 80% close rate, something. Maybe it was 80 over two or three months, to be fair. But like, got to a point where 25 meetings a week is like too many. It's like a lot, especially if there's no money coming from it. But like to get people onto a platform like that, it's significantly easier. When I was running my fashion magazine, I was doing outbound, and people lose sight of this too, to magazines, to distribute our content or to photographers to work with us. I'd reach out to, I qualify lists of a hundred photographers. I'm like, Hey, we're looking for new photographers, blah, blah. 10, 15 of them would say yes. Like phenomenal. And then, and then after you do work with the 10 or 15, and if it's good.

And you reach out to the other 100 again and say, Hey, we already worked with 10 and 15 and they know that they're qualified. And then you get another 10 or 15 that you didn't like, Hey, sorry, I overlooked this, but now I see that you work with Billy Bob Joe who shot for Vogue. I would love to come in. I'm really good friends. We were just talking about your shoot.

It's potent. If I was gonna start a partnership program, I would copy, because I think partnerships is another thing that's low hanging fruit, where you give value. I would copy HubSpot's partner list, which is available for those that are listening. Hit me up, I'll send the link if you can't find it. On a Google Sheet, there's 4,000 partners on there, and Gautam, I strongly recommend that you do this, set a KPI for 200 or 5% of that list signing up and a quarter period and just go at it and bring it on. Hey, I saw that you partnered with HubSpot. We integrate with HubSpot. Small world. Amazing. We want to give discounts to your portfolio. We want to help your portfolio succeed, et cetera. And now all of a sudden the salesperson in marketing, just like that.

GR: Yeah. And I keep thinking like our business we've grown, ours is mainly all direct prospecting, partners, something we've thought about, but we haven't resourced time, money, all those good things. But it's such a big area. And I think when people think about outbound and pipeline generation, it doesn't necessarily mean just find your ICP, send them a cold email. 

There's lots of different ways to engage with your prospects outside of a cold call outside of an email, outside of a LinkedIn invite. And there's ways of doing things like using the partner name, looking at the ecosystem that will just significantly bump your response rates in that prospecting anyway.

JR: It's going to help you grow much faster, because when you do outbound, there's kind of a ceiling. You know, in your time in all of this. And if you stop doing outbound for a month, there's gonna be nothing coming in. Outbound at once upon a time was very predictable. Now it's becoming significantly less. And you see that gap and you've created a product to help make it more predictable again for orgs. But like partnerships is one angle.

Like there's a lot of collaborative stuff. Leaning into community, evangelists, customer marketing, find out which ones of your customers are talking about you on social media, harness them in a round table, figure out all the value ads, the non-monetary value ads that you could give folks that are already using you, that are loving you to speak about you, like to harness word of mouth, whether it's in communities, on social media, et cetera. Find targeted creators or influencers that have audiences of your ICP or personas that are part of your ICP or both. Have them get on the sauce, so to speak, like get on your product, give it to them for free. And if they truly love you, then compensate them in some way. There's like all these collaborative efforts that don't require significant ad spend that you could build quite a business of marketing with that if you join with outbound, oh, now you'll create some inbound could be really stellar, right? And so, you know, it's just logical, right? Like you work with an influencer or whatever, and they have a post and it's and it goes pretty big. And you could just scrape everybody that liked and commented on it, see who overlaps your ICP. And now you have a much warmer outbound. And there's also really cool demand gen ways that I've heard to do outbound. So you could, let's say we're using OneShot, which is gonna be even more potent than the current ways. You could send an email with a sales engagement platform, like a OneShot, and with a marketing automation platform, to all of your prospects. And you could see who interacts with it, who clicks, who goes to the site, all of that. And then you could create an audience of those people, and create programmatic advertising with those who have shown a level of intent on your outbound. Okay, so it's not just following everyone that opens like that's fine. Again, we're talking about the ceiling. Yes, it's amazing. Yeah, yes, you should do it. But we're talking about the next level, right? You create the program and then you see all the people that showed intent again.

Cool. So you reach out to 10,000 people, it becomes a thousand or 10,000 becomes, 2000 becomes 800. And then on that list you give the reps to go outbound to and by the way, that's not a cold call anymore. That's warm. You're welcome. You're going to hit a lot higher on that.

GR: Yeah, they know the name. Yeah, yeah, they know, they know, they may not have read the email, they may not have processed it, but the name is going in there. Like they're registering that company exists. They probably already have a high level understanding of what you do with the ads as well.

JR: And that's like outbound reporting to marketing, which is, it's a trend. It's a trend that's been around for a while. Should outbound like SDRs report to sales or report to marketing? It depends on a lot of factors, but like reporting to marketing is potent for a lot of people.

GR: We're seeing, I'm seeing this maybe in the last three months, where the RevOps teams are getting so involved in outbound now. We're starting to see rev ops leaders have business development SDRs roll into them now because they're seeing, I've only seen this maybe, I've seen three companies in the last four weeks where that's happening. These are fairly big BDR teams. I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing, I'm just, that's just something I've seen in the last month that I haven't seen before.

GR: I will say this. You're going to see RevOps teams own revenue more. The CRO role initially was a VP of Sales getting promoted more often than not. That was very sales focused first and not necessarily aligning of all the departments there and some people were better than others. The RevOps person, persona, is a bit more objective to see what needs to go where, look at the reports and stuff. So you're going to see that type of person climb up and oversee things.

We wrote an article on, does there need to be a chief GTM officer instead of a chief revenue officer? The difference is also aligning with product and having a more of a thin line to finance in an org because why, yeah, sales and marketing aren't siloed anymore, let's say, but then why is product siloed and all of this siloed still? And I'm seeing it. I have a great friend who works for Hoppin, now RingCentral, who was the VP of RevOps. His title now is the VP of GTM. He has more responsibilities. Things are easier this way. So I think to your point, and RevOps people love this, like it's really smart too, they're so thoughtful and so objective with their thinking.

GR: I find it interesting. Like I've been in tech sales since 2004. So like almost 20 years. And that role, there was never RevOps. What started to come in was a Salesforce administrator, a CRM administrator. That was someone who was mainly looking after CRM, making sure people can run some reports. Then it just became more and more strategic. And then people started to realize, oh, these are super smart people.

They're using this data to actually provide us with intel about our business that we didn't know about. And then that role went from CRM administrator to a sales ops role, where it was like, hey, we're never getting a bit more strategic, they're aligning more. And then with the rise of the CRO role, the RevOps person is incredibly closely tied. It's their right-hand person now. And this has happened in the last 10 years. So I think in the next two to four years is exactly what you're saying. I think you're gonna see this chief, chief rev ops manager or whatever. You wanna see the chief GTM person. Yeah. And it's happening. It's great. I love it for one.

JR: Yeah, it's crazy because salespeople are clamoring. You can't have this person running sales. But sales in some organizations, at an early stage, have been reporting to the COO. Right? And doing very well. This is even more aligned.

GR: Yeah. And the final question for you, like super inside for everything we've covered. And especially some of the like it's thought provoking in terms of opportunities to build pipeline outside of like out like using outbound, but in the different channels and the way you can use it. I think it's huge, like for me as well. AI is going to change the world. Everything we do has started. What's your take? Everything. There's tons of noise on it. I think sales is a prime use case for AI in a lot of areas. What do you see, like, are the big use cases you're seeing today? Where do you think this is gonna be in a couple of years from now?

JR: AI is the biggest use case in content today, content production, where people are actually using it. AI is good today. It's good enough to test out like you're seeing it in copy for emails from a sales perspective and marketing perspective. We use Jasper on marketing, Reggie with some of the sales stuff.

And, I know they have posts on LinkedIn and stuff like that. What I'm seeing with sales copy is, is it, is it being good, but you still need to edit it, a human still needs to edit it on top, I think within time that may improve, I think same thing with, with marketing copy, you need to make it your own.

Over time, it could be the whole machine. Like it's got to ingest that over time. It can actually call people perhaps and have full conversations. Is it going to replace anybody? It's like the big question.

I mean, I think if you're good at what you do, you're gonna always be safe or always recalibrate. And if you're not, or average, you're gonna have to learn how to be better or optimize these tools to get there. I think organizations are gonna look different. I think the outbound structure might be aligned differently.

If everybody is just using AI to write everything, is there a need for outbound to be aligned to sales? They aren't marketers better, maybe not in sales copywriting, but maybe they'll learn. So AI has been going in programmatic and some of the other stuff.

It's going to be interesting. There's a quote like. We always do more. You know what we think we could do in one year versus what we think we could do in 10 years, what we think we do in 10 years always happens early. We think we could do it one year later. So it's going to be, uh, it's going to be wild.

GR: Yeah, yeah. And I think we're seeing, I think if you can use AI and, like you said, the outbound function, I think the question always comes up, which I think is a bit ridiculous. It's the main topic. Is it going to take all these jobs, are people going to get fired? I think that's just a general technology discussion across any technology. Most technology is brought into automate a function that is repetitive and can be automated.

And if you can get technology to do that, then it's not necessarily replacing people. It's like it's replacing an automated task that's a low level task. And actually you can now do more high value work, more intelligent work. You can upskill, you can get better at your job. You can earn more money. You can find more opportunities. So I think that the discussion should be around what technology is going to allow people to do to make more money. But the discussion is always.

It's going to fire every SDR in the world, every AE in the world. Like that. And I just feel that the narrative around it probably needs to be like, how can it help those people do their job better?

JR: The revenue org is going to look different as a whole. An SDR might be a different position or a different title. That person is going to still be in the org. There's an evolution happening in solopreneurship and side hustles and creators happening that B2B is going to tap into as well to generate demand. Outbound was a very straight line 10, 15 years ago.

Five years ago, it was social, right? And it was like, hey, let's connect with people. Two years ago, it became your own social to get inbound, right? Not just use LinkedIn to do outbound. That was five years ago. Two years ago, build your personal brand and have them come to you. Now it's, you built your personal brand, make money off your personal brand. And you know, people are going to harness this for business as well in products. I already know Andrew Mewborn is building a product called Distribute. Shout out Andrew, that is going to essentially create landing pages, Canva-esque, that people could have their own links to. So when they post something, sign up on my landing page for my OneShot after all of this and streamline that. So, you know, I pause to answer these questions because I think that AI will allow us to do a lot more, but I think we're thinking about it slightly myopically in the sense that we're thinking about, hey, what can we do now and add AI to when the whole game is gonna change? We just spoke about RevOps being aligned differently. We talked about creators, like communities coming in now and all of this. I'm watching people like the head of sales development of Sendoso becoming the head of evangelism. Gautam, things are changing like, like without the AI. So do we want the AI to do what? Yeah, let's see. Let's see. We'll set it loose in some way, but.

GR: I'm excited. And then on top of that, everything you mentioned, everything's changing, the roles are changing. And then we're also forgetting, we started with this, COVID only happened like three years ago, remote work became, I know people are going back to the office, but more employees from all parts of the world, everything has changed. The B2B landscape has changed, funding has changed, everything has changed. So the way businesses are operating is changing, dramatically.

JR: Everything's changing, right? So like asking what AI is in regards to this, everything is going to evolve, even if there was no AI. And that's really exciting. That should be exciting for everybody.

GR: Yeah, I think the excitement is you can reimagine the way your org works. Like it doesn't have to be, we have five SDRs reporting to 10 AEs. We have this there. We have a sales ops person there. Like you can change the entire playbook on how you build a business. Like from the ground up, you do not have to do anything that has kind of come before you effectively is the really exciting piece.

JR: Yeah, and there's so many more resources to sell a company like Microacquire, for instance, as a small bootstrap company. You're going to see more people want to bring a company to five million or less in revenue and get rid of it owning 100% of the company, then grow it to 50 or 100. So they're not going to have the need for the 10, 20, 30, 40 SDRs. Even assuming this, there's so many dynamics happening. And it's so brilliant. We’re in the fastest moving period of my life by far in so many moving parts and there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for all.

GR: Yeah, I love it. What a brilliant way to end out. I'm always gonna say once it's the age of the entrepreneur, or the age of the individual, the age that anyone can go do anything. So they get hyper competitive with that because there will be more people doing it. But like go do it. It's almost like a new gold rush, but in a really powerful, empowering way for the individual.

JR: Let's go.

GR: Jared, thank you so much. Man, this was amazing. Thanks so much. If anyone wants to kind of keep in touch with you, reach out, what's the best way to do this?

JR: LinkedIn and Twitter. And also, everyone, come into RevGenius. Everybody, it's free. I'm here to support you. I want to learn with you and collaborate with you.

GR: Amazing job. And when we release this, we'll include all those details as well. But Jared, thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute blast. Thank you.

JR: I'm amped to watch you grow and to support you as well. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

GR: Cheers, Jared. Thanks.

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