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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and there's something pretty crazy to me about having more than 1000 episodes here on this show and that is.
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In all that time, we've never talked about revenue alignment, we've never talked about leaky revenue.
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These are words that I've not said together here on the air, and that's why we're going to say them a lot in today's episode, because you and I, as entrepreneurs, we must confront these things, we have to understand them, we have to know what to do about them, and that's why we've gone out and found an incredible guest.
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Her name is Jess Schumann.
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Let me tell you all about Jess.
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After spending nearly 10 years leading in selling from small to medium-sized businesses to global companies at a top SaaS company called ADP, jess leaped to a new industry to learn ad tech and retail media strategy.
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She once considered herself a sales and SaaS lifer.
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It's beautiful to be in software and in sales, but this experience in transitioning industries exposed her to building and leading a revenue.
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Operations function If your ears are going off at the term of revenue.
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Obviously, we always think about that, but it sometimes feels outside of our grasp, so it's going to be so interesting to hear what Jess has learned, because this function was foundational to getting to an exit co-founded her company, revolin, which is a fractional and project-based revenue alignment company focused on diagnosing and stopping revenue leaks.
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This is an important topic for all of us to confront.
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I'm personally very excited about this one, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Jess Schumann.
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All right, jess, I'm so excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much.
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How's your day been?
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It has been so good, Jess.
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When I'm in podcast mode, I'm just rocking and rolling, having great conversations, and with you I want to kick it off.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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You've had such an awesome career leading up to the start of your business.
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You gained all these skills and perspectives and experiences.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Jess?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Well, thank you for having me and I think something interesting you said I promise when we talk revenue it will be exciting.
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So that's my one promise of today.
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I like to start a little bit on the personal side, if that works.
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So you know, I grew up in a very small town in West Virginia.
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John Denver famously sings Country Roads I jam it anywhere I hear it.
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But I tell you this because we really didn't have much when we were growing up, so had to use our resources, had to be scrappy, and I think that pragmatic nature of myself and that approach has taught me so many lessons in business.
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It's not always adding a sophisticated tool to your tech stack, but practicality.
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With resources you have to be successful.
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You know we just had Thanksgiving, I would say the few good ingredients you can make a great meal.
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So I think that resourcefulness started even at such a young age.
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At such a young age and immediately after college, I went to ADP P as in payroll and anyone looking to start their sales career in tech, adp is the absolute best place, even though, as I'm thinking about it, telling you the story, I almost quit after three months.
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It was really hard, but having the training and tools in place to be successful really catapulted my career in selling and leading teams.
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I had two great leaders, joe and Bill.
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Shout out to those guys that took a chance on me, brian at 28 and promoted me to VP of sales and I built and scaled a sales team from zero to 100.
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Again, I think about pivotal moments.
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I'm going to probably use the word skyrocket a lot, but it really helped me understand what it takes to run my own multi-million dollar business, but in the safety of a Fortune 500 company, right?
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So you know more lessons than I can count, and I could go on and on, but I think two really stand out.
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It was being accountable to your results and you better know your numbers and come support it with data you know caught.
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After nine years, I thought am I achieving results because it's a great product, because it's a great company, or can I go elsewhere with these frameworks?
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So you know kind of.
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To wrap this thought up, I went to a company quotient completely different from selling compliance solutions.
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Now I'm working with the biggest CPGs and retailers in the ad tech space and our president had a vision Can you bring someone?
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I told you I was a SaaS lifer.
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Can you bring a SaaS background, a sales discipline, into a new industry and be successful?
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And that answer was yes, so I'm sure we'll talk about it today.
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That company went through some challenges but Scott and I worked together to build a revenue operations function, again with the ingredients we already had in the organization to be successful Things like sales ops, marketing ops, enablement, sales planning, the quota setting which is so fun commission strategy, and we created a revenue machine and we really set that foundation to get to an exit.
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So I'll talk about here in just a moment how that led me to the entrepreneurial world.
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But that's just a quick background.
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A little bit deeper into the bio, yeah, I love that overview, Jess, and I so appreciate that.
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Especially, you promised to make revenue fun.
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I'm gonna throw this out there really early on in our conversation today, because I think back to when I started my first business, which, granted, I was a teenager, I had no real world business experience, but when I thought about revenue, obviously we all know that revenue is important and that's a measurement of growth.
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For most entrepreneurs is that they say, yeah, of course I want more revenue.
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You know it's counter to the to the Biggie Smalls advice of more, more money, more problems.
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We always thought that more revenue could solve all of our business problems, and therein lies the first question that I want to throw your way, jess, and hear your approach here is that when we think about revenue, we constantly just think of well, yeah, I want more of it.
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But it sounds to me, even in that career overview that you just gave us, you're thinking about revenue in so many different and intentional and strategic ways.
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You're talking about revenue drivers, you're talking about planning, you're talking about all these other aspects, as opposed to just go get more revenue.
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How do you view revenue?
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Because it seems to me like there's so many subsets underneath that in your mind.
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That's a good early and tough question.
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So thank you for that.
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You're going to hear me say this a lot.
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I have it on a t-shirt as well.
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If you go to my LinkedIn you'll see.
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But I followed.
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I'll call it a framework of people, process and pipeline, because oftentimes to your point, when you think about revenue, people are automatically just thinking pipeline.
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But it really starts.
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I know it sounds silly enough at the people, from the people perspective, excuse me, are we hiring the right talent?
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Are we setting them up for success in the right role?
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You know we traditionally always heard the term hunter versus farmer or account manager versus account executive.
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So are we setting people up for success?
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And also, on the people side, how are we helping, enable them from negotiation, being on the front lines and having these conversations?
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Because I think sometimes when you lead a company or your company gets big enough, you step away from the sales process a bit and really that's where value can be given away or your sellers need a little bit more help.
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So that's just a couple examples on the people side.
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On the process side, I could go on and on.
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Mckinsey has this great study that sellers are only spending 70% or less than, excuse me, 70% of their time is actually not on customer facing tasks.
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So think about that.
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I'm trying to find my opportunities.
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I'm trying to seek out you know where I, what accounts I should call today, who I should email, what should those cadences look like?
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But even sometimes simply on the process side, it's also things like pricing and deal desk.
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You know, for example, I had a conversation just today where their top line was exploding, but now they're having a challenge putting the mechanisms in place to make sure that margins aren't impacted.
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It's a fun conversation again.
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And then pipeline, as I mentioned.
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You know how are we looking at conversions in the pipeline?
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You know I've coined this term called dirty pipeline.
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It's not as bad as it seems, but it's all about age and you know it goes back to that leaky bucket of if I have aging opportunities or opportunities stuck in excuse me, certain stages stuck in certain stages.
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There we go.
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So I could ramble on and on, but again, revenue to me is driven by people, process and pipeline.
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And that also, as you mentioned, is not just top line but also margin.
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Yeah, I love that answer.
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Jess, you are the one I teased it at the top of today's episode that in over a thousand episodes, this is the first time we're really talking about leaky revenue, and I know how much that leaky bucket analogy is important to you and the way that you articulate and share these things with the world.
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So, jess, you're the one to intro my audience to that.
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Take it away.
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What the heck is this leaky bucket that we're talking about?
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Well, can I tell you how in the world I got, I went from corporate America to running my own business?
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I think we're missing a step here.
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Yeah, if that's where you want to go, let's go there first.
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We're happy to go everywhere here on the air.
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I love it.
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I'll make it quick and then I'll go right to the leaky bucket.
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I just want to jazz in a little bit.
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I mentioned how I got the last company to an exit, which was great, great experience selling to private equity.
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But one thing I'm going to be a little vulnerable to your audience, brian.
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I was pregnant throughout that exit process and I was actually laid off right after giving birth and it's embarrassing a bit to the ego, but when you build and believe in something and great people follow that vision, I think it stings.
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So I actually took some time away from revenue, I took some time away from my frameworks, I took some time away from I'll call it traditional corporate America and I really thought it was because I had this baby and my spark just wasn't coming back.
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Met another entrepreneur as you know this community is so interconnected a friend of a friend and after I did some research he had founded a couple companies and he kind of positioned the question about consulting in the revenue operation space.
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And again, I want I hope I don't offend your audience by saying I have never thought about being an entrepreneur ever.
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I don't know if I like the comfortability of corporate America, I don't know if it just hadn't really entered my brain, but I think it's important that I found other entrepreneurs who saw the expertise and vision needed in this space to say hey, you're it, come on this journey with us.
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So shout out to Bob and Ryan there.
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Come on this journey with us.
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So shout out to Bob and Ryan there.
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Going back, though, to your revenue leak question I think it's such an important thing to talk about because I was initially a RevOps skeptic.
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I always tell the story.
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I thought operations folks just tell you to tag campaigns or update the CRM.
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So I am the perfect person because I was that skeptic.
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So, as we started the company, the first initial hypothesis was okay.
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On the value that we could bring, we were getting warmer, but after I had more examples or, excuse me, more conversations with leaders, more examples came to light that this can all be summarized as revenue leak, and your audience is super smart.
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But just for a quick definition, it really is any opportunity that's missed, and every organization can look a little different, especially based on industry, but it's missing, you know, opportunities to upsell, cross sell, expand, maximize value, get that net new deal, even deals that don't execute, we all get excited we sign the contract and we're ready to go.
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Two quick stats I want to give you regarding revenue leak Clary, great forecasting tool.
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They surveyed CROs.
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Cros said listen, 16% of our revenue loss is due to leak.
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That's an easy math math equation If I make 2 million, I'm going to multiply it by 16%.
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That's potential lost value.
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And then one final point so it's not just me talking about leak.
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Boston Consulting Group did this great study and they actually value the economic value loss of leak at, I think, call it 2 trillion.
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So we can go into what causes it and how we solve it.
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But I just wanted to quickly walk your audience through the fact that this wasn't my journey, but I love this concept so much and I had a nudge along the way.
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Yeah, I love that, jess, especially.
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I mean you so effortlessly rattle off all of these very important points, which is why I always like to remind listeners hit that rewind button, tap that rewind 30 seconds button a few times, because Jess just listed there for you.
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You know, missed upsells, missed cross sells, all of these opportunities for you to increase your revenue.
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And the big thing that I always love interjecting into these conversations, jess is also more deeply serving the customers and clients that we aim to serve with our business.
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That's what I really appreciate, jess.
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It's very prevalent in your own messaging about what you do at Revellyn is it's not just about more money, it's about alignment with the customers that you're aiming to serve.
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That's why all of our businesses exist.
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So, yeah, I mean hearing you talk about all of those different causes.
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I'd love for you to spell that out for listeners, because these are people who are busy doing the work of their businesses.
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They probably don't have a CRO in-house, and so hearing that there are opportunities out there to more deeply serve their people, that's exciting.
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So how the heck do we start to, or how the heck do we stop the leak, jess?
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Where do we start to stop the leak?
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Something really interesting you said is oftentimes we define sales stages by our own journey and I actually think we need to start defining our sales stages by the customer journey.
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How is the customer buying?
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Because that's really going to help us understand those conversions.
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From my experience, leak can come from a few different areas.
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Again, I'll use an example of somebody I was talking to earlier.
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That's a startup, because I think sometimes, sometimes you think revenue leak you have to be a multimillion dollar organization.
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That's not it whatsoever.
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In this instance, you know this customer was trying to win early clients.
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So what do you do when you're trying to win early clients?
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You discount heavily, you give away pilots.
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I think that's all sound strategy.
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But now this person was to this leader, excuse me was at a point where, hey, we've got a good customer size, we need to look at our pricing and process, because up to this point he had just been pricing really based on customer based feedback.
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So I think it depends on where you are in your revenue journey.
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But if you've kind of gotten past those first few pilots, you know giving away value, you have leverage to ask for more because, again to your point earlier.
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You're building a true partnership.
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So you know, that inflection point, I think, is really important when it comes to revenue leak.
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One thing I think for bigger, a little bit bigger organizations that have a few sellers, anytime turnover happens, what I find is it's a botched process.
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So seller A leaves the company, seller B is taking over.
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We really aren't doing a mindful job to understand customer needs where the customer was in the process.
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So customer first, but then think about the trickle effect.
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Then it's really difficult to cross-sell, upsell, because not only have you created a poor customer experience, it's low probability that they're going to buy an additional solution.
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So that's really on, I think, the people side.
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And then you know, I think just day to day, and I'm guilty of this too, I let it, I'm gonna.
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Can I tell on myself for a second letting a deal slip?
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That was my own revenue leak.
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Is that fair?
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Jess on the air.
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I'm constantly confessing my dirty secrets about business, and especially all the times I was super naive and didn't know.
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So it's about time to have someone else make some confessions.
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I'm sitting here giving you good stories because they all have good outcomes and they're real customer stories, but then I'm getting a little red.
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I'm thinking I actually had a pretty big one.
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So, without revealing too much, had gone through the sales process, had gotten the verbal yes and was feeling really good, put together the statement of work, put together all the deliverables and had already started to think about implementation.
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And I let some time go by.
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Again, I'd already gotten the verbal, I felt really good about it, and this customer just kept asking me questions about my experience and my credentials and I would just answer them.
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I didn't take the time to pick up the phone and say, hey, why are you asking me this?
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So I'm talking a lot about leak pre-sale and again, I could go through a million examples with your listeners.
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But I also did it myself in a post sale execution where, you know, felt good, thought we had it in the bag, and then something happened where I wasn't in communication and and that deal completely fell through.
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And you know, that's a few at least.
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You know.
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Call it fifty to seventy thousand dollars just in that one opportunity lost.
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Yeah, jess, we've all got those real life examples.
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You're bringing me back to all of mine, which all right, now that you're in the business of making public confessions, I'm going to join you right there, because here's the thing, jess having I mean myself as an entrepreneur, but also, you have to remember, I interact with so many of our listeners around the world and the one thing I constantly hear is nobody wants to be salesy.
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It's like there's this huge negative word and, jess, obviously you've been in the world of sales and you've seen healthy ways to do that, and I say healthy in terms of a really good and ethical and enjoyable way to do sales, but also the mindset behind it.
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I would argue that all of these things are playing around at the same time and so, with that in mind, before I had matured as an entrepreneur and this is still very much a work in progress, we're all a work in progress the thing that I realized is, because I didn't want to be salesy with my clients, I was afraid to ask for those upsells or those cross-sells.
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Jess, I was my own very much source of a giant revenue leak.
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I didn't know when to propose those things to them.
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I didn't know, even though it was of service to them, I had this mental hesitation to offer it to them.
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Talk to us about timing and how we work this in, because it just sounds to me and obviously, seeing your career up to this point, you embed it into your process through that place of service.
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When and how the heck do we do that?
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So such a great question.
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I think there's a couple ways to answer that.
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Sometimes we do shop with our own wallet, so maybe we're afraid of sticker shock or we undervalue what we bring to the table.
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When I was in traditional corporate America, it wasn't even a thought for me because I had a quota, I was paid by this company and you know I would run my sales process and I'm going to say, wouldn't think twice, but I was very confident.
00:18:25.336 --> 00:18:26.960
You would assume.
00:18:26.960 --> 00:18:31.336
You know, having that framework as an entrepreneur, you would bring that confidence to the table.
00:18:31.838 --> 00:18:35.486
I find myself second guessing myself a lot.
00:18:35.486 --> 00:18:37.417
You know, I'm in an entrepreneur group.
00:18:37.417 --> 00:18:45.186
We're both CEOs and we're like should you really be following up with a prospect, with a CEO title Like that just seems kind of weird, right?
00:18:45.186 --> 00:18:50.938
Or you know, you feel really strongly about the value and you don't want to pester, you don't want to follow up.
00:18:50.938 --> 00:18:59.898
So to me and it's actually one of the key takeaways you know, you know this sales is all about listening and running a great discovery and uncovering pain.
00:18:59.898 --> 00:19:02.500
I think we, hopefully your listeners, know that.
00:19:02.500 --> 00:19:11.586
But it's also and I'm going to steal a phrase from Bob Bob you're going to love this he has a phrase called putting the moose on the table.
00:19:11.586 --> 00:19:13.387
Is it throwing the moose or putting the moose?
00:19:13.387 --> 00:19:13.807
Bob?
00:19:13.807 --> 00:19:22.740
I'm sorry I'm botching your phrase, but essentially it means if something is stalling or there's some kind of underlying thing, call it out.
00:19:23.214 --> 00:19:33.255
So let's just say you're running a sales process and you sent your follow up and you received no response, and that happens to us all the time you sit there and think to yourself, well, when do I email again?
00:19:33.255 --> 00:19:34.359
Do I text?
00:19:34.359 --> 00:19:36.983
Do I say hey, double email?
00:19:36.983 --> 00:19:40.003
And sometimes just putting the mose on the table.
00:19:40.003 --> 00:19:41.278
And I actually used this tactic.
00:19:41.278 --> 00:19:51.644
The other day I started my email with a prospect that I had a proposal to and I said I started with you can say no, I want to talk about this.
00:19:52.446 --> 00:20:02.244
So again, we're so in communication and in terms of human communication excuse me, you know, being agreeable and polite and all that's important and listening and building trust.
00:20:02.244 --> 00:20:07.767
I think that's where you and I foundationally believe in our soul is the reason to our success.
00:20:07.767 --> 00:20:15.000
But there's also a time to put the moose on the table and to call something out hey, essentially, are we moving forward or not?
00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:16.142
Getting to that?
00:20:16.142 --> 00:20:19.538
No, while you're going after that, yes, and apologies.
00:20:19.538 --> 00:20:26.943
Apologies, because the more time you spend in that opportunity again this is another revenue leak example you're missing out on other opportunities that you could go after.
00:20:26.943 --> 00:20:39.769
So no, that was kind of a long roundabout story, but I think it's so important to know when to put that moose on the table and when to either move on and call out hey, are we, are we going to work together and how can we make this work?
00:20:40.390 --> 00:20:47.174
Yeah, that's such an important insight and, again, it's a lesson that we're not going to learn it just from hearing someone on a podcast episode talk about it.
00:20:47.174 --> 00:20:57.881
But, jess, today you're putting it on our radar so that next time we catch ourselves, whether we successfully navigate those waters or not, at least we're aware of it and we can start to intentionally work on it.
00:20:57.881 --> 00:21:01.403
So I really appreciate those insights and shout out to Bob for teaching you that lesson.
00:21:01.403 --> 00:21:07.228
Along the way, it's cool to see how these things stick with people, because, jess, now you're the one who's passing that advice on.
00:21:07.228 --> 00:21:09.153
It's going to stick with listeners all over the world.
00:21:09.554 --> 00:21:18.060
I want to go back, though, because the inner math tutor in me my ears perked up at you using one of my favorite terms, which is inflection points.
00:21:18.161 --> 00:21:31.355
And so when I think about inflection points, jess, I've been in business for 16 years now, and there are so many different inflection points that happen along the way, both revenue wise, but life wise, and business wise and mindset wise there's so many important inflection points.
00:21:31.355 --> 00:21:35.374
What I found the most fascinating is the things I'm thinking about.
00:21:35.374 --> 00:21:53.549
The actions I'm taking, the decisions I'm making today are so different from what I was doing in my first year of business and, of course, that's natural as my businesses progress, as I progress as a leader as well, walk us through knowing that you've been involved in, for example, a $420 million exit.
00:21:53.549 --> 00:21:57.196
That is not a small number, jess, but you also are one of us.
00:21:57.196 --> 00:22:00.500
You're a fellow CEO of a business that you have started.
00:22:00.500 --> 00:22:10.971
So, with that in mind, what do you see from that revenue perspective, or from a strategic and consideration perspective, what are those inflection points that we should be mindful of and looking out for?
00:22:11.874 --> 00:22:15.863
I want to talk about one in particular, because I could go on and on here.
