E39 – Integrating Rev Ops: Venntive’s Unified Solution with Lydia Sugarman

E39 – Integrating Rev Ops: Venntive’s Unified Solution with Lydia Sugarman

In this episode Gary interviews Lydia Sugarman, the CEO and founder of Venntive. Lydia shares her journey in the business world and her experience with revenue operations (rev ops). She explains the concept of rev ops, emphasizing its importance in aligning marketing, sales, customer success, and operations to drive business growth. The discussion also covers technological challenges, the benefits of a unified database, and how Venntive offers an all-in-one solution for businesses of all sizes. Lydia also highlights the role of AI in enhancing CRM functionality and offers practical advice for companies looking to streamline their operations.

Discover:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:19 Lydia Sugarman’s Background and Venntive’s Origin

01:06 Understanding Revenue Operations (RevOps)

02:53 Challenges in Aligning Departments

04:33 RevOps Solutions and Tools

12:04 Venntive’s Unique Offerings

17:26 AI Features in Venntive

21:25 When to Consider Venntive

23:51 Conclusion and Contact Information

linkedin.com/in/lydiasugarman
https://www.venntive.com/

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to the Pipelineology podcast. Today I am pleased to be joined by the CEO and owner of Venntive, Lydia Sugarman. Lydia, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:13] Lydia Sugarman: Thank you so much Gary, for having me. I’m really excited to be here. 

[00:00:17] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I think this is gonna be a, be a fun one. So for anybody who’s not familiar with you, hasn’t, hasn’t heard of you or Venntive before, can you just tell us a little bit about, you know, yourself and kinda how you got started in, in this crazy business?

[00:00:30] Lydia Sugarman: Oh, in. Almost by accident. And it goes, it goes back. I, I find myself at, at some, sometimes talking to people, I’m like, well, you know, I’ve been on, I moved into the online space before you were born. Which is, which is true, goes back to 1995. But, I’ve been in business for myself since 2001. Started as an email marketing consultant and it’s just kind of evolved from there with the technology that I, that I, that is part of the Venntive business.

[00:01:05] Gary Ruplinger: Well, excellent. Well, I know we were talking offline before, before we started the show, and this around this topic of, of rev ops, and I was saying I keep seeing that term pop up here and there. But I feel like at this point, I don’t really know what it is, but at this point I’m also afraid to ask. So for anybody else who’s out there, who’s, who wants to know?

What, what is this, rev ops, because I keep seeing it. Could you, can you give us some, some insight into what, what this is all about? 

[00:01:35] Lydia Sugarman: It’s, you know, it’s, you know, it’s been around for a few years. It’s kind of been under the radar, and it is, I’m hoping it reaches a tipping point in 2024 because it is really important.

I believe for every business of every size, but rev ops stands for revenue operations. And what that means is it’s a strategy, it’s a discipline, and it’s a more and more a role in companies. They’re still trying to figure out where it be belong, where rev ops person belongs, whether it’s a, a c-suite, position, whether they fit under the COO, we’ve pretty much decided it doesn’t fit under the CRO.

It sits beside the CRO, but that person. That strategy and that discipline is about bringing marketing, sales, customer success and operations into alignment so that they’re on the same page, ideally speaking the same language and working toward a common goal of driving business to the bottom line.

[00:02:53] Gary Ruplinger: So I would, I would love to kind of get some insight into how that, that alignment process works. Because I know in my, in my corporate career, I certainly worked at companies where you’ve got the other, you’ve got departments and, at, at some of them, literally there was in fact a brick wall built between us.

but in other ones. It was virtual, but still the same. Same thing as we, we didn’t talk the same language. We didn’t really communicate with each other. And you know, you walk to the other side and you feel like you’re in a, in a totally different world. So yeah. 

[00:03:27] Lydia Sugarman: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a lot of the problems contributing to that, I mean, are the separate stacks of technology that are, that are created, that are built, for marketing, for sales, for customer success.

For operations and they’re siloed. And there’s also, you know, and people and departments and teams, you know, mar, I mean, marketing and sales. That’s the most, that’s the easiest example of different teams. Really pointing the finger at each other saying, it’s your fault. No, it’s your fault. You didn’t do this.

You didn’t do that. No, that’s not a qualified lead. I don’t bel, your MQL is not our SQL, you know, and, and, ultimately what suffers is the bottom line. Because opportunities are lost, prospects are lost, money is lost. So rev ops is designed to, bridge, is supposed to be bridging those gaps and bringing those people and those technologies into alignment.

There is a, there’s a whole, family of applications, called CDPs, that it’s simply piece of technology designed to bridge gaps between marketing and sales and give you a dashboard and, and a data and a synced database. They’re successful to a certain extent, and they’re very expensive. 

[00:05:16] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I am. I, I, I can only imagine because as, as a small business owner myself, using tools like Zapier, which allows my stuff to talk to each other and connect it. That, that is never a bill I look forward to getting, and I’m, I’m a small company with, with three employees, so I 

[00:05:36] Lydia Sugarman: yeah. How many, and I’m, you know, I would ask you, oh, how many different applications are you using? And most people say, oh, not that many. And then you start naming things off like, you know, what you use for CRM, what you use for email marketing, for social media marketing, how do you manage sales, pipeline pipelines, and customer journeys or workflows, all of these things.

And, you know, and they all have their own databases and Zapier or Zapier, it’s great, but you and I both know those apps don’t always persist. Sometimes they break and then you have to fix them. 

[00:06:22] Gary Ruplinger: Yes, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve troubleshooted many, them, them many times. I’m trying to say What happened here? It looked good.

And then you look at the timestamp and say, well, this hasn’t worked for two weeks. That’s not, that’s no good. 

[00:06:34] Lydia Sugarman: Oh gosh. You know, and, and another thing about, so, and maybe you’re gonna ask this, and I’m jumping ahead, is, when you’ve seen rev ops mentioned, it’s, it’s generally, you know, been around a conversation for companies that have reached a certain, annual recurring revenue.

You know, it might be 5 million, it might be 20 million. And my question has always been, okay, so how do you get to 5 million? Or how do you get to 20 million? Don’t you need to be in alignment to get to that point? And that’s, you know, that’s my mission, is to work with those companies to help them get to 5 million and 20 million and beyond.

[00:07:28] Gary Ruplinger: So in, in your experience, one thing I’m curious is how does it, how does it kind of get to this point? Because I’m, I’m guessing it’s done with the best of intentions at the beginning where you look at evaluate this, will say, this looks great, this will do what? That, you know, this team of people or these two or three people will, will need, or, and then this will do what, you know, my sales, my sales guy, I only have one. So whatever he likes. That’s fine. He can use that. Is, is that kind of how you see it evolving, or? 

[00:07:56] Lydia Sugarman: Yeah. You know, and it, yeah. You companies, well, you know, when we first starting out, everybody, every, we’re all in this together. It’s a flat organization, everybody.

Kind of catches up with each other. It might be over a beer at the end of the day or whatever, and then you hit that, it may not even be as many as 15 or 20 people, but that’s generally the generally accepted point at which you start seeing teams formed specific marketing and sales teams, and they all, they each have their own budgets for technology and it, and somebody is like, holds up this bright, shiny new toy.

It does this thing, this one thing really, really well. And it’s like, oh, we gotta have that, we gotta have that, you know? And, then you start getting this, plethora of, of separate, of separate apps. And then, you know, if you’re using that big expensive CRM that says no software. It is very limited. It requires a lot of single point solutions bolted onto it to make it a complete solution.

So, you know, the, the problems, the challenges just multiply.

[00:09:23] Gary Ruplinger: Gotcha. So how, how does, or how do you advise a, a company. If you, you look at them and say, oh yeah, well I’ve seen this before. You’ve got all these stacks. We, and we need, we need to get everybody on the same, we need to get the software on the same page as well as the teams. How, how do you advise a, you know, maybe a startup that’s kind of hit that, that mark where they’re trying, they’re, I mean, they’re, they’re working hard.

They’re, but they’re also, they have no idea, the right hand doesn’t know what the, do know what the left is, is doing type of thing. 

[00:09:57] Lydia Sugarman: I. So I don’t, you know, sometimes people say I’m a hammer and everything that I look at is a nail, or that I wanna like throw the baby out with the bath water. And to be perfectly honest, yes, that’s true, but I try not to do that.

It’s what, what you, what companies need to do is really be brutal about reviewing all of the apps that they’re paying for. Versus the apps that they’re using, and are they really doing the job? Are they really in, you know, do you really need them or are they orphan apps that you’re still paying for, that nobody’s using?

Do you have, company policy in place that requires, departments to get approval or people to get approval before bringing in another application? And there, you know, there are some, there certain people, sales is notorious for getting away with bringing in apps because, and there are, there are multiple problems with that.

Not the least of which data is data security. bringing in, you know, it, so you have to go through a really brutal review and pair down and edit. I listened to an interview a few weeks ago, maybe, end of last year on, revenue reimagined, and with John Barrows who was threatening, oh, it was back in, yeah, it was early fourth quarter, and he was threatening to, throw away all of the apps that he used and go back to spreadsheets until they figured out exactly what they really need to do their business, which is, sales consulting and training.

And it, that’s kind of extreme, but it, it, it’s not a bad idea. From, from for Venntive, I mean, we actually provide a complete rev ops platform that has all of the marketing, sales, customer success and support and operations tools in one seamless platform. And I, and there are a lot of, there are a lot of important points about it.

Number one, it’s a single unified database which immediately gets everybody on the same page. it’s, it’s easy to, to hand off, Customers, future and current so that there is a continuity and it’s one profile that that person or, and that company has so that everybody sees the same information about them and can speak with them more in a more informed manner.

It’s also all no code customization. And every account includes every feature. So the small new company that’s spending $150 a month for a thousand up to a thousand contacts gets all the same. Features that an enterprise level company spending thousands of dollars a month, we believe in leveling the playing field and enabling small companies to scale.

And they should have access to the kinds of tools they need to do that. 

[00:13:34] Gary Ruplinger: So, so you’re saying it’s, it’s not like a, a HubSpot or a Salesforce where everything is Oh, that’s, that’s gonna be another six grand. Here, let me just ding your card for, for that. That you need, you need marketing to go with your sales.

Sure, no problem. That’s, that’s a, that’s $12,000 a year. No, we got you. 

[00:13:54] Lydia Sugarman: That’s exactly what I’m saying. You know, the other, and you know, the other thing is with regard to the first one you mentioned is, you know what? There really is no such thing as a free lunch. It’s gonna cost you in the end, So, you know, I mean, I’ve had customers call Venntive their forever CRM, which is like the best.

That just makes me feel a warm and fuzzy, that they, that we can, that we can deliver that. so yeah. It, it, it’s exactly that, and it’s, it’s a single ui. It’s a single login. It’s a single database. It’s singly unique and what it, and what it delivers. 

[00:14:51] Gary Ruplinger: Right. So what are some of the ways that people are, are currently using Venntive in, in their organizations?

[00:14:59] Lydia Sugarman: I, I’ve taken tax accounting firms off of paper. They, you know, everything from being able from their clients, being able to submit their completed tax forms, in a password protected client portal to before that, se sending out, sending out contracts. our work agreements to be executed and come back.

So yeah, we replaced DocuSign, having, project templates for different kinds of tax returns that track progress on that with regard to tasks as well as time and billing. we have nonprofits and arts organizations using it for managing their members, their fundraising, their outreach. In terms of the programs and special events, one of the most unusual is a small company called Lionheart Autographs, and they actually are an auction house for, Documents for with famous, you know, letters signed by, written and signed by famous people and different, different things like that, which is, is fascinating. but then, you know, tech companies, all different kinds of companies with sales organizations are sales tools are, are really outstanding and all of those single point solutions that you’ve been hearing about so much about, we replace those.

You can capture, you can record sales calls and summarize them and, you know, and, see exactly it and see exactly, you know, what was said and it’s set and it’s attached to that prospect or that customer that you were talking to. We’ve added a ton of AI functionality too. So that you can actually, you don’t have to type anymore.

There’s voice recognition. Yeah. So you can just tell, you can just click on the mic and, and tell, tell, Nova what to do and what to put into a certain field and it does it. 

[00:17:16] Gary Ruplinger: That’s cool. I know, I know. There’s, there’s, there’s lots of AI features out there, you say. Nobody, nobody needs that. But so many of them are also really quite useful.

Can you kind of tell us some of the new AI features that, some of your favorites perhaps that, that, that have been built in, that you guys have built into the system? 

[00:17:33] Lydia Sugarman: Well, I kind of love Nova. You know, it’s, but, I think, you know, one of the first, the, the first thing that was added was being able to generate, emails, either one to one or one to many, and you go in and you say, I want, I want it to be, you know, between 50 and 75 words. I want it to be at a fourth grade reading level, and I want it to be sound friendly. Then you either write a prompt or you can, as you can actually build a repository of prompts and choose a preexisting prompt.

You click the button and it generates three options, and you choose the one you like best and click on that and it. Puts it into the body of the email where, you know, you do judicious editing and, and formatting and boom, it’s ready to go. You can also do, fire intent research. You can, what else do I, you can do in research on individuals and companies.

So, for example, you put a, you create a profile for an individual. You add the URL for their corporate, their corporate URL, and save that. When you click research, it’ll give you, all of the information that’s available about that company and, and as well as you know, what they do, what their, what, how they’re perceived, who their competitors are.

And that means what? You can pick up the phone in a minute instead of after 20 minutes of research. 

[00:19:25] Gary Ruplinger: That’s cool when you, when you started talking about it, being able to help you craft good emails. I just started thinking back, again, to kinda when I worked in, in, in the, in the car business where we’d have sales staff who, who are really good, you know, talking to people.

They’re, they’re personable, everything you want, except when it comes to written communication. Where they forget to capitalize or, you know, period, or there’s a bunch of spelling mistakes. Because it’s just not, it’s not what they’re, they’re good at. And I say, man, if, if they would’ve just had AI that they could just stop, here’s what I want to say.

Here’s how I want to follow up. And it would write it and it would all be correct. Yeah. Boy, that would’ve saved me a whole lot of, lot of time trying to put all kinds of little, little things in there just to, just so that we didn’t, so that we didn’t look stupid when we were talking to customer. 

[00:20:14] Lydia Sugarman: I’m always, I have to say, even pre AI, you know, I was, I’ve always been surprised at, at the cold, some of the cold emails I’ve gotten and the challenges like with your, with your sales people, because a good, a good business solution like ours, you or CRM or sales tools, you can create a library of preexisting email of, of pre-formatted emails so that when a salesperson needs to send a follow up email, they just go in and they do a search and click a button and it loads, and you, you edit it as needed and send it.

I, there should be, you know, every company should have a library of, of built emails that are ready to go for any given situation. That is not, that does not require AI, that just requires, you know, doing that work. 

[00:21:25] Gary Ruplinger: So with, with Venntive, where would you say is a, is a time that, in a, in a company’s journey, when do you kind of find that this becomes a good fit or something they should perhaps be, be looking at as, as a, as a solution to help align them before or before things get really out of control? 

[00:21:44] Lydia Sugarman: When they’ve outgrown, when they’re outgrowing their spreadsheets or their notepads with their lists of contacts. You know, seriously, because like I noted earlier, it’s it, or maybe not, it starts at $150 a month and you’re all in. That’s email, mobile, social surveys, sales, full sales, CRM, customer support contracts. Learning management systems. So for training you, you know, HR departments can use it. real estate companies use it to manage their port, their, what do I wanna say? The houses that they have, listed. You know, it could be cars as well. and the great thing is that you, you go back to that profile when, when a customer comes back to you, hopefully that customer does come back to you.

You have all of that information of the car that they bought four years ago or three years ago, and it gives you a headstart on being able to really provide outstanding service. yeah, I, you know. If you’re, if you’re going into business for yourself, you really need to like invest in your business. And this is a base, I believe it’s a basic investment.

Otherwise, you know, if you are looking at, if you’re, if you’re outgrowing HubSpot free or if Salesforce is saying you really should sign that three year contract. You need to like step, like, I’m gonna step back here. I’m gonna, I’m gonna call Venntive and have a conversation with them before I make that commitment because we’ll save you a lot of time and we’ll save you a ton of money and aggravation.

[00:23:50] Gary Ruplinger: Gotcha. And if somebody is interested in, in kind of learning more about, about Venntive, where should they go? 

[00:23:58] Lydia Sugarman: I’d really like for you to, connect with me on LinkedIn, Lydia Sugarman, it’s real easy. linkedin.com/in/lydiasugarman. And the website Venntive, which we are working on relaunching, but is just Venntive.com.

V-E-N-N-T-I-V-E dot com. That that name, I made that word up. It’s from a Venn diagram where everything comes together in the middle and being inventive. That’s actually the subdomain when you log into your account in.Venntive.com, and we make it real easy, you can click a button and set up a trial.

Pricing is published and we will call you.

[00:24:42] Gary Ruplinger: Well, great. Well sound, sound interesting. Sounds like it’s definitely worth checking out, especially given the, the, the pretty low, low cost of checking it out. So, really appreciate your time today, Lydia. It’s been great, great talking to you. Kinda learning about, about rev ops. I know I, I took some notes here because I learned some things too, so I really appreciate your time today.

[00:25:01] Lydia Sugarman: Oh, Gary, I really appreciate your time, your having me. This is, I, you can tell I love talking about rev ops and Venntive. 

[00:25:11] Gary Ruplinger: Well, great. Well, thanks so much. You have a, have a great rest of your day. 

[00:25:13] Lydia Sugarman: You too.