Welcome to the world of #RevOps After Dark, where we get straight to the revenue news you (hopefully, probably) wanna know, adding in just a dashin' of that Rattle-brand bashin'.
This week!
Before we get into anything actually valuable... a HUGE happy birthday to my lovely and beautiful wife who is celebrating her 40th birthday today. (Now back to being a dinosaur 🦖).
Also: a happy 16-point loss to the goobers over at Commsor, who were convincingly proven to be ptero-ble by a highly scientific LinkedIn poll asking who has the better dino. (Rawr. )
Now, let's get to business (literally).
Business, Tools & Software News🥲
X’s ad revenue half a billy less than expected (per Q)
A quick checkin on Bizarro Twitter reveals a deepening of the comedy of errors over there. From the folks at Bloomberg : "X generated a little more than $600 million in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year... that compares to more than $1 billion per quarter in 2022." The once-proud (well.....) institution has come under increasing pressure as a result of owner and "ghost of a 19th century oil baron and a 14-year-old who died in 2012 possess[ing] the same body" Elon Musk telling advertisers to "go Tesla themselves" (uh... in not so many words).
💸 More like Sharesforce Am-I-Rite: Benioff offloading stock
Fortune reported this week that Marc "Big Country" Benioff, the SFDC co-founder, has been consistently selling a portion of his shares, amounting to over $475 million through 170 transactions since July. The strategy is all part of Benioff's plan, say his spokesfolk, to be a safe methods for the CEO to liquidate stock, avoiding legal risks and lessening any icky impacts on the market. (Notably, it should be added, this approach contrasts with other less cautious billionaires, like Zuck, who opt for larger, more sporadic share offloading — so good on ya, MB!) (Also: did you know that he owns TIME magazine? Yeah! I found that out while I was reading about this) (Weird that he hasn't given himself the honor yet?).
🤖 Your Weekly “A.I. in Revenue“ Breakdown
Actually, short of OpenAI making the odd decision to pair up with some scandalized news outlets, GPT4 beating Google's Gemini with better prompting, and the popular Gemini hype video being fake... it was a pretty quiet week. (Maybe a little too quiet, if ya know what I mean).
Strategy & Tactic News
😇 One the sanest takes on A.I. in cold outreach we‘ve yet read
Writing on MarTech.org, Kath Pay criticizes this seeming newfound over-reliance on A.I. for drafting cold emails, stressing the need for a balance between automation and personalization to maintain authenticity when you're out there prospecting. She does a fantastic job, if I'm to be honest, highlighting the ineffectiveness of fully automated emails (which has been true for a long time), but adds a few helpful strategies for improving prospecting, including — get this — genuine personalization (read it here).
🐻🐻🐻👧 Just-Right Tech Talkin’: Rattle’s CEO nails it
Our very own CEO, Sahil Aggarwal, now makes his, yes, first appearance to the RevOps After Dark this week for his pretty stellar take on the balance in communication. Not too little. Not too much. Just right. Obviously. But his take was interesting in that he meant not simply among team members, but also in how tools like CRMs function. An ideal CRM should neither be a silent, passive bystander nor an overwhelming source of constant alerts, but rather a perfect communicator, integrating seamlessly into workflows with relevant, clear, and immediate information. It's a utopian Goldilocks vision that's leading Rattle to where we're going, and we had to give it up for the guy. Here it is in full:
👏 RSE: Is process important? (OK you probably know the answer, but do you know whyyy?)
The importance of process in the RevOps realm is emphasized with a resounding 'Yes!' from friend-of-the-brand and The RevOps Collective founder, Rosalyn Santa Elena this week. Processes are crucial, she says, for creating predictability, scalability, alignment, efficiency, effectiveness, and for understanding what works and what doesn’t, mainly because they provide a solid baseline for measurement and improvement. It's like trying to bake a cake without a recipe; sure, you might end up with something... edible, but wouldn't you rather have the guarantee of a delicious outcome? (I know I would, rawr.)
A Good Read
🧠 One down, eight RevOps geniuses to go
This week, we dropped a new free ebook, RevOps Actually, that has two-fold benefit:
- It helps current RevOps pros think long-term about what they want from their own careers and gives some really good advice.
- It helps these 9 lovely folks get some more exposure as they look for work.
Talk about win-win!
Well, in just the last day we've learned, the book's very own Emily Bruce who lead the book has already since found a job! (On her own merits that had nothing to do with the book!) Still eight more to go, people! Get your own copy here, ungated, for free. (That ugly lookin button is just to stop the bots)
The Ad Hoc
🏛️ Does the IRS has an Ops team? They do now!
This week, everybody's favorite (👀) governmental department of all-time, the Internal Revenue Service, announced a new org structure to reflect new goals, update its org chart for the first time in literally (and this is true) more than two decades, and find ways to not make me wait on hold for 257 minutes every time I call about writing off my collection of Mark Benioff action figures. And they're doing it by taking a play out of the business playbook for once! The new changes include a single deputy IRS commissioner alongside four new chief positions covering taxpayer service, compliance, info tech, and operations. For the latter, the highly esteemed Melanie Krause will serve at the helm. (Congrats, Melanie! We do not envy you one bit.)
We're still looking for submissions to the State of #RevOps 2024. Wanna tell us what you're seeing from the field? We just dropped our own survey (fill 'er out here now and we'll send you the report a week earlier the rest of the public so you can act all sneaky and cool).
***
And that's it for this week!
We'll be back next Thursnight (before taking a three-week hiatus for the holidays), when we'll be bringing back more news and tips, and hopefully more fake CEO action figures.
Thanks for reading — remember you can always reach out to us at hello@gorattle.com for any questions, comments, concerns, or cease and desist letters.
