LeanData Customer VMware Carbon Black Wins Prestigious Forrester SiriusDecisions 2020 ROI Honor for Revenue Operations Transformation
Cybersecurity leader VMware Carbon Black was recognized for its pioneering Revenue Operations (RevOps) business initiative in the 2020 Summit Return on Integration (ROI) Honors program from Forrester SiriusDecisions. The annual award spotlights business-to-business (B2B) organizations that have achieved strong sales, marketing and/or product alignment, and have improved company performance as a result. Dan will present his award-winning RevOps transformation story in a keynote presentation today (May 6th) at the 2020 Summit event.
LeanData: First of all, Dan, congratulations! This is a big industry recognition for you and your team.
Dan Carpenter: Yes, thank you! We’re very excited to have our Revenue Operations success story recognized on such a big stage in the B2B sales and marketing world. The concept of RevOps, and the establishment of a truly integrated revenue engine across all go-to-market functions, is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the highly competitive and dynamic SaaS market. And yet RevOps is still very new. I’m delighted to not only spotlight our team’s success story, but share details of our journey to RevOps and best practices with other attendees at this year’s Summit.
LeanData: How do you define Revenue Operations?
Dan Carpenter: One year ago, RevOps was “officially” debuted from the mainstage at SiriusDecisions Summit 2019. Analysts have defined it as an emerging go-to-market model that unites the operational groups powering the revenue engine into one strategic function singularly focused on maximizing an organization’s growth and performance across the entire revenue funnel.
For me, RevOps is the combination of all the operational teams across the go-to-market functions into one powerhouse of strategy, planning, analytics, operations, enablement, process, systems and data. On behalf of Marketing, Sales and Customer Success functions, the RevOps team can collectively run and optimize the revenue engine, from top of funnel to customer renewals, to efficiently maximize growth, enable scale and provide a great customer experience.
LeanData: More than two years ago, you joined Carbon Black to spearhead the company’s transition from a traditional go-to-market structure into a centralized RevOps organization.
Dan Carpenter: Yes, that was an ambitious undertaking to be sure, but we had tremendous executive support. We had an aggressive business plan as we prepared for our IPO which included transitioning to hybrid SaaS sales motions, significantly expanding our go-to-market and accelerating revenue growth. So, we needed our revenue engine to also significantly transform and scale to enable our commercial teams to efficiently achieve our goals. And to achieve that, we needed a first-class Revenue Operations team. Our combined RevOps team and our new revenue engine were mission critical in enabling Carbon Black to rapidly and efficiently achieve our growth goals, enable our IPO, and now most recently we’ve joined the VMware family.
LeanData: Why was the move to RevOps so pivotal for your business?
Dan Carpenter: Quite simply, RevOps establishes and manages an efficient set of processes, systems and data seamlessly across the entire revenue engine. Having a RevOps structure in place ensures that sales and marketing are in lock step on go-to-market strategy, planning and measurement, supported by insightful reporting and effective operating practices. Revenue Operations was critical to balancing our resources to achieve our goals, and removing silos, friction and barriers to growth. Thus it has helped to optimize revenue growth across our entire revenue funnel.
LeanData: Did your sales and marketing tech stacks evolve with RevOps?
Dan Carpenter: For sure, our marketing, sales and customer success tech stacks are critical to our efficient revenue engine, as are the data providers, AI and data science applications. We added many applications on top of Marketo and Salesforce core apps to accelerate our business performance, such as LeanData, Clari, Gainsight and Outreach. We’re also delighted to leverage the continued innovation and thought leadership from the many application providers out in the market today.
LeanData: Carbon Black was also recognized for “RevOps Transformation of the Year” in LeanData’s 2019 OpsStars Awards. What role does Lead-to-Account Matching & Routing technology play in your RevOps structure?
Dan Carpenter: Leads are the lifeblood of any company. LeanData bridges the gap between marketing and sales tech stacks to automatically connect the leads generated by marketing to the right accounts within CRM and then orchestrates the flow of those leads to the right person in sales. The majority of companies still try to manage this process manually, but it’s time consuming, expensive, prone to error and ultimately not scalable as lead volumes expand.
LeanData’s Matching and Routing technology plays a mission-critical role within our Salesforce CRM environment. Especially given the rate of change in today’s economy, and the speed at which go-to-market plans are pivoting to meet new selling realities, automation is critical for business agility and continuity.
LeanData: Following the acquisition by VMware, and now with the global workforce shifting to remote work, did VMware Carbon Black as a cybersecurity vendor experience a surge in lead volume? Did your RevOps structure enable you especially well to manage these leads effectively?
Dan Carpenter: As a $10B cloud and virtualization company, VMware has an amazing vision to enable any app to run in any cloud on any device. Now with VMware Carbon Black, security is an inherent built in capability across the VMware stack. So yes, with both VMware and Dell customers engaging to meet their security needs, and now an increasing need to protect homeworkers, we’ve seen a significant increase in demand. And yes, our well-performing revenue engine has been critical to our efficient execution following this surge.
LeanData: We have witnessed firsthand through our long-standing partnership with VMware Carbon Black the successful transformation of your company’s traditional go-to-market organization into a best-practices RevOps model for others to follow.
Congratulations to you and your entire team, Dan, on this well-deserved recognition at the 2020 Summit!