Aptitude 8

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Revenue Operations Director for Financial Technology Firm. My company is a cloud-based data operations and delivery firm providing active pipelines for a wide variety of traditional and alternative datasets. As Revenue Operations Director I built the CRM, Data Analytics and billing infrastructure through multiple funding rounds ($10 to $41M) and high employee growth (15 to 60 EE's).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Aptitude 8?

Hired Aptitude 8 for a 2 year period to help build and scale the entire Revenue Operations department which includes initiatives such as:

• Salesforce Lightning Infrastructure Design and Build
• Salesforce CPQ
• Pricing and Billing
• Revenue/Sales Ops Systems Research, Purchasing and Design
• HubSpot CRM
• Marketing Analytics and Campaign Management
• Website Development and Design
• Sales Process & Design
• Territory Planning
• Lead/Demand Generation for Inside Sales

What were your goals for this project?

• Build systems to be scalable, cost efficient with minimal training.
• Building infrastructure that was complimentary and not overly expensive and complex.
• Design Sales Processes that allowed us to adjust based on customer feedback as we learned from Series A through Series B.
• Allow Sales Reps to enter data quickly and efficiently to promote quick and agile reporting.
• Allow Marketing to have systems and reporting that were aligned and integrated with sales.
• Allow Finance to report revenue forecasts, expected revenue and bill customers without large amounts of manual data exporting and cleanup.

SOLUTION

How did you select Aptitude 8?

Reached out to various Revenue/Sales Operations consulting firms through UpWork that had specialties ranging from:

• Salesforce
• Hubspot
• Tableau
• Microsoft PowerBI
• SQL
• excel,
• etc.

Connor Jeffers and Aptitude 8 stood out from the rest as I was looking for a solutions partner that could help me think at an executive level rather than a tactical task master. Most of the other firms I found did the task work well but I needed a firm that could help me think differently and scale for the long term in a fast-pace, complex environment such as financial technology.

Describe the project in detail.

Since there were so many projects over the 2 year time span-- I will describe how they helped me build our sales process and transfer into salesforce opportunity stages along with defined entry/exit criteria. This process was important to our investors since our business model was unique and we needed to clearly articulate how difficult and long it would take to win deals.

Project consisted of 2 full day on-site visits with the Aptitude 8 team which was split into the first half being interviews with the Head of Sales, Field Reps and Technical Account Manager to understand the customer flow of customer meetings and buying tendencies. Second half of consisted of formalizing technical design, flow-chart data/mapping and building of Salesforce Sandbox to start to test functionality and get user feedback.

Final portion of visits were final reviews with myself and the executive team on proposed sales stages, entry/exit criteria along with analytics dashboards and corresponding reports we could provide on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Finally, Salesforce trainings were provided to the field reps to make sure they understood how to classify and enter the information throughout the Salesforce funnel.

What was the team composition?

Connor served as my project lead and was on-site to help me work with the sales team and the executives. The rest of the team that included designers and developers would work with me as needed through phone/email/zoom.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

For the salesforce opportunity stage creation in 2 days we had our entire process mapped out, approved and trained. Over the next 2-4 weeks we rolled it out from Sandbox into Production and were reporting to leadership weekly, monthly and quarterly reports. This data was also used in my quarterly review with the Board of Directors.

Overall, in the span of 2 years Aptitude 8 had built full-production instances of Salesforce Lightning, Hubspot, Outreach.io for demand generation along with Salesforce CPQ for pricing of deals and helping with billing design and reporting for the finance team.

Their ability to help my department scale up or down with manpower was critical in our start-up environment as there would be peaks and valleys of projects/executive requests that I would have not been able to keep up with if I had chosen to staff in a traditional manner.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Excellent. Meetings were held bi-weekly with myself and Connor to discuss high level projects and 3-6 month executive roadmap. Additional Aptitude 8 members had weekly meetings with marketing, finance and product teams to help make additional adjustment or enhancements needed.

To provide some additional context, Aptitude 8 continued to earn more business with my fellow department heads beyond revenue operations and at the end of my initial contract had expanded our SOW with the Heads of Marketing, Product and Finance.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Aptitude 8 is unique since their EE's have actually worked in senior positions for revenue/sales operations, marketing, demand generation, systems design and have that executive level "view" that most companies don't. I also noticed that as the company has grown the breath/depth of their knowledge continues show in the suggestions/experiences they provide to me.

This is critical for any department head or leader to be cognizant of as they propose solutions and initiate projects.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None that I can think of.