73. PreSales Operations w/Megan Lin Gibbons

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey pre-sales collective it's your host james kikis and today i'm going to be

joined by megan lynn gibbons head of operations solutions engineering at twilio topic of today's episode is pre-sales operations if you don't have a pre-sales operations function i think megan is

going to convince you through this episode that you need one megan who previously worked at dropbox facebook and now twilio has a plethora of experience in solutions architecture

leadership roles and operation roles as well and she's going to talk about what a pre-sales ops or pre-sales program team can do for the business and the impact that it can make on leaders who

are juggling so many different initiatives at all times we're gonna break down what the role is why it's important and why pre-sales professionals should consider it as an

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megan welcome to the pre-sales podcast how are you today i'm doing great thank you so much for having me james oh it's my pleasure i'm really excited to have you on today because i know that we've talked about

operations ahead of time and this is a topic and subject that we haven't really talked about with the pre-sales collective so i always love the first of a specific topic because we get to set the foundation for the community i love

your experience and i'm really excited to dig in today before i get there megan i do want to say congratulations i know that you're a new mom and you've transitioned back to work how's that going

thank you so much yes it has been a whirlwind you know i constantly am telling people it's a bit disorienting becoming a mom everyone kind of warns you you know there's lack of sleep there's all these like adjustments but i

think until you're actually in it you're like whoa this is kind of monumental thing that i think is as physical processes it is kind of a mental adjustment so there's

this piece of it where i was able to very luxuriously take a few months off to entirely devote my attention towards a baby towards these life changes and get consumed by that and now having to

go back in many ways it feels like i'm joining a new company again so you kind of have those like new employee jitters of you know do i still know what i can do and is my role still needed here and

you ask all those questions but i'm grateful i feel extremely supported by my team my leaders and so i'm trying to make it work as best as i can that's amazing well i appreciate you sharing that do you have any advice for

people who need to prepare to take leave you know in hindsight i would say you got to make a plan as an operations leader i think that's very much in my dna to be thoughtful about

kind of what's ahead and looking around corners but you make a plan and then don't feel guilty i think there's enough going around in your brain to not feel guilty when you go back about having taken the time away right you know if

your company has those parental leave policies which i hope they do to support you know modern day employees and the flexibility that comes from you know currently working from home take advantage of it and if you're a

manager you know you want to make sure your people are taken care of but beyond that it's also great for you to set a precedent that it's okay to prioritize family and if you are not willing to

kind of take that time away then you kind of like set a symbol for your team members and you kind of communicate to others indirectly that if you're reluctant they should be reluctant too

so you know i think the key here is like you know take the leave and don't mentally tie yourself to work if you're not at work that is an incredible insight i love that you said that megan and i think that's great advice for managers supporting your people

throughout this process is really important in showing that family matters is one of the benefits of working in tech to get that balance in this new remote world that we have a hundred percent and i remember earlier in my

career i'd almost be embarrassed to ask the recruiters during the hiring process almost like secretly email them to be like hey i'm not in this situation but i'm wondering what your maternal leave

policies are and you know i think more and more i want to encourage people to ask those questions and like don't be shy because the policies should be open public transparent for a reason and then

people should feel like they're allowed to take full advantage of them when they do so you know we need to move away from this culture where it's like oh it says you can take three months off but really everyone takes two weeks you know so

be the change you want to see in the world and i mentioned earlier to you james now that i'm back at work and people had known that i had a kid there's a lot of people coming out kind of behind closed doors letting me know

like you know they're expecting or you know they're family planning and just wanting to get advice about how to navigate the system and it is still daunting i think there's this piece

that's ironic to me which is that having kids is such a universal experience and yet at the same time before you've gone through it it's so like overwhelming to even just think about how to go through

it and make it out the other side so now that i'm on the other side i do feel like i've become a member of this kind of survivor club megan wow that was amazing i really appreciate your insights there i

actually even more excited for today's episode because you just packed value in the intro so i love that you gave us actionable takeaways that's always my biggest thing thank you for that and again congratulations and appreciate you

sharing i want to get into your journey can you talk to us about your pre-sales career what got you to where you are today absolutely so i have been a solutions architect a solutions

architect manager and now you know i'm an operation leader specifically for a solutions engineering organization having been in this core role i feel

like it has been so helpful to propel me into now the operation side full time and that transition kind of happened in a phased way you know as a leader or as

someone who's on the team and wants to make a difference you find that you're maybe 80 90 of the time working with your customers you know heads down in account work and doing the demos the

technical challenges but then you know in order to make your team better there's all these side projects that accumulate and a side project might be something like oh we're doing annual planning my leaders asking if we have

any input on like how we want the comp plans changed next year or you know should we be putting our new higher head count towards someone in latiam or emea and you know you're part of the team so

you can be part of those conversations but you realize quickly that like to do some of those big side projects well it requires a lot of focus it's hard to just carve out the extra time during the

day to spend towards really strategic initiatives and so that's where i realized that i was just spending a larger and larger percentage of my day focused on these things that were more

on team building and optimization and then i really just asked for the role you know i had the fortune to work at several high growth environments like dropbox facebook and now twilio so i

lead the twilio operations team for ses and it kind of comes to mind that you know sometimes those opportunities are ones that you have to ask for and so if you find yourself doing a lot of that what is the kind of role that i can have

where i can focus more and more on that and as the size of the team grew it became a full-time opportunity and i was asked by my leadership to then focus in that direction until really it became

the role i'm doing today megan it's really good insight and i think you've kind of covered it so as we transition to our topic today of pre-sales operations i would love if you can break down like what is pre-sales

operations and how is it different from other departments because i just heard a bunch of pieces from your career journey that really resonated with me to be like oh yeah an ops person would have been really helpful in my career break it

down for us well let me start with what you said james about like you know an ops person would be helpful you know chances are if you don't have an ops person as part of your team or organization it probably means all those

responsibilities are being spread across usually the management level who at the end of the day is supposed to be putting together these goal posts or is taking care of things like email aliases right

something so trivial but someone's got to do it and it usually falls to the managers or leaders of an organization who already are really on the hook or responsible for revenue generation as

their core metric and a whole host of other things right hiring.the list goes on i would say broadly speaking operations is all the stuff that keeps

an organization or team running and the program and operations team for any department like solutions engineering partners with the leaders of that org to define goals and then the operations team is the one who's

responsible for making sure the execution actually happens one way i like to paint this is like let's say you're in a senior leadership meeting and your ceo says okay go do it make it

happen it's really the operations team that's supposed to break down what happened in that meeting what decisions did we make what are the action items who's the directly responsible you know executive sponsor who's actually going

to do the work before the work is approved you know makes all the racy matrices so it's that team that is the kind of framework for how everything else happens megan that's so insightful

because you're right these responsibilities get spread amongst the team they get spread amongst the managers and probably are not done or executed as well as they could be and so having a dedicated

function whose goal is to continue to empower and enable these pre-sales teams is really important because i think about some of the conversations that i've had on this podcast or with pre-sales leaders around the community

it's what should ses be doing like should we be responsible for just the revenue in closing deals or should we be doing all the side projects and collaboration we do with all the different departments and i think having

this role really be front and center in terms of allowing for execution and strategy to happen behind the scenes or sometimes maybe just some of the small things that can be tedious in time really makes a lot of

sense and it has me thinking around like some of the specific duties so can you walk us through what are some of your duties in your role and really how you are tactically supporting these pre-sales

teams so absolutely have to talk about you know the type of day-to-day work that my team does i think there's two major categories of programming responsibilities there's

this bucket that i would call keeping the lights on it's stuff that has to happen in order for an organization to function when you mentioned that that's the layer that kind of falls to managers

and leaders and can oftentimes become like a lot of overhead to the core work that's the kind of bucket that people oftentimes find most helpful when you have a program manager when you have an

operations lead examples of this are like you know running all hands taking care of onboarding coordinating with teams so let's say you know your marketing team needs a certain number of

scs or solutions engineers to participate in a conference who are you going to assign how are you going to keep them the tools that they need where are you going to send them so that like matches with their schedule doesn't interrupt their work all that sort of

scheduling coordination layer is handled by a programs or operations team so that's keeping the lights on you know just normal day-to-day stuff to make an organization or team function and then the other bucket i would say

are special projects or work that needs attention and these are areas where as a program manager you would identify gaps and then fill the gap so maybe there's something not so

obvious like when covid hit there was this huge need all of a sudden for everyone globally right not just in tech but everywhere to suddenly virtualize how employees work and that includes virtualizing all of our training

programs for onboarding adjusting the way that we sell because you can no longer send sales teams into the field so what do you need to do to prepare

people to do a demo that's as compelling virtually as it would be in person and when somebody figures it out you know you partner with folks on the team to actually get these projects going and

get the work done but let's say you know you have a wonderful you know fcsa on your team they're like okay got it here's like the recipe for success the next question is how do you share that recipe with the rest of the team maybe

of a global org maybe you have people working across different time zones and again we're all remote so that adds layers of complication when it comes to communication these are all the kind of problems that any team would encounter

and think about and the great part about being in an operations role is that it's your job to kind of help swarm around you know all the different stakeholders but also make things happen right you're

in a position to get things done which is really wonderful because then you know things tend to move a bit faster versus if it's like item number 15 on your vp's list that last point really

hits home hard so megan most people are listening to this but i'm sitting here nodding and approval i think i haven't stopped nodding about yes since we started this episode because i reflect

back again at my experience at showpad when i was helping build a team or start a team and the first time i was actually exposed to operations was my co-founder yuji higashi who was at outreach and said he was hiring an operations person

i was like why would you use a head count for an operations person and kind of gave me a little bit of an idea into what that person was doing that's incredible when it comes to scale and i love that you talked about getting

things done and helping swarm versus something that's on the bottom of that priority list because no matter the stage of the company we'll continue to have priorities that are just thrown on our plate and being able to execute on

them is really important so it sounds like that is really what your role continues to do and continues to be i think so you know the responsibilities shift day-to-day so what you're actually

doing sometimes is a bit more tactical like behind the scenes you're organizing the wiki to reflect sort of current team status and priorities or making sure there's a knowledge management

management strategy in your team and so you know you could be heads down in confluence or you could be creating docs and guides and other things but then there's also the elements where all of

us have been in situations where you already feel like you are working at 100 of your bandwidth and then leadership kind of comes up with a brilliant idea or some direction of strategy where

they're like okay we need a team on this right we need someone to help us figure out how to get this big customer assigned or we you know need to prioritize logos now so we need everyone

to kind of like partner with pmm to like you know make that happen all of those like kind of additional layers of work it's tough when really revenue leaders are foremost responsible for revenue in

closing business and making sure that you know they close the quota by the end of quarter so what happens to all of these kind of side tasks or duties is that they end up kind of being way late or you know sidetracked in the grand

scheme of things and so operations is really powerful because when you have a well-rounded company it actually helps the coral function better so that is actually the charter that i communicate to my team and tell you know other

people within the company when we talk about what we do we need to make the job of every pre-sales engineer easier faster better right it should be easier to be a new hire tomorrow than it was

for a new hire who joined twilio two years ago why because we have these layers now we have better tooling we have now introduced rfp tools we have tools for tracking productivity we have

demo engineering platforms in place we have an onboarding bootcamp that introduces them to our products the first couple weeks and all of those different things were built in conjunction with resources across the

team so like subject matter experts our leaders and managers all had a lot of buy-in were involved but what made them happen on an accelerated timeline is having a good project manager tell people like hey we have to get this done

this is the next step here's how we break down a large project into small steps wow megan i have so many questions as a pre-sales professional so curious i love the way you're breaking this down we

have people listening that are one of the first essays of their company we have people listening that are part of thousand person teams so what stage

should this function usually exist in the need for program management exists at any stage and i mentioned already at the start but if you don't have a program manager or don't have an

operations person it probably means you're doing it yourself which is great for small teams and i think that's the nature when you sign up for a startup or when you're one of the first solutions engineers or sales engineers at your

company you expect to be doing a lot outside of the core job duty but when you have a programs team the advantage is those strategic initiatives those responsibilities can be centralized so

think of it like a catalyst to get things done a bit faster but you still need the kind of core ingredients there to generate the work i would say for growing teams you might have a program manager for

anywhere from like maybe 20 to 50 individual contributors for a larger organization so right now you know let's use my current company twilio at twilio we have a solutions engineering

organization of this year roughly 300 and we've been going like crazy we're adding like 100 people each year that i've been at the company but incredible growth and you know to make that growth

sustainable we needed to have program managers and operations like strategy so that you know the whole operation just kind of crumble and you want to also paint this in terms

of like back to the work that we do any process or solution that you put in place it needs to be flexible to the needs of the team so if your team is 50 people you might

have a process that's like hey you know just contact this pm and when you need a license for x y and z but when you're 100 people contacting a single pm is not going to work right that means going to go crazy if he's getting like slack

messages all day so you have to devise some kind of more scalable process maybe it's like okay fill out this google form and the pm will take care of it like once a week but then when you're 200 people you can't have like a google form

become the official process for the company forever right that's kind of like a very flexible you can just kind of throw it up in a couple minutes kind of solution so then you might want to actually build something more formal into like a tool you're using like

salesforce so then coordinating with the sales efficiency team that's something operations person can handle or when you're 300 people now you know maybe now you're working between operations teams across different teams so you have an

operations manager on the solutions engineering side talking to an operations manager on the r d team to then figure out like okay what is the way we want to work so to answer your question about like what stage does this

function usually exist it can exist anywhere but you also want to make sure that the number of program resources that you have scales with the size of your organization i really appreciate that breakdown i

mean i can see how this role can really be different across different segments or different stages of a company and really evolve to continue to empower those teams and we've talked a lot about

the positives of this role but i'm curious on maybe the negatives or let's call it the challenges of this function what are those challenges so any role you know there's the two

sides of the coin right you know you're responsible for getting work done but on the flip side you're also responsible for getting work done so the part that can be very challenging when you're in a

operations position is when you don't have clear priorities so your end goals are undefined or maybe those goal posts are constantly shifting and i say that

with an asterisk because any growing and scaling company especially in tech needs to be able to pivot quickly so it's not that you can't deal with change but if the directional shifts are so great that

it really undoes a lot of the foundational work that you've done previously so you're constantly kind of being brought back to like step one then that can be really frustrating so that can be a challenge

and then number two is if you don't have enough firepower behind you so to make a role like this really successful you have to have an executive sponsor that believes in the function of

this job so the team that i have at twilio you know we're so fortunate to have leaders that really have seen the value of a great programs team early on and when i

took this role i spoke with my leaders and really asked the hard questions like why do you need this kind of job why now so the questions you just asked me james you know this kind of reminded me of my

interview process but it's also you know how are you going to make sure that this job is successful because anyone can say like oh i need to get this done or it's like you know hiring a physical trainer

when you want to make like a certain diet goal you can hire someone who's responsible for kind of keeping on track giving you the strategies even to some extent like keeping you accountable by giving you reminders about what to do

but at the end of the day if you don't really actually want to subscribe to that plan or you know if you have a group of people that's like oh that's nice that megan is sending out the 15th reminder email but i'm busy you are like

i don't care and they don't have their managers really behind you to say like no actually this is important to do then there's really no path forward so i think those two things are some of the challenges of this function that you

need to really evaluate for before you decide like your team or your organization wants a program or operations leader is you know do we have work that needs to be done that we

really want to prioritize are our priorities clear and when push comes to shove do you have a leader that's going to draw the line that's going to say like these things have to happen

again the operations person can help move things forward but they alone cannot do all the work themselves recently we had stephanie kinser from salesforce on the podcast talking about

executive sponsorship and we really took that episode in terms of an employee resource group or women in solutions excellence program but i like that we just talked about executive sponsorship in terms of the programmatic function

and how it supports pre-sales teams and pre-sales orgs you mentioned something in there that has me thinking in my mind it seems like it might be a little bit difficult to quantify the impact of this role how do you do that and does it

change based off the size and scale of a company there's change you know and there's also pieces where there's the obvious metrics you can track like how many hours are

you spending on certain projects and hopefully that translates into time that you're opening up for leaders or managers or ics to be more efficient at their core jobs or to spend towards

other higher priority tasks but then there's also the other measures around the team level organizational goals that you have maybe that your team sets annually so you have these like high level goals

like we want to make sure that this is the best team with the best culture that's a very generic statement but you know i'd say that probably applies to most people's ambitions when they're setting their annual goals that might be

broken down into like we always hit revenue and we hire the best talent but to actually get to a goal like we hire the best talent it takes more than just wishing for it right you can have

head count and then you need to fill that head count so you post the job description on somewhere but are you really in lockstep with your recruiting team do you have a job description that's tailored to your company or is it

just very generic and you're going to kind of capture the talent that you are putting the effort to seek so if you have an outstanding tailored job

description that sounds great you have materials that support that so maybe when you are recruiting candidates you have like promotional videos you create where you give really specific insights into the job role why it's a great

career choice and exciting and then when you're going through like the recruiting process you might really need to optimize that funnel you know how are you screening for the right kind of candidates to make sure that they're successful in the long run so one of the

projects i've done in the past few years is redesigning our technical screen for the interview process and that involved training our essays on how to ask a whiteboarding challenge question so it

wasn't always just like tell me hypothetically about something you've done but that where we can challenge people to say show us it's not a gotchu you know we really wanted to create some

sort of evaluation process where people can be taught something and then teach us back or you know we're helping them through it so we can see how they think so anyway let me pull out of that interviewing example a bit but you know

this is to illustrate that any high level goal always has individual components and it's easy when you create at the beginning of the year these high-level goals like we want to hire the best talent to just think that

happens automatically because you're interviewing but unless you're actually being thoughtful about breaking down like those steps and like how to tweak and optimize at each level it may or may

not happen that you ultimately reach your goal so i can quantify the impact of my team because our team goals are just 100 aligned with what are the organizational

goals and how closely that we meet them by the end of the year so if you are able to define specifically like we want to hire the best team and that means bringing in 80 new solutions engineers

this year across these regions and we want to hire them by this timeline we want to make sure that in two years time at least 80 percent of them stay at the company that's something you can measure

and then work towards i think it really comes down to are your goals of the operations team you know completely aligned with those of your leadership and of the organization you support

and then also it's at the end of the day by which part of the company you sit in we are part of the revenue side of the house which means you know when your sales team hits quota that means you're

successful and frankly you know i hate to kind of always come down to you know sales is money obsessed but if your team is not successful it actually doesn't matter how great your interview process

is you know at the end of the day people on your team can't do your job so you know we also have to measure ourselves in alignment with the fact that our goal is to make the sc team successful and

the sd teams is successful when they support their account teams in hitting quota so yeah it all kind of like ties back to the same thing at the end of the day where whatever system tools

resources you build produce implement have to come down to are they making an impact for the team you support and is your pre-sales team meeting their goal

megan this is a phenomenal episode i love all the actionable takeaways that you're providing us i love the analogies and even metaphors that you're giving us when it comes to comparisons and

pre-sales i feel like i can see and hear you selling on a call like what a pre-sales role actually is you talked about like job descriptions and such and with pre-sales collective

we continue to put out different thought leadership out there in terms of paths could you tell us maybe some attributes of what makes a great pre-sales operations professional

absolutely it's one that i love recruiting for because i love my job and i hope you can tell you know from the anecdotes i'm sharing there's things that are hard but it is a fun role

and part of that is i have always been someone that likes to be hyper efficient likes to optimize and so this is a role that is great for you if you want to be in a position to drive change if you're

feeling frustrated and like hey i wish something could be different or better and you have an idea for it and you want to see it through being in an operations position allows you to do that and focus on it full time

it's also really fun you know i would say program and operations teams are community builders because we work across all different levels of the organization oftentimes aligning goals with leaders but then getting work done

with smes or you know people on the team that are nominated to help support these really high profile projects and that directly leads to career growth so any high visibility role like this

one it's exposure into how decisions are made within an organization at senior levels it gives you exposure into how the change comes about you know and operations is a path

towards driving that change in conjunction with other stakeholders and it requires a lot of the same skills that it takes to be a people manager so if you're wanting to get into a

leadership role and or a future people management role but you know maybe those opportunities are fewer especially in startups right not everyone can be a manager when your team is five people then volunteering or raising your hand

to say i want to take some of these operational responsibilities a i think your manager would you know kiss the ground you walk on because who doesn't like to hear like you know someone on their team is raising their hand to take

some of that overhead away but two is i think you're really going to see that you're getting the same skills that you would develop in a manager role and can really help set you up for the next stage of your career

great insights i'm absolutely sure that there's plenty of pre-sales professionals listening to today's podcast that have been considering some sort of different role or different responsibilities so i can tell that you love your job i'm ready to work in

pre-sales operations myself after today's podcast megan this has been really fun i want to give our listeners an actionable takeaway because there's plenty of people that are probably listening to this episode who are saying

wow i really need a pre-sales operations role or this role can really make an impact to my business but i don't know where to start they're convinced that the role is needed so where should

somebody start when it comes to creating an operations or program function i would recommend that you get creative about structuring the role it totally makes sense you know you're a smaller

team you're not immediately going to get a full head count for someone just to do the operational elements of your responsibility of your organization so get creative you know this is a great

career opportunity for high performers on your team maybe someone's actually worked as a pre-sales professional for several years already and they want a little bit of a break and you know they

need some temporary relief from just day-to-day customer work but they don't want to take time off of work so this is a type of function where you can maybe offer it to someone to split 50 of their

time doing the core work and 50 focus on some of these other activities that serve the business and we already see kind of that happen you know very naturally for people that you want to

give opportunities to like you think about if you were opening a pre-sales team now in emea and you needed to send your best person over you kind of would naturally have to reduce their amount of customer work in order to give them the

space to launch this new location and so that's the kind of split that we oftentimes see works really successfully for pre-sales operations and programs teams to say

like maybe you can spend 50 of your time doing your core job for a period of time maybe a quarter or two and the other time you can help kind of craft and take care of all of this low hanging fruit or

high hanging fruit right you know there are strategic objectives there's the tactical stuff but it can be a huge help to pre-sales managers again it doesn't have to mean that from day one you hire someone who's only dedicated to that

function but it also definitely helps your team if you hire an operations person that's done the pre-sales role before so well said getting someone who's done the role and understands the day-to-day is definitely important i mean even with

pre-sales collective we made that type of hire with the head of community so it makes a difference especially when you're getting off the ground megan this has been incredibly insightful i've really enjoyed today's

episode i've taken so many notes and learned so many things that i have so many follow-up questions but it's been incredibly insightful and really glad that you can provide your insights to the community on pre-sales operations

and the why behind it thanks for joining us on the podcast today i'm so glad to be here thanks so much james all right see you next time all right pre-sales collective what an

episode i don't know about you but megan has convinced me that even we at pre-sales collective need an operations and programs team it is incredible to hear her perspective on this role and on

its impact within a revenue organization megan covered it as soon as we began this role is how operations team help in planning strategy and ultimately

execution and can make the lives of solutions engineers easier by helping focus on tasks that typically get spread amongst the team or even amongst the leaders and really the role is about

keeping the lights on and focusing on work that needs attention i don't know about you but i think about my experiences in my career and juggling all the different initiatives at all times and while priorities might be

impactful they might fall to the bottom of the to-do list and the pre-sales operations team can make a massive impact on bringing those initiatives and goals to life megan talked about how

sometimes the goals shift around an organization and it's normalized in high growth technology companies and the operations role will allow the pre-sales leaders and the pre-sales team to be

focused on revenue while the initiatives get worked on as a team and most importantly things get done and i think the role can really drive change within an organization it sounds like if done

effectively can really increase horsepower and efficiency of a pre-sales team with pre-sales collective we talked about how this role is so tightly woven into multiple departments and multiple

initiatives around an organization and it sounds like some of those rules and responsibilities can be taken on by the operations and programs team again to allow the pre-sales teams to focus on

revenue and revenue driving activities i do appreciate megan sharing her story about being a new parent in the workplace and loved the actionable advice that she offered about taking the leave and taking the options that exist

to us in the company all right pre-sales collective last thing we have created a channel and slack called role operations and so if you're interested in talking about pre-sales operations or pre-sales

programming go to the slack pre-sales collective dot com slack join the slack community find the channel roll ops and

we will continue the conversation there as always i will see you next week you