Podcast: Revenue operations with Anna Oom from Qmatic

Are you considering Revenue Operations? Then, this is the episode you've been waiting for. We are so happy that Anna Oom from Qmatic took the time to visit The Onlinification Pod to discuss revenue operations. Anna is Head of Revenue Marketing at Qmatic, a company that recently implemented revenue operations, and here you get the chance to listen to her experiences and learnings so far.

As Head of Revenue Marketing at Qmatic, Anna Oom has an important part in aligning marketing and sales regarding the sales funnel and the marketing activities connected to it. This podcast episode, we get the chance to listen to her experiences and tips regarding Revenue Operations.

Thanks to Anna for joining this week's episode, and thanks to you for listening! As always, links to The Onlinification Pod on the main podcast platforms and a full transcription of this episode can be found below.

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Transcription

AE: [00:00:00] Hi and welcome to the Onlinification Pod, a podcast produced by Zooma. I'm Alex, your host. And today we have a very interesting episode in front of us. The guest is Anna Oom who works as Head of Revenue Marketing at Qmatic, a company that recently implemented revenue operation. So we're going to listen to some real experiences in this episode. Niyat, it's time to roll the jingle.

AE: [00:00:36] Hello Anna.

AO: [00:00:38] Hello.

AE: [00:00:38] How are you?

AO: [00:00:40] I'm good. How are you?

AE: [00:00:41] I'm good. Very nice to have you on the podcast.

AO: [00:00:45] Thanks for having me.

AE: [00:00:46] It was a long time you and me had a talk.

AO: [00:00:50] Yeah, that's quite a while.

AE: [00:00:51] Yeah. So, yeah, let's just dive into it. Who are you and what's your background?

AO: [00:01:01] Yeah, so my background, starting from what I studied, I have a Master's Degree in Chemical Engineering. And then I worked in the scientific field for quite some time as a product and application specialist. But I started to get interested into how, how you come across as a company towards your customers and how you present yourself with your marketing and sales material. And I got the opportunity to start to work in marketing, and I continued doing that within the scientific field for a few years. And then I thought, why not try and take the leap and do just marketing but in a different sector? And I ended up in the IT area where I'm now.

AE: [00:01:49] When years have passed now, do you think that it was the right decision to change direction?

AO: [00:01:55] Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy the combination of still the analytical parts because there is a lot of data and you have to do the right things in combination with the more creative part of things.

AE: [00:02:09] Yeah. Yeah. So now you work at Qmatic. What does Qmatic do for listeners who don't know?

AO: [00:02:16] Yeah. So Qmatic is a is an IT company then. And we do customer experience management solutions. So for companies and facilities that have visiting customers and they provide services, we supply them with appointment booking solutions, queuing solutions, virtual queuing, and virtual meetings as well. That's become much more popular of course, customer feedback modules, business intelligence, those kinds of things.

AE: [00:02:52] So who is your customer?

AO: [00:02:55] So we have customers in a few different areas. One of the bigger ones is in the public sector. So for like city services, city halls, social services, tax offices that have them visiting citizens to their facilities, especially in countries maybe not as much in Sweden as in the US and further down in Europe. And then we work within the health care sector, hospitals, labs, and those. Within retail bigger retail companies with several branches, especially within the telecom industry and as well, retail banking. Yeah.

AE: [00:03:47] Wide scope of industries.

AO: [00:03:51] Yeah.

AE: [00:03:53] And how many countries are you active in right now

AO: [00:03:57] Oh, I should know this. I don't remember. But we are in many countries in America, most countries in Europe. We have partners as well in Africa and the Middle East and further away in Asia as well. So basically everywhere. Yeah.

AE: [00:04:22] We're going to talk more about your specific role at Qmatic. But before that. Could you explain a bit how you work with revenue operations?

AO: [00:04:35] Yes. So it was quite recently that we started to work with revenue operations and we have a chief Revenue Operations Officer, and below him, we have four different teams. One is revenue process and tools, taking care of all the processes and tools that are related to our revenue in our business. We have sales enablement that makes sure that we do our sales in the best way to generate revenue. And we have revenue marketing that I'm heading, and we have a revenue insights manager taking care of the data on an overall perspective. So not just the marketing part. And we work cross-functionally with the product team, the sales team, of course, client success, and also some with finance as well. So that's how we worked things out for us.

AE: [00:05:38] And that's on a global level.

AO: [00:05:41] Yeah, that's on a global level. I mean, we're spread out in the world, but we belong to the headquarter function, so to say, and we work with all the sales team across.

AE: [00:05:53] So you're Head of Revenue Marketing. How would you define revenue marketing?

AO: [00:06:03] Yeah. So revenue marketing to me, it's like you have a holistic approach to sales and marketing. So it's not just two silos both on our side of things so that our processes and the things that we do make sense to us and that we learn from each other and work together on the back end side of things. But of course, ultimately for the customer, it should be one journey all the way so that you don't have any gaps in your journey between marketing and sales. And we work then across so that it's not always marketing, starting with the lead, it could be sales and vice versa that you help each other and take over. You don't have a clear hand over place in the journey. So that's revenue marketing to me from one point of view. Another important part as I see is the data side of things because as you hear, it should be related to revenue. So you're not only doing marketing activities, you do the ones that you know will generate the most revenue. So not looking at lead generation, for example, of course we want to do lead generation, but we're not that interested in the number of leads as such. But further down, how much opportunity value do they create for us? And in the end, what is the one deal value? And looking at that data and tracking that back so that we do the right activities next time.

AE: [00:07:39] So you mentioned that it was quite recently that you started to work with revenue operations. What organisational changes or structures did you do when starting?

AO: [00:07:54] Yeah, for the marketing part, we're now divided into two marketing teams. So revenue marketing is within the revenue operations function, focusing on the more revenue-generating marketing activities. And then we have corporate communication and product marketing now belonging to product management. I think it works well because we still collaborate so well between the two marketing teams and we get better visibility and collaboration with the product management team. And also, I mean, then we have the other parts as well. So we have the sales enablement team. I don't know exactly where they were sitting in the organisation before. The process and tool team was part of finance before. So maybe they at that time was more focused on the finance side of things with our tools on how you deal with orders and those kinds of things. But now making that work all the way up to leads in sales force and leads and other activities that you do in HubSpot as well, that whole process and all those tools that you use on the way that they work together. And the Head of Revenue Insight, he's just recently hired. So we didn't have that role before, but we all are very happy to have that role. It's something I mean, everyone wants data, and you not only want data, but you want relevant data that you can learn from and do the right things based off.

AE: [00:09:33] Can you give some examples of what kind of data that is?

AO: [00:09:37] Well, I'm mostly into my data, you know, for revenue marketing. And then for me, that is like if we do activities and campaigns and so and as I said, we want to track that all the way to opportunity value and one deal value. I want to make sure that what we have gets attributed to the right campaigns. So starting that it does get attributed so that we know that we had influence. But also, you know, if you have several interactions, what was the important part that made the difference for those opportunities to go all the way? So that's the data I'm most interested in. But then there are all sorts of other things, of course.

AE: [00:10:24] Yeah. Yeah. Cool. And yeah. You're head of Revenue Marketing. Could you explain a bit about how does your team look like? What kind of initiatives, activities do you do?

AO: [00:10:40] Yeah. So on my team, I have a revenue marketing specialist, and also we'll have a web manager that I'm hiring for right now. And then we also work closely with the product and corporate team, of course, because it's hard to say what we do and what they do. We collaborate and produce content together. So, that's the team. We're focusing on the activities within marketing that are closest to revenue generation. There is no black or white but campaigns and making sure that we have the sales content that is not only about the product, but that puts things into a context for the different target audiences. So we're closer to the target audience, so to say, in that sense. And then everything related to ads, the website, of course, SEO and having relevant content, we're going more towards account-based marketing. But at the same time, content marketing and inbound marketing is super important for anyone and we've put a lot of effort into that as well.

AE: [00:12:02] Yeah. So generally you don't need to take an example from Qmatic. But are there any like obvious obstacles of aligning these different departments to work towards the same objectives?

AO: [00:12:19] I think it applies to any company that you have goodwill to, to make things go in the right direction and people collaborate really well. But you still have your area that you need to drive and not necessarily do you drive things at the same speed as other departments. So that can cause some kind of, you know, that you are not synced, done things and not there at the same time and that can make it more difficult. I think also working much closer with sales is very rewarding. But it takes also a lot of effort because, you know, they need to perform today. They need to fill their sales quotas. And we can't say that we're building something. You know, we're working towards a new strategy, and you'll get this in three months. We need to do it here and now. But when you manage to do that and you can deliver something that makes sense for them and that makes them increase revenue, then it's very rewarding. So yeah.

AE: [00:13:22] Could you give an example of how you were aligned with marketing and sales?

AO: [00:13:27] Yeah, I think if we compare to before we had discussions with sales maybe on I would say monthly or sometimes even quarterly basis like this is what we could do. What are your ideas of what you want to do and trying to find some of those things? And we were more like, okay, so we're doing this campaign, and we're doing it for everyone, and we're just translating it and putting it out to everyone. Whereas now I speak on a weekly basis and even several times a week with all the sales VPs and also with several sales reps. So I know, I always know what's on their mind and what they're working on. And we try to, you know, both do long-term campaigns but also help them here today. It can be anything from content to like how do I capture leads at an event. And we want to make that in a good way. So and that's again so that our data works for us.

AE: [00:14:35] So having that transparency and weekly contact makes the difference.

AO: [00:14:40] Yes. Yes, absolutely.

AE: [00:14:44] Could you summarise, like, how to overcome the main challenges of aligning the departments for listeners who just started or thinking about starting?

AO: [00:15:00] Oh, that's a difficult one. Well, I would say it's always good to start by listening in what their challenges are within the different departments. Try to find the things where you see that you can help to to make it change, to make impact and really collaborate. I think that's the most important part. But then also we are a strong revenue operations team since so we are four functions and altogether we're about 15 people. So we also have the capacity to create change. So that's a strength for us, of course. But even if you're a smaller team, then you're even more relying on the people out in the different functions. So you need to have a good collaboration and find those things where you can make a change to smooth things out between the different departments.

AE: [00:15:55] Yeah. And would you recommend any company and organisation to have revenue operations?

AO: [00:16:03] Oh, that's very difficult to say. I think there are so many different ways how organisations are built up. But I think, I mean, just having one person that has this in mind overlooking this, I think definitely. Yes.

AE: [00:16:21] Yeah. Yeah, I. Good. So coming six months, what's your focus right now?

AO: [00:16:31] Yeah. So on a company level, we are implementing a new strategy, which is we have a very set number of target audiences more than what we've had before. So making sure that our marketing and sales activities go in the direction of these target audiences. So we have the ideal customer profiles for these, and we're finding the target accounts we want to go after. So it's both in the sense of making sure we have the content that applies to them and finding the relevant channels to reach them and then following up on that together with sales. So that's our main focus, I would say on a higher level.

AE: [00:17:21] Yeah.

AO: [00:17:22] Yeah.

AE: [00:17:24] Well, good. It was very interesting to have you on the podcast Anna and hear more about how you work it. Lastly, are there anything you want to share with the listeners?

AO: [00:17:38] Well, I think in general, if most of the listeners are working within marketing. I think in general there are so many interesting areas and it's more a matter of how you balance things. There are so many different good parts. And as I said, even though we're going towards account-based marketing, you still have the inbound methodology and that way of thinking and you bring that with you in everything that you do. So, yeah.

AE: [00:18:08] Yeah. And you said you were hiring a Web Manager.

AO: [00:18:13] That's right.

AE: [00:18:14] If any Web manager listens to this podcast, why should that person join Qmatic?

AO: [00:18:20] Oh, because we're a great marketing team. You know, as I said, we are we're two marketing teams, but we collaborate really well. We have a lot of fun at work. We learn from each other, and it's an exciting company to work for. The products are really interesting, and I think we have a good way of doing marketing. Yeah.

AE: [00:18:40] Yeah. And I can really confirm that you're a good team.

AO: [00:18:44] Yeah.

AE: [00:18:45] Great stuff.

AO: [00:18:46] Yeah, that's good to hear.

AE: [00:18:49] So. Yeah. Thank you very much, Anna.

AO: [00:18:51] Thank you. Good to be here.

AE: [00:18:55] You're welcome back.

AO: [00:18:57] Thanks. Bye.

AE: [00:18:58] Bye.