90 Days to Make an Impact with Louis Poulin of Buildertrend

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, we are joined by Louis Poulin, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Buildertrend.

In this episode, Guy and Louis explore improving the efficiency and effectiveness of revenue generation by consolidating and aligning operations teams. Discover how to make an impact in just 90 days, understand what factors drive pipeline and revenue growth, and how to use AI to qualify deals.

Louis is a senior executive and global digital transformation expert with over 25 years of experience accelerating growth in the software space. He currently acts as Vice President of Revenue Operations at Buildertrend, a leading project management software provider for the home building industry. Prior to this, he has held roles at big-name companies like PayPal, Google, and Amazon Web Services.

• Louis Poulin on LinkedIn
• Buildertrend Website
• Ebsta Revenue Insights Newsletter

Time Stamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 00:54 – About Louis and Buildertrend
• 03:54 – Making an Impact in 90 Days
• 11:45 – Metrics for Measuring Impact
• 15:56 – Knowing Which Stakeholders to Engage When
• 18:13 – Moving From Sales in IT into Sales Operations
• 22:40 – How Buildertrend Leverage AI
• 28:56 – Where to Find Louis

Highlights:

How to Make an Impact in the First 90 Days

Louis was brought into Buildtrend specifically to consolidate the operations teams spanning marketing, sales, customer success, data, and enterprise technology so they all had one comprehensive view of how to look at revenue. To have an impact in just 90 days, he focused on two main things. The first was identifying what tools could be consolidated. When he first joined, there were around 130 tools being used across the operations teams, with some hardly utilized, and others heavily utilized. To effectively consolidate these, he focused discussions around what business capabilities were being driven by which tools, and how they fed into the goals of the organization. He also focused on getting good quality data on customers, as this would help them know how to sell to them to achieve their goals. He worked with the data engineering teams to ensure that the efforts in place were yielding the best possible data that could be leveraged as an organization to make the best calls and understand the customers as best as possible.

Understanding What Factors are Driving Pipeline and Revenue Growth

Over the last 18 months, Buildertrend has begun measuring pipeline health as the first step towards more sophisticated forecasting. They are trying to be predictive and evolve their efforts to be more prescriptive around forecasting, understanding the cause and effect of different tactics and  their relationship to the pipeline. To do so, they are measuring revenue growth, pipeline general health stage progression, and productivity gain. 

Signal-Based Selling

Buildertrend have been using AI to help them get deeper into signal-based selling. Louis has been doing signal-based selling in some form for a decade, but he is aware that AI can be used to enhance it as it will identify signals that people closest to the account would not. AI is helping them to focus time, energy, and effort on the accounts that make the most sense and will yield the best results. 

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