Sales Ops Interview: Alex Williams of Roxhill Media

Host: Hello and welcome to the fourth Sales Ops Demystified episode. As you can see, we're here. We work near Bank Station in London. You can see it, is that the Bank of England?

Alex: Royal Exchange. Directly behind us.

Host: Directly behind us. It's the Royal Exchange. [crosstalk] Alex, can you just move like a tiny bit? You see that there? Sweet.

Alex: That's not the Royal Exchange.

Host: That's not the Royal Exchange?

Alex: The Royal Exchange is below that in the middle there. It's in the [unintelligible 00:00:30]

Host: There you go. First of all, thank you for joining. This is our third interviewing episode and we think they're getting better every time. I'm not going to say better quality, but guests. [laughter] We are getting really good guests and quite interestingly, the guest we have today, Alex knows the first guest we had, Justin. Justin and Alex are both awesome people in the sales commercial, sales ops space, but have come into sales ops in a slightly different route and we're going to talk about that today. That's going to be super interesting. Hopefully, Justin is watching and he'll be dropping comments and questions.

We're going to run as always, for around 30 to 40 minutes. There are slides. You can probably see they're quite small in the corner, and a few PowerPoints on those and we'll be elaborating on them. If you have any questions the whole time, pick one and chat with. We have Josh over here. Josh quickly run around to give them the information so they don't have to come here. Josh is here and he'll answer the questions or send the questions through to me. We'll hopefully get them all answered during the session as well.

With that, I want to welcome Henry. Thank you for coming back on today. I also want to officially welcome Alex. The first thing that we will be chatting about, or the first thing I want to cover, just to give context is kind of an introduction to Alex and his roots in sales ops. The slides we have, that's the first one.

Alex: D'you want me to introduce my myself or are you're going big me up?

Host: I think--

Alex: I should introduce myself.

Host: Yes.

Alex: I currently work at a company called Roxhill Media and we are a relatively young media database company. We provide information to the PR community, whether they're working within a company or whether they're working with PR agencies. It's effectively a database of journalists that we've led on all sorts of functionality drives, accuracy for the facilitation of their conversations with their target audience. The founder is a guy called Alex Northcott, and he used to be a PR for Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan for a number of years, realized there was this massive opportunity to take what was effectively I think, in those days floppy disks or even paper digital, and set up a company called Gorkana, which very quickly became the preeminent media database. He ran it for seven years, sold it in 2010. Sold it very successfully. His business was then subsumed by larger companies. In 2015, he set up Roxhill media, and we now compete aggressively with Gorkana and are gloriously taking between one and two companies away from the [unintelligible 00:03:26] We're very keen to compete with them.

Henry: You're also the co-founder from the Sale Ops Meetup in London?

Alex: I am, yes.

Henry: --with Kirsty Charlton.

Alex: With Kirsty Charlton.

Host: I didn't know he was the co-founder. I thought it was just Kirsty.

Alex: No, so Kirsty and I, Kirsty is someone who as you may know is Head of Sales Operations for Signal Media. Signal Media provide a media monitoring service. They are the other side of the coin to our business and we are sister companies.

Host: Kirsty is going to on in two weeks I think, or maybe next week.

Alex: That is certainly something that people should dive in for. She's excellent, great. She's an absolute rock when it comes to sales operations.

Henry: Why did you start that group?

Alex: We had met at an event that Roxhill Media were putting on for PRs. She was new to Signal Media when we start talking about the sales operation role. I'm slightly sort of hybrid. I'm not pure sales. I should admit I do various different things for Roxhill Media. She and I got talking and quite quickly started sharing ideas and thoughts. We met up just once a month. Then, one meeting we both came to the conclusion we should set up a sales ops meeting meetup. It's grown from strength to strength.

Host: I totally agree with that. I was there a couple of weeks ago and it was really really good. There's going to be one next week so we should big that up. Anyway, I'm conscious that we focus on a business that you're now running. I think we should focus on you Alex. Everyone watching's probably like, "Alex seems like a nice guy, he works for this [unintelligible 00:05:14] "

Alex: I can show my mean if you want [laughter] to say I'm a nice guy. My background in a sentence--

Host: I think [unintelligible 00:05:23] like 20 years. [crosstalk]

Alex: I've been in sales; I was in sales for a long time. I started off in the publishing industry as-- I was working from the publishing house and went freelance and worked for lots of different publishing houses. I quickly realized that publishing wasn't going to pay for a mortgage and children, so sadly, moved out of publishing, but moved into a company that I loved. I served that company for 15 years.

Host: Selling?

Alex: Serving absolutely. Yes, long time. I started off as a junior salesperson to the small accounts and doing things for the big dogs. Then gained my own territories and accounts and then transitioned from sales after about 10 years, into more of a strategic role. I guess, at that point, I was still very involved in sales, but more in sales operations, well, sales strategy, and looking at how to break into different markets with different platforms. We provided covered for SAS platforms and processes. It was, how do we take those platforms that have a use in the US and create a new market in the UK and Europe? At the same time looking at how we talked to clients.

Henry: Do you think it was important that you had a sales background to step into a more strategic role and step into a sales ops role?

Alex: Well, I think given the company that I was with before, I had a lot of experience in what we did and how we did it and and who we were talking to. That enabled me to I think identify both the markets that were potentially saturated for us but also identify new markets. I think, given my understanding of the platforms, I think it's always useful and interesting to be able to look at the platform you're providing and think what are the use cases for this?

It was interesting because we were in America, it was an American company, and the US drove a lot of decisions. There was a point along the process of saying, ""Honestly, really, this should work, this will work, we've tested it, xyz," and I think when you are moving away from your sort of core service, or the core functionality of the platform, changing its use case, people get a little edgy.

There was very little risk that was potentially in a very high upside. I think the combination of that sort of low risk moving into a market where, if it did go pearshaped, it wasn't going to impact the rest of our service and customer base.

Host: Just to make it clear about your journey from sales to sales op, after almost 10 years of selling?

Alex: More, longer. I was 10 years ago at that one company and we're now talking about 13 years or something [crosstalk].

Host: How and why did you make that shift from actually going and doing selling to- just like the last time we met - a role in strategy and operations?

Alex: I think the company that I was working for at the time, I had a fantastic CEO., effectively. She ran the business and all aspects of business for MEA and APAC. She was-- I think the word inspirational gets bandied around too often, but she was really inspirational. She gave people autonomy and she was very commercial. Oddly, she was a very introverted leader but she was fantastically good at ideas, looking to drive the business forward and think about diversification. The opportunity was really driven by the opportunity to try to diversify our markets into different markets and it seemed a very exciting opportunity. I had always enjoyed the sales aspect, the people aspect of selling. There was still the ambitious, wanting to achieve element

 that I think is essential for any sales person with this role because they're not going do it without those numbers next to to your name. I still had numbers against my name but it's working with teams, across teams.

Host: I see, nice. The next thing I want to touch on, and kind did it then was needing sales experience to do sales ops, and We're sure the type of [unintelligible 00:10:30]

males a really good sales ops person.

Alex: Yes, I don't think it's essential, I don't think you need sales experience. I think in any role you undertake, the more experience you have whether it's of that role or other roles, it adds different dimensions to your ability to synthesize problems, to understand what's in front of you.

Henry: Do you have to listen to people?

Alex: Absolutely, yes. I always say that should ask this person to do this or that, I always try to put myself in their shoes. What would happen if someone asked me to do that? Would I be happy to do it? I think it's the same way in a work environment. If you're able to understand other roles to a much greater degree, I think you're able to facilitate your own role better. I think a lot of times, doing what sales ops does is about selling to your colleagues, to an extent. [crosstalk]

Host: That's good. I really like that.

Alex: It's not selling. If it's a sales operation, if it's a person. You want people to adopt a process, to do things in a particular way because you've looked at the data, and the data says, "This isn't working. Would another way work?" and so you need to go to your sales team and persuade them. I think if you understand what the pressures the sales force are, I think if you understand the things that they have to do and the ways that they do and the characters that often reside within a sales team, it's easy to do that.

Henry: How do you persuade them to change their processes? How do you do it? Is it carrot or stick?

Alex: I'll do it any way I can, quite frankly. Again, it's back to knowing who your team is. There are some people who will look at email marketing campaigns, for instance, which is very much your sphere and potentially are experienced salespeople, who say, "Good Lord, you're just spamming people," and it's absolutely not true so how do you get those people on board? I think if you have done your research and if you are-- and this probably comes on to your question about the things that make the greatest sales ops person, I think if you really are interrogating the data that's in front of you, you can potentially see what's not working, what would work, and I think then if you go to that team and say, "Here are things that we've been doing. This is the way we've been doing it. We don't believe that we're generating enough sales from this. We need to look at it this way," I think most people should listen to that.

Host: That's maybe hard, analytical skills and also softer, persuasive skills required at the soft end.

Alex: Absolutely. Going on to your question about what makes a good sales ops person. I think you have to like data, you have to enjoy the fact that there is a lot of data and you can utilize it. If you can have harness it. I think you have to have very good attention to detail. I think you have to be hard working. You spend a lot of time looking through the data. I think what you're looking for in the data are anomalies. If something to screws up again and again. Great, you can crack on with that but if there are anomalies in your data, why is that number showing up like that again? You have to pick up on these things.

Henry: If you're a new sales ops role in business, you join this business, it's got 30 salespeople it's got a sales manager. What are the first things you do? Do you want to go build those relationships first? Because it's the only way you can have influence in the business?

Alex: I think size matters. If you have 30 salespeople, it's very different from the environment in which I work, which has 10 salespeople. The same goes for the data sets as well. When you have a very large sales team, it's as much about the tools and the technology and the process. You may not have the time, the geographical ability to talk to the sales team and persuade them that x, y, and z. I think it comes much more back to, this is the data we have, this is what we're learning from it. These are best practices. I do think that a lot of that sales operations, which I feel is-- it's not in its infancy but it's not a sort of super-established career. There's a huge amount of learning that is done among sales operations people.

Host: Hence the webinar.

Alex: Hence, the webinar, hence the Sales Operations Meetup Group. I also think that Henry, you're sales, you're marketing, we were just saying that you guys have a close alignment within Ebsta, we have a very close alignment within Roxhill. I think that's essential.

Host: This is one of my favorite points right now. Now, we're going to talk about the merging of these commercial [unintelligible 00:16:40].

Alex: Revenue operations.

Host: Henry, revenue operations demystified is one. I think we might change it. Should we bring this discussion in now? Because I do want to cover this.

Henry: Sure.

Host: It might have been actually you that I first got this from or maybe it was-- I think it was you as a sales [crosstalk]

Henry: In Tamworth. [laughs]

Host: I might just let you talk about it then. Almost every webinar now is actually, this role of sales ops also has to encompass, potentially, fear, customer success, what happens after the sale and also what happened before the sale so you can [unintelligible 00:17:18]

Alex: I mean it's one pathway, if you think about it, sort of a sales funnel, you're pouring leads or contacts or opportunities in at the top. Out the bottom comes hard work but throughout this process, things are falling out of the funnel and marketing is hugely involved in it, sales is hugely involved in it. Post-client, sort of the old model where you have the funnel ending with the client, we're all businesses where recurrent revenue is absolutely king, if you think about investment cycles, what investors look for in companies they're going to invest is an opportunity to sort of increase the revenue dramatically, but also have that base of recurring revenue. Your client success team, your customer success team is hugely important as well.

Henry: Do you have a high renewal rate?

Alex: We have 81% in the first year and 96 from then on. We are in the process of-- so we had a sales force who continue to look after clients, we had a group of account directors who managed the renewal process, and we have a team of account managers, and we're changing the account managers roles into they're going to run the first-year renewals. We're backing all that up with a nurture campaign and as soon as they sign on, they start getting emails that are very much value-led. Here's the best way to do this. How do you see this particular trend x y x?

Host: A week after the campaign--

Alex: I think month after for the campaign, Nurture campaign, but when we were looking at the 19% that were moving away, and to be clear, there was a large percentage, almost 70% of that group weren't going to the competitor. They were just saying that, "We don't feel we need it." It's not as if we have a high-value platform but we had a number of clients who are not rolling in cash. Therefore, even the amount that we charged was something that they would have to factor into their budgets. If we can demonstrate value on that first year-- and it appears already this year to be working. Even with that and simply the nurture campaign the fact that we focused on-- Again, that's a data-driven result, what are we looking at, why are we looking at it, who's going where and that's very much the sales ops.

Host: So revenue operations.

Alex: But I think we were talking about this, the division between marketing and sales. So not just in Kirsty's part of the business, but another part of the business really had really rigid demarcation lines between the marketing team and the sales team.

Host: In the previous business?

Alex: In the previous business and it was just totally ineffective. The salespeople were much more inclined to say I don't want my clients in that campaign, we haven't fed into any of this. And one of the things, when I joined Roxhill we didn't have a marketing team at all. It was me and that was never going to get us anywhere, me and the campaign monitor, as good as it is, wasn't really up to scratch.

We've now got a marketing team of four and we work extremely closely, we're a good team, we work really closely with the sales team and our Head of Marketing's view on it is that her role should be 60% in support of sales and 40% in support of brand. Those two things are symbiotic anyway. They both help each other and I think it's hugely important.

Henry: What kind of technology are you using across marketing and sales? Do you use a CRM?

Alex: We do use a CRM. We use a CRM called Capsule. I really like it and I think the whole CRM question is one one could entertainingly talk about for hours. My family roll their eyes when I try and talk about it at home. It's a very straightforward CRM. It doesn't have a huge amount of bells and whistles, but it does exactly what we need it to do.

We have a multi-level operations platform. We use Hotspot, we use Xero for accounting, we use Heaped and [unintelligible 00:22:19] to keep our platform here, platform usage. They do all talk to each other, apart from Hotspot, which is [unintelligible 00:22:28] because they're not selling the CRM, the sales CRM. And I use Excel, I use it a lot.

Henry: Excel is a frequently-used tool in business and very useful.

Alex: I try to automate as much as I can, so obviously, the platforms help us with managing part of our data, but Capsule doesn't provide some of the in-depth analytics that we might want the for management team, and one of the questions that always comes to mind about CRMs is, who's it for?

It should be for the sales team and the sales team should be using it to manage other relationships and keep their tasks ticking over and all the rest of it. I think that was the view of a CRM five to ten years ago and I think the pendulum has swung to see it as, this is fantastic, I can get all this data out of it, this is wonderful.

But you've then got a layering on of the Sales Director saying, actually, before you close this opportunity, while it lasts, you've got to check this box, you've got to check that box and suddenly administration in a major way became involved and it's not necessarily the salespersons' friend.

Henry: If you're giving a report to senior directors, financial reporting, opportunity reporting are you giving that to them in Excel? Is that where you process the data?

Alex: I do both. I will use our platforms to provide one set of information, but I will also layer in more qualitative information. I think another one of the questions around forecasting is how do you manage that? Is it entirely quantitative, are you just looking at the data? Or are you going to your sales team and saying, "Talk to me about your pipeline. Where is it strong? What analysis has been provided for this last pitch or this last meeting?" And I think we tend to rely on a combination of both quantitative and qualitative analysis for certainty in forecasting.

Henry: So you think businesses that just use quantitative to say forecast, you think they are doing themselves a disservice?

Alex: I don't think they're doing themselves a disservice, but I do think you need a large data set in order to generate patterns and I think to be able to analyze effectively you need a pretty big data set. A big data set is always going to give you better results I think, more established results.

Henry: Because you know, managers always want to just look at a dashboard maybe and just see the numbers, but that doesn't always give a true capture of what's really going on, no matter how good people are at putting stuff into the CRM.

Alex: That's the other issue isn't it? People are not necessarily great at putting things into the CRM, but then you have that issue with the quality of the analysis. You always have [unintelligible 00:25:46] this thing's coming through and then they go on strike. There is always that amount of people either consciously wanting to present a better picture than actually exists or just being overly optimistic.

Henry: Eternal optimism.

Alex: Yes, but I think that's the other important thing about relationships between sales ops and sales managers and directors. We have a -- to blur in with marketing as well, we have a sales meeting which marketing come to every week, we have one-to-ones with each of the sales team and that's the sales director and me.

I think you're then able to get a much better picture of the quantitative measures, what does Capsule say about your pipeline? But then sitting down and talking to them about the next three months. So we have qualitative management, obviously, you have your pipelines and there is a weighted percentage against that, which I think is a slightly [unintelligible 00:26:55] piece.

We then ask the sales team to say, "In the next three months, you need to apply a 75% likelihood of a deal coming in," and that's proven pretty accurate. There might be some shift in timeline, but as we look at it the whole time, you sort of see the numbers as the months draw closer to you.

See the numbers going up and then they sort of tail off a bit as wins come through, but I think that qualitative measure works really well. I think the combination of sales manager and sales ops working together works really well.

Henry: Do you think technology is crucial to sales ops? Do you think it's vital to the role? It's an intimate part of the role?

Alex: Absolutely.

Henry: Being able to manage and decide what those solutions might be for the sales team.

Alex: Firstly, there's too much data out there now to not have technology provide a solution. And I think we talked about the platforms that we use at Roxhill and the thing that I like most about those platforms is that they do talk to each other.

So we'll start the process off with the salesperson putting as little data into the CRM as they can possibly give, but then that builds up over time. We win the deal, our finance team then take that data and put it into Xero which then pushes any addresses that aren't already in the CRM into Capsule.

The accounts management team, the client services team will then pick up that client. They will be using Capsule to find out who are these guys, what are they doing, but they will be analyzing Heaped from that on the job. Who's using this? So we look at Heaped to both discover how people are using it and whether we can detect patterns.

But we also use it as a risk analysis. If someone has ten licenses and only five people are using it and those five people are using it very irregularly, by the time they come to their renewal if they ask the difficult question, "How many licenses do I have?" and we price on banded levels, you don't want someone realizing quite quickly that they're wildly overpaying. It just makes conversations difficult.

So we would rather understand that at an earlier stage and get those people using it. They need more training.

Henry: Do we have any questions?

Host: Josh, any?

Josh: There's the one. The tax. [unintelligible 00:29:48]

Henry: I've got an interesting question. Do you have a single metric you can judge all sales users by in your business?

Alex: Sales users as in who's using my CRM and how they're using it and--

Henry: Yes.

Alex: Or how do we judge ourselves? Because they're different things. They're very different things and I think traditionally it's been the sales usually sits at the center of vast technology platforms and do you judge them by who's putting in great data, who's putting in poor data, who is shifting their milestones along the perceived rate-- and we tend not to do a lot of that. [chuckles]

Henry: Do you a lot of time to close as a metric that you [crosstalk]

Alex: No, you don't. I think we're slightly an unusual company in that- because we know exactly who our clients are, or our prospects are and who they-- We founded Gorkana. We sort of know who we need to talk to a lot of the time. There's an element of knowing when we need to talk to them and if we have missed the relevant date, it's not as if that is an opportunity that's been closed. We just see it as we've given them X amount of data. We've discovered what else they need from us, what the pitching points are and we go back.

The sales cycle is about six to eight weeks, but we do understand that there is potentially is we come to people we've not spoken to. This comes back to the brand thing. How do we build our brand so that when our salespeople pick up the phone, they know who we are and what our history is and how we differ from our main competitor? We understand that there may be quite a lot time they're tied into something. Also, our main competitor tends to aggressively enforce an auto-renew policy. This puts a lot of people off but it makes our job so much easier the next cycle-- We don't, I guess, look at that metric as being something that drives success or lack of success for a salesperson. Somewhat, I guess prosaically, one of the things that I look at is activity. I think-

Host: [unintelligible 00:32:27] question. I don't know if our guest already said that, but we came to a conclusion that potentially what time is spent selling. That literally came up. It's almost similar.

Alex: So time spent selling, when I think about what the salespeople are doing and how they do it, each salesperson does it slightly differently but when I hear them on phone, some of them will cycle through their calls really quickly. They will ascertain when is your renewal date and then boom they are off. Can I send you some literature? They don't want to waste your time. I'll call back when and they move them through really quickly. But part of me wonders whether there is an opportunity to push a little harder. Certainly with larger companies where there might be capacity for multiple platforms and our main competitor and Roxhill have slightly different functionalities. We're not complementary but we're not necessarily two entirely separate things. I think it is good to move through those accounts quite quickly. We do know that it is a week trial or less than a week trial. We tend to be pretty quick to move people on if at the end of the week they haven't been trialing it. Again, back to marketing, we have an automated trials campaign. You sign in for a trial and you get put into a campaign, you get three emails in the week telling you how to do-

Host: Three emails a day.

Alex: Three emails a day, yes, to your address.

[laughter]

Henry: Do you have a customer success manager or a pre-sales person looking after the trials process or is it totally hands off?

Alex: No. It's the sales team.

Henry: Okay. Sales team and marketing.

Alex: We're pretty-- we're 40 people. Telephone sales, we have four account managers, ten for marketing but we're not a big company. It means that I do lots of different things. Jack of all trades, master of none, as Kirsty would probably say.

Henry: Within your sales ops role, what's your biggest challenge that you face?

Alex: Data and time.

Henry: Data and time. Is that the time to process it? Is it to understand what's the reason?

Alex: It's just there isn't enough time in one's day to do all things that you would want to do. It goes back to attention to detail and looking at quite large data sets. Some of that stuff does take time. Time is a luxury. Then data, partly because I guess we're doing quite a lot of stuff outside of platforms, there's a lot of data flying around the office. We try to ensure that we have naming conventions across all of our platforms but that doesn't always happen. You get web leads that people describe themselves as being from an allied company. Harnessing the data, it has to be as clean as possible but ensuring that it's clean is a never-ending task. Particularly given the platforms, like Capsule that we're using, are very simple and straightforward. [crosstalk] try Capsule, it's really good.

Henry: No, I understand. Sometimes-- you're not making do but you're utilizing all the features you need to. You could invest in another CRM that typically costs-

Alex: Yes, we could.

Henry: -several times more and offer way more features.

Alex: We've looked at them. We've been through processes. When we brought our HubSpot it was obviously the time to say, well should we be changing our CRM at the same time? Should we be getting HubSpot's marketing automation platform and its sales CRM? We went through a process of really looking at all the platforms we used. I think partly because the sales team-- I think CRMs does have to come back to sales teams rather than marketing reports, management reports. Part of the sales team knew it and liked it. We were bringing on HubSpot. There was a lot of change going on in the company anyway. I think the question has raised its head again now that we've got the account management teams turning into client services? Is this the right time to create- to buy in different platforms? We have brought in Freshdesk as a servicing tool but for that reason, we're continuing- we're going to stay with [unintelligible 00:37:32] That's one of the reasons we're going to stay with Capsule.

Henry: It sounds like you have all the functionality you need so why change it? You're [crosstalk] data that could be bad. You'll have disgruntled users.

Alex: It's always a balance, isn't it? Something like Salesforce has, a) so much more functionality and there are so many companies that provide analytical tools that you layer on to it. Would I enjoy it? Yes, absolutely. I'd love to.

Henry: It's more data.

Alex: Well, probably it's more data but I think some of the Salesforce partners provide really interesting and really clever services of functionality. I think if you are a small company it's really useful to have that support. I think often the cost of these things-

Henry: It's very attractive in a way because there's this whole host of features that you can utilize but you have to have people managing that constantly to get the most out of it.

Alex: Sure but then we have probably me managing a bunch of different Excels and as many formulas as you can throw in there and as much automation as you can apply to Excel. It's pretty slick. It still takes a lot of time. Management report week is always fun.

Host: Cool. Okay, so I've heard we might have some audio going a bit quite, but that's fine. We can clear that up later. We have one final question we are actually going to ask every guest that comes here. I think I might know who you'll say but I'm not going to allow you to say it because you've already said it today, which is who-- it's a two part question. Who if we told what you know in relations to sales ops? It's probably the same answer but if you could take one person from Sales Ops out for lunch, who lives in London--

Host: You can't say Kirsty because we're going to talk about Kirsty.

Alex: Who do you think I would say?

Host: Kirsty.

Alex: Why can't I say Kirsty?

Host: Because we've already had- we've already talked about how great Kirsty is. Kirsty's really great.

Alex: I think the choice for me is who's taught me about sales ops. What's the big influence? One is Justin Kersey who you [crosstalk]

Host: Justin.

Alex: But I think what- what I thought was

 really interesting about his roles, he didn't come from sales ops, he came into sales ops from a different part of the business. He has a very very analytical mind. He's super sharp. We talked about, you know, the importance of being sales or sales operations or whatever. Justin wasn't either of those things but worked, I think, pretty effectively with the sales team. I don't think the sales team enjoyed it much because he would put data in front of them and say, "Look, it's right there." They'd be like, "Er, I'm not sure. Maybe I didn't input it." It was marvelous. So I think, you know, talking about is there a soft side of persuading people to do things. I think when you put the data in front of people, you know, particularly sales people who try to sell their way out of anything, you know, it's sort of black and white in front of them and there's very little wiggle room.

Henry: There's very little wiggle room.

Alex: So I learned a lot from Justin but honestly if I'm-- if the choice is between going out to lunch with Justin or Kirsty? I'm sorry Justin.

[laughter]

Host: It's a hands down win to Kirsty. Okay, cool. Okay, we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you everyone for watching. Apologies for the added audio issues, we'll clear that up on replay. I wanted to say thank you to Alex for being an amazing host and for dropping some bombs. What was that thing that we were- I was like, how actually, sales operations is almost a sales rep that sells [unintelligible 00:41:23]

Alex: I think you have to expect people to, you know, adopt the sales operations process and sales people aren't necessarily always good on process.

Host: Exactly, so that's the great-- Everyone of these, if you lay out one or two that's going to be absolutely great. Little insights and quotes. Awesome, so Henry anything else to add?

Henry: No, not for me.

Host: Nothing next week.

Henry: Except thank you so much to Alex.

Alex: Well thank you very much for having me. It's been great fun.

Host: Final slide, any question to about Ebsta? We don't-- We'll talk about that later but Henry's your man. I put you gmail there. I'm not sure--

Alex: That's absolutely fine.

Host: I just revealed your personal email.

Alex: I'm probably going to be less able to answer questions in that cluster.

Host: That's the-- hang in there-- I'll change that up.

Alex: Rory would be delighted, though.

Host: Yes. Next week we have Kirsty on.

Alex: Excellent.

Host: It's going to be actually on Wednesday because one of us is not available on the Thursday. 5.00pm, next Wednesday live. We'll send people an email with links. Sign up. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you.

Henry: Thanks guys.

[00:42:38] [END OF AUDIO]