Today, we’re recapping our episode with Christine Maxey, VP Revenue Operations & Henrick Lee, Chief Product Officer for LeanData, a revenue orchestration platform that’s transforming GTM and revenue operations by streamlining lead management and optimizing sales processes.
Listen to the Podcast as we explore LeanData's GTM strategy and product roadmap and discuss the GTM tech landscape and evolving nature of the B2B industry. See highlights from the conversation below.
Sales Pitch & Founder Story: Enabling any combination of GTM processes
LeanData is the market-leading revenue operations platform designed to enhance the efficiency of customers' CRM, sales, and marketing technologies for B2B revenue teams. Their mission revolves around harmonizing people, processes, and technology through agile scheduling and workflow automation, enabling businesses to adapt and optimize their revenue operations. LeanData’s raised $45M through venture partners like Sapphire Ventures, Tenaya Capital, Shasta, Felicis and today they are profitable and cashflow positive, allowing them to control their own destiny.
LeanData's origin story started when co-founded, Evan Liang, a seasoned product professional, faced challenges in aligning marketing and sales while launching a product in a previous role. Struggling with data messiness and inefficiencies, Evan and Kelvin Cheung, the CTO co-founder, envisioned a solution that could seamlessly integrate and streamline go-to-market processes. This vision led to the creation of LeanData:
Christine Maxey's journey with LeanData began as an early customer who was impressed by the product's uniqueness and market fit. With a background in RevOps, Christine has been instrumental in LeanData's growth since joining in 2016. Her passion for customer success and her deep understanding of the operational intricacies make her an invaluable asset to the LeanData team.
Demo Round: A canvas to make all your orchestration dreams come true
Christine focused this demo on a critical use case: "speed to lead" aka leave no potential customer behind. LeanData’s new scheduling automation starts from a web form submission. When a prospect fills out a form, they can immediately schedule a meeting with the appropriate person. This automation is smartly configured: if a submission comes from a competitor or lacks a corporate email domain, it’s directed to an SDR for further vetting. However, if the lead is qualified, it’s matched to the appropriate account, leading to various outcomes like scheduling with a CSM or the opportunity owner directly. This includes creating events in Salesforce and involving multiple team members as necessary, thus maximizing the chances of engagement and conversion.
LeanData’s workflow automation, demonstrated through their FlowBuilder, offers a visual and intuitive way to manage lead routing. This platform is designed to handle complex scenarios with ease, allowing customization based on the needs of different teams. For instance, even if a prospect doesn’t immediately schedule a meeting, LeanData ensures they don’t fall through the cracks by incorporating secondary routing strategies. Alerts in Slack are used to prompt timely actions from sales representatives, ensuring leads are addressed promptly. This system not only enhances lead management but also provides transparency and accountability. Check out the full demo of LeanData, but also note this is just one use case, some customers’ will automate hundreds of processes through LeanData to manage intricate go-to-market motions:
Go-To-Market Strategy: Empowering growth and delivering empathy
LeanData targets B2B companies that are either at scale or in the process of scaling. These companies typically have specialized team members and more complex go-to-market motions that require a solution for rules of engagement and data automation. LeanData's product fits this market by offering comprehensive data governance, automation, and scalability that becomes indispensable as companies grow. The product's ability to handle complex processes and provide transparency into data operations makes it particularly valuable for revenue operations teams, which often deal with the complications of maintaining and migrating systems like Salesforce, hear how they help:
LeanData’s competitors fall into three categories:
Direct competitors like RingLead (ZoomInfo OperationsOS) and OpenPrize
General automation tools
Homegrown DIY solutions
While some competitors offer similar features, LeanData differentiates itself with its purpose-built solutions for revenue operations and go-to-market strategies. This specialization allows LeanData to provide more tailored and effective solutions compared to more generalized tools or custom-built internal systems.
While LeanData employs various customer growth strategies, including inbound motions that they showcased in their demo and leveraging partnerships with platforms like Salesforce to acquire new customers. LeanData has an even greater focus on customer retention and the natural growth within its customer base; as companies scale, their reliance on LeanData's solutions increases and they become an indispensable partner. But it's LeanData’s customer curiosity that really keeps their customers’ onboard. Christine shared their Revenue Protection Programs and the 4 places (The 4 P's) they gather signals to enable AMs to be empathic to customers’ needs. It’s great advice for any retention strategy, check it out:
Product Roadmap: Utilizing AI to make sense of the signal noise
LeanData initially focused on solving the prevalent problem of siloed operations between SDRs, sales, and marketing, but has grown to provide extensive tactical tools for revenue operations. The product has evolved from simple lead-to-account matching to a comprehensive "match context" capability, enabling users to match various data types and they continue to invest on growing these use cases. They’re also moving beyond a strong focus on Salesforce by beta testing products for Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot. This CRM expansion is critical for supporting diverse customer needs and ensuring that LeanData's orchestration capabilities are accessible to a wider audience.
Moreover, LeanData is aiming to provide AI-driven recommendations based on the extensive data collected by their customers that can be overwhelming to sift through. These recommendations will help companies optimize and enable prescriptive selling and GTM strategies by understanding profiles, personas, and sales dynamics. There’s also a growing request to support the concept of buying groups, so LeanData is deepening its capabilities in this area by using AI to inform what should those buying groups look like and who should be a part of them, check out Hendrick's walk through of LeanData’s upcoming product features:
Industry Trends: The Human vs. Digital/AI ever changing balance
Market dynamics indicate a shift back towards in-person interactions and localized efforts. LeanData's investment in expanding their team and presence in EMEA underscores this trend. Face-to-face meetings and localized marketing efforts are regaining importance as companies recognize the value of personal connections and tailored approaches. Despite the tech industry's push towards digital transformation, traditional sales techniques like phone calls are proving effective, especially outside the tech sector, such as financial services, hear Christine share more on this:
Another notable trend is the emergence of waterfall technologies, which prioritize the seamless integration of multiple data sources. Companies like Clay exemplify this approach by enabling businesses to select the data they need from one source, and if unavailable, automatically proceed to the next, ensuring critical information is always accessible. And while mergers are slowing down, the concept of "coopetition" is also gaining traction, where companies collaborate while maintaining competitive elements. This approach aligns with the customer-first philosophy, promoting partnerships that benefit end-users.
Kudos to the Industry
Christine & Hendrick’s recognized one giant and many up and coming GTM tools (some kudus repeats) that they’re partnering with and using at LeanData:
User Gems: Helping to monitor job changes, an important element of Christine’s 4Ps
Microsoft: Due to their scale and proven ability to be agile, they have a huge amount of potential with their OpenAI partnership, Azure platform and many other technology areas in the B2B space.
HyperBound: Who can place calls and enable AI practice with your SDRs
Lavender: For drafting emails and evolving based on what is being opened and responded to the most and providing scoring and guidance.
GTM Buddy: For new-age content management and LMS
Check out the entire episode here to hear all the wisdom Christine & Hendrick shared with us!
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