Today, Asia joins host Islin Munisteri for a conversation about data governance, an audit cadence for cleaning and maintaining data. We also talk about having data lakes, a CRM, and a reporting BI tool as your "single" source of truth. She also recommends developing soft skills earlier on in her career and taking project management courses.
Asia Corbett graduated from California State University, East Bay, in Economics and Statistics. She has worked as a financial analyst, business intelligence analyst, and was leader of RevOps at multiple SaaS companies, and most recently served as Head of Revenue and Community Operations at RevGenius. She is currently Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Bread Finance.
Connect with our guest, Asia Corbett, on LinkedIn.
Transcript
[00:00:20] Islin Munisteri: Hi, this is Islin with Theia Marketing and I have Asia on the Rev Ops Careers podcast with us.
[00:00:29] Asia Corbett: Hey, nice to be here.
[00:00:33] Islin Munisteri: That's great. Being here too. So Asia Corbett graduated from California State University, East Bay in economics and statistics. She has worked as a financial analyst, business intelligence analyst, and was leader for rev ops at multiple SaaS companies. And most recently served as head of revenue and community operations at Rev Genius. She is currently senior revenue operations manager at Bread Finance welcome to the show.
[00:00:59] Asia Corbett: Thank you.
[00:01:01] Islin Munisteri: Awesome. So how did you get started in your career in your rev ops journey?
[00:01:07] Asia Corbett: Yeah really early on, I thought I wanted to be in finance I took some finance internships and a few finance positions out of college and I call them like, cause I finance because there was always an element to them that was operational.
[00:01:25] And what I mean is I was always thinking about how can I make things more? Efficient for myself, or like, how can I th there are repetitive things that you have to do, like month end, close, and quarter end close. And a lot of like the finance processes are like very what you're going to be doing basically.
[00:01:42] And so there, there was always a part of me that was like how could I like do something that's a little bit more that's helping the company and that's cross-functional and like early on in my career, I didn't know what that meant really. Like college doesn't really talk about operations jobs.
[00:02:00] So I was like, yeah, I'm going to get, I want to be a financial analyst. But so I decided that I did not really like the work of finance and and I didn't want to go down that route. And I started getting into these operations roles and, I really liked being able to talk to a lot of people from different departments and do projects that were like different in nature and fast paced ness of it. And as each like company I went to and like operations role I got into, I was starting to see. You know those commonalities. And I was like, this is this is where I want to go. And we all know that revenue operations is a newer, not a newer discipline because it has existed for a long time.
[00:02:43] But I guess like the title are new and like the way that people are defining it as new. And so I wanted to go deeper and down the revenue operations path and use my learnings from being in other operational roles and apply that to rev ops. That's how I got to where I am today.
[00:03:03] Islin Munisteri: That's great. And I guess when you say there's rev ops has always been around like, What job titles or other what would you say was rev ops before rev ops became a thing?
[00:03:15] Asia Corbett: Yeah. So go to market operations. Business operations, to an extent, I say that because when I was on the business operations team, you are really looking at all of the things processes across the entire company in revenue is one of those things at that company.
[00:03:34] We didn't have a dedicated sales ops function. Sales operations was in our department.
[00:03:41] Islin Munisteri: Gotcha. Yeah. I guess the next thing I remember, we talked a bit about different direct mail companies and you worked at different direct mail companies for awhile, like Postal and it was just really interesting to hear that direct mail is not dead.
[00:04:00] Asia Corbett: It's alive and well, actually. Yeah. I didn't know about this space before I started working for the company. And I started like at the beginning of the pandemic and I was doing a little bit of research and stuff and I'm like, how are you going to send things to people like that seems. I, because I was like, what how is this going to work?
[00:04:20] We are going at the world is going to shut down. So how's the company going to, make money and. A couple of people there shared with me that physical things that you send to people like creates a more powerful connection. And so that's really important obviously in the sales cycle.
[00:04:36] And I'm at the top of funnel. So I was like, this is interesting. I want to see what this is all about, right? Yeah. And yeah, and so then I became immersed in that space for a little while and I'm still very familiar with how it works today and I'm, trying to maybe position it to our team is as a tactic we can use.
[00:04:59] We'll see how that works. Yeah.
[00:05:01] Islin Munisteri: What was interesting about the direct mail route is. My question to you was like, then how are the packages get to people's homes?
[00:05:09] Asia Corbett: Oh yeah. So the way it works and it works this way for some other companies too, because I've been on the receiving end of things.
[00:05:16] So you get like an email or whatever, and you have the link, so you click the link and then you put your address in so that it can, you can opt to not receive it essentially. Traditionally, we were in corporate offices, you could get stuff sent to your office. I remember at when I was working at presence learning, our director of marketing would get sent to her, to the office all the time. She's oh, I got cookies or, oh, I got, like this cool, like plush thing. So it was definitely, probably a lot easier to just, send things to people's offices and it would make their rate of someone. But yeah, now. Obviously, since a lot of people are working from home, you have to provide your personal address.
[00:05:58] So it's very secure and those companies have to go through certifications for privacy and data security and all that. So that's how that works.
[00:06:06] Islin Munisteri: That's great. It's they're not selling your personal data or anything.
[00:06:10] Asia Corbett: You cannot do that. Yeah.
[00:06:15] Islin Munisteri: You're like, that would totally ruin the company.
[00:06:21] Asia Corbett: Yeah, exactly.
[00:06:22] Islin Munisteri: But cool. So usually like in an email sequence or something like that, like it would be part of an email sequence. Like you'd send them the link for them to put their address and then you can send the gift. And then I think these platforms have like data analytics. Right that show you whether the gift resulted in a deal or exactly.
[00:06:44] Asia Corbett: Yeah. You can use it in a couple of different areas within the go-to-market organization, which I think, from a revenue operations perspective is cool. We're always thinking about like, how can we help enable our teams to close more deals and bring more customers back, like on the renewal side of things. Top of funnel, you can use it in various campaigns to like virtual events, to get people, to show up. And then you can report on it. You can tie those gifts back to campaigns in whatever system you're using, so you can show it how it contributes to pipeline.
[00:07:18] And then yeah, in the sales side of things say you're a company that is using some sort of sequencing tool or. Like an outreach or SalesLoft and he put us as a step, send a gift, for different kinds of sequences and you can tie those steps back. Tie them to pipeline. You use them on the customer success side too, and renewals are coming up.
[00:07:39] Yeah. There's a lot of applications.
[00:07:43] Islin Munisteri: That's exciting. Yeah. So direct mail is alive and well and shipping straight to your home.
[00:07:49] Asia Corbett: Yeah. Like I have I have a couple of things here at my desk, even like this candle. But I got sent from this one's from a company called partner beat, stuff shows up.
[00:08:01] It would be when I put my address and stuff shows up at my door.
[00:08:06] Islin Munisteri: That's exciting.
[00:08:11] The free gifting.
[00:08:12] Asia Corbett: Yeah.
[00:08:13] Islin Munisteri: So I guess going back to more of a rev ops side what's your single source of truth in your tech stack? I know you just started. So I don't know if you want to talk about like previous companies you've worked for.
[00:08:26] Asia Corbett: Yeah. I I think that's always a challenge everywhere and I think if you are lucky you have like a data lake, right? Like a Snowflake or something. But yeah, I've worked in companies that are too small for that. And so the CRM really has to be the source of truth. And it should be the data in there should be accurate. You should have somewhere to pull everything in, standardize it and then push it back out to the systems.
[00:08:54] Everything is the source of truth in a way, if that makes sense here, where I am now we have actually a pretty like good Salesforce instance. There's not a lot of Error, there's not a lot of, not a whole bunch of duplicates. There's pretty solid. Automation that's been built, so that's cool.
[00:09:12] Think, just still connecting the systems is always a challenge. Like finance data is in a different place and that has to come from. Into the CRM, but it doesn't. So we're using a few different tools to do reporting, which is unfortunately the norm in the industry. I think.
[00:09:30] Yep. You going to do your reporting and a bunch of different places. So yeah, I think you have in a perfect world, you have your database that has ever all your data that you need and something, whether it's an automated process or like another tool that you can use to like. Make sure everything is standardized when it gets pushed back out to your other tools, especially the ones that the go to market teams need to use is good.
[00:09:57] I think, unfortunately there's not really a single source of truth for data, for a lack of me I've been in, in those shoes as well.
[00:10:05] Islin Munisteri: Cool. So there's just so hopefully there is you need a data lake, a reporting tool and a CRM.
[00:10:12] Asia Corbett: Yeah. Yeah. You definitely need a CRM, especially if you have you're go to market team's not going to be living in your reporting or in to Snowflake
[00:10:19] Exactly. So you want data to be in there and you want them to be able to use it, but you also want to tie data from different sources back to the CRM to if you need. And. Yeah, I know there's a couple of tools out there that can do things like that. And so companies are paying attention, which is good.
[00:10:38] And people are starting to realize the importance of accurate data. And when we talk about making data-driven decisions, like you have to make it based on clean data, not inaccurate or duplicate, or, bad data.
[00:11:00] Islin Munisteri: So when you say bad data, you mean duplicates or they're in the wrong lifecycle stage or what do you mean?
[00:11:06] Asia Corbett: Yeah. Inaccurate data and duplicates can affect yet that too. So it really having a good data governance framework is important for that also like you get the tool of course, to implement a, to run your data governance framework, but you should also have that kind of in place too. Like on what cadence are you auditing everything essentially. And that may not be every it may not be every month or every quarter, or, but you should, with some frequency, let's take a look at those things.
[00:11:43] If your data is accurate and up-to-date.
[00:11:50] Islin Munisteri: Yeah, it's interesting. Like I've noticed like in our Zoom Info, like the data's okay. But it might be like a couple jobs back, like it's on someone's LinkedIn profile and they're like, oh, they had that job like a year ago or two years ago.
[00:12:05] I was just like, yeah. And then it's, and then you have to have like different information sources trying to enrich that.
[00:12:15] Asia Corbett: Yeah, it's fair. I think that's a decent, entirely separate definitely an issue for, ops people and sales people, for sure. But it's we can't control that internally. That's ZoomInfo, Clearbit, Seamless. That's their their data, wherever they get their data enriched from. And then it then passes on to us. Yup.
[00:12:44] Islin Munisteri: Yeah. I like, I love ZoomInfo it's saved me on multiple deals. Mostly it's bad, but I'm just like, aw.
[00:12:53] Asia Corbett: And we use it too. And I just I talked with Aubrey Morgan who was at Syncari
[00:12:58] we had a whole webinar where we talked about like how the Great Resignation is impacting contact data quality because people are moving around and moving around really fast. I mean leaving companies and going to new companies really fast. So it's yeah. How do you. What are like what's how do you ensure your data is accurate when that happens?
[00:13:20] Because you don't have control over how all of that is going on in the world at the macro level, but how can you help mitigate some of that internally? So we had yeah, we talked about that. That was fun.
[00:13:33] Islin Munisteri: That was of events that you do with Rev Genius?
[00:13:35] Asia Corbett: Yeah, it was a webinar.
[00:13:37] Islin Munisteri: Cool. Yeah. I wish I went to it.
[00:13:41] Asia Corbett: Yeah, it's recorded. I'm sure you can find it somewhere. They have pository of the webinars that they do, so you can just reach out and ask.
[00:13:50] Islin Munisteri: And what's your philosophy on how rev ops teams should interact across, marketing, sales, customer success?
[00:13:57] Asia Corbett: I talk about this a lot, like in the community, and I'm pretty vocal about it on LinkedIn, but rev ops is really if you're going to call the team revenue, operations and means, and it short should mean at least that you're supporting the processes and the systems and the reporting that and All of the revenue generating teams. So we can all agree that marketing is a revenue generating function.
[00:14:22] And sales is a revenue generating function and success as a revenue generating function. And in some companies like product, right? Those you should. Interact with all of those teams on a regular cadence and consider all of the processes in each of those departments and how they impact B the entire customer journey, the buyer's journey.
[00:14:47] Coming from a background where I've been on like business operations teams, that helps me to look at. Beast kinds of things holistically. So looking from marketing through to sales, through to CS, thinking about what is that entire holistic business process that supports the top of funnel all the way down.
[00:15:12] Islin Munisteri: Gotcha. So trying to get the entire journey.
[00:15:16] Asia Corbett: Yeah. See like support that. So before I've done things like build out a roadmap that has on, I have a template that I take with me now, and it's like each business unit and like the most common processes, like deal desk is on there under sales renewals implementation.
[00:15:36] Onboarding implementation and onboarding upsell cross sell. Those are processes those are business processes. And so trying to get like catalog all of those and like figure out where the, they lay over the buyer's journey so that when you are talking to the teams and when you're getting requests from them or you're making changes or you're doing reporting, you understand how all of those things fit together.
[00:16:00] And that's really like the benefit of that. Unified revenue, operations team.
[00:16:06] Islin Munisteri: Gotcha. Yeah. You'd have to, everyone has to be aligned on a single goal or across people, processes, systems, reporting. Yeah. Yeah. It needs to all work together or else it doesn't. Yeah.
[00:16:24] Asia Corbett: Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:26] Islin Munisteri: I guess if you died tomorrow what do you hope people would say about you and how you impacted them?
[00:16:31] Asia Corbett: Oh my God. What a question? I guess it's fitting for the times. Not to be too morbid, but I would just hope that I have impacted at least one person's life in the positive way and then empowered them to go. Be whoever it is they're supposed to be in. And that, and what I mean by that is it could just be something as simple as oh, I really wanted to go into revenue operations and I didn't know where to start and now I know where to start.
[00:17:00] Like now I know I have a couple of places I can go look and thanks Asia for sharing that resource with me.. But I guess even more than that is just inspiring other people to be themselves and the great go forth and be great.
[00:17:14] Islin Munisteri: Go forth and fulfill your potential.
[00:17:16] Asia Corbett: Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:17] Islin Munisteri: And what's the best piece of career advice you would tell your younger self or other folks in the room? If it's rev ops specifically?
[00:17:26] Asia Corbett: I would say take some project management classes or. Take there's a whole set of professional development training around how to have critical conversations with people and if, and how to communicate with different communication styles, like learning those soft skills is earlier. The earlier you can learn them the better and the more opportunity you have to practice them, do it like.
[00:17:55] I would've told myself if you see their opportunity for a project where you can practice these skills, ask your boss and tell him what your goal is and see if they'll let you do it.
[00:18:06] Islin Munisteri: Okay. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I, it's funny. I was talking with some high school students on Zoom yesterday and I told them like, yeah, it says communication skills.
[00:18:17] So soft skills that you need to learn during your internships. So important because if you can't talk to your coworkers, how are we going to get anything done?
[00:18:25] Asia Corbett: Yeah. And big thing around revenue operations is like presenting information, and making business cases for things, or being able to communicate information to different types of people based on, what their personality types might be, right? You might be if you're talking to technical teams, which sometimes you have to in revenue operations, and translating that into sales speak or translating finance numbers into sales speak, or CS speaker for non-technical people. So that is very important and learning how to put together a presentation that's not boring is I think a subjective word, but maybe something that's not too.
[00:19:08] Gosh, the word escapes me, but soft skills are very important. That is what I would tell my younger self to invest in those as early as you can and put them into practice as early as you can.
[00:19:22] Islin Munisteri: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my early engineering days I thought I would never have to use soft skills ever in my life that I liked developed at like volunteering organizations and lo and behold, you do have to use soft skills in real life.
[00:19:40] Asia Corbett: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:44] Islin Munisteri: Awesome. Is there anything we haven't covered today that you want to talk about more about Bread Finance or anything?
[00:19:51] Asia Corbett: Oh, I better not say too much. I'm not sure a while to disclose, company-wise but I'm really enjoying being there and I'm enjoying being on a team and I, for some great smart, awesome colleagues, and we have a lot of fun rev, ops challenges and problems to solve, and that's why I went there.
[00:20:14] And yeah, I'm really excited to continue. Can you continue on in my career, but also, be be as helpful to as many people as I can, especially people who are just starting out or want to go into revenue operations.
[00:20:25] Islin Munisteri: Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. All of those different things and rev ops that you might get pulled into business
[00:20:32] Asia Corbett: ops as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was really fun. Community is really important to me. I'm a firm believer in the power of community and connecting people together. And that whole empowerment piece, I have the job I have today because of community, because I met my net current manager in one of these communities.
[00:20:55] So we had known each other already. There's it's so powerful to be able to connect with people in this way. And you never know what can come out of it.
[00:21:03] Islin Munisteri: Exactly. Yeah. That's a great thing about communities. It's you don't know what happens, like all those relationships that you have I wouldn't say they're weak relationships, but it's not like talking to a friend every day, right?
[00:21:13] Yeah. But it's all those loose connections like that, that will help you. Yes
[00:21:19] Asia Corbett: in the future. Yeah. I have connected with, I would call go as far as to call some people, my friends, like I'm on texting basis with some people, and it's really nice to have that like sense of support too and solidarity,
[00:21:35] Islin Munisteri: agree. Yeah. Having a sense of support is huge when you're like building your rev ops career or even, if you're. You're in the thick of things. Having someone to bounce ideas off of really helps.
[00:21:46] Asia Corbett: All the time. I still have questions sometimes. Like I forgot how to do this.
[00:21:51] Did I forget? Am I missing something? Having people come and bring their questions all the time. Process questions, tools, questions, career questions. So it's a. Emphasize enough, the importance of finding a community that you really like jive with, or that you like and putting the effort in there to be a part of it, because you get out what you put in.
[00:22:16] Obviously you got to participate a little bit in order to get that value out of it, but when you do it's, can't put it in word into words, how much it's helped me.
[00:22:29] Islin Munisteri: Great. Thank you so much, Asia, for being on the Rev Ops Careers podcast. This is, these are all great tips and tools for for people to use.
[00:22:38] Asia Corbett: Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for having me.d
