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Welcome. And today we're going to be talking about Accounting And The RevOps Flywheel, really exciting topic. We have an amazing guest here today that'll jump to and intro here in a second, but what we're discussing today is why accounting is critical to RevOps, where you can find the necessary data to power that RevOps flywheel with the accounting information, and how you can work to get it inside of your CRM, aligning your RevOps flywheel using that accounting data. And then we'd love to take questions from you guys as well. So if you have questions throughout, throw them into the chat and we will field them towards the end of the conversation. So in terms of who we have here today, I'm Connor. I am the CEO of Aptitude 8. We are a HubSpot elite partner, RevOps consulting firm. And we work with lots of companies on integrating all of their business systems to deliver amazing customer experiences. And with us, we have Brian Suthoff. Brian, I'll let you do your own intro. I'll hand it over to you.

Great thanks. Hi everybody. So my name is Brian Suthoff, CEO of Tally Street. We're a solution for small businesses, really trying to help them better understand their customers by generating better analytics out of data that they probably already have. They're probably already spent a lot of time and effort managing and could be put to better use.

Cool. Well, I will go ahead and we can kick this off and Brian, I'll hand it to you for why we wanted to do this today.

Yeah. So it's about putting it to better use, right? So RevOps, is really about breaking down those silos and aligning sales and marketing and customer success or service. So the customer gets a better experience. But for the RevOps groups, the RevOps team, to really perform at their best, they need to share a lot of the same metrics, a lot of the same infrastructure. And that's where we see things have kind of been, I would say, broken or where accounting has been kind of left out, right?

So most of the lot of small businesses, especially ones who aren't have a high tech background, they don't have a data warehouse, they don't have a data lake. They don't have data scientist, right? So the challenge is where do they get the kind of information that they can use to drive the RevOps? And the one thing that they all do have because everybody has to pay taxes, everybody has to report to management is an accounting system. And the accounting system is just this treasure trove of information about what people bought, when they bought it, who their customers are, how frequently they buy. And we think for too long, accounting has been kind of sitting over, kind of as a back office function and disconnected from more of the front of the house, which is where we normally associate RevOps.

Cool. So if we jump, I think one or two ahead for where we see sort of accounting in all. I think what is so exciting about this topic is we've been talking a lot about product led growth and integrating product data into your CRM and doing all of those different things. And I think for some businesses that they aren't a software business, but they do have orders. They do have fulfillment, they do have a customer relationship. And especially if you're not a subscription business, you probably have customer relationships over a whole bunch of different touch points and all of that data about how you interact with those customers, what they've bought and what they've done with your business exists in that accounting system. And I think what's so interesting about this topic is we don't see accounting in the RevOps flywheel because everything in that RevOps flywheel is about sort of how are you delivering that customer experience? How are you removing that friction?

But at the end of the day, the financial relationship that your customer has with your business is in your accounting system. And that data powers everything else in your interactions with them, whether you're going to modify your service levels based off of customer value or what skews they purchased or you're going to market and drive cross sell and upsell opportunities based off of what people have historically purchased or for your sales team, allowing them to prioritize accounts that haven't ordered recently, or perhaps accounts that order very frequently. And you want to give them more touch points. The only way that you can sort of deliver that type of an experience is if you have that data into your CRM and you're aligned with how to actually go and deliver that to those end customers, which I think is awesome.

So let's jump into a little bit of like what types of things you kind of want to track. I know that when I look at these, I see, oh cool, these are sort of our standard type of metrics, but I think on your end, Brian, obviously these are ones that you guys focus on. I would love to learn sort of like why and where you see the importance.

Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned non software companies because as a little bit of background, that's kind of the creation story behind Tally Street. My background was in data analytics in SaaS where these types of metrics have been used for really long time. Things like CAC and LTV and MRR, et cetera. And then a few years ago, I started a liquor company, liquor distribution, definitely not SaaS, definitely not very technical, but I realized that a lot of those same metrics apply, like in my case, being on the menu at a bar was kind of like a subscription, right? As long as something I was delivering was on that bar menu, that restaurant was buying from me on a recurring regular basis. And that's something I need to track and for, especially for SaaS businesses as well, but especially for non SaaS businesses, B2B, that information is sitting there in accounting.

And one of our hypotheses is that a lot of these SaaS metrics like CAC and LTV, MRR, ARR, even customer retention, net revenue retention, these can all be ported to other businesses. Other businesses should be using them as well to really understand how their customers are engaging, how they're driving repeat growth, how they're upselling and cross selling those businesses, right? So they're going to use a cross, all the RevOps functions and across the entire team, they're also really important metrics that a lot of businesses can use to their own internal KPIs, OKR, goals, objectives, et cetera, but to incentivize employees.

So keeping track of how customers revenue growth is increasing over time. Or one thing we focus on a lot that's a problem for B2B is, and we'll talk a little bit about more later is businesses getting paid. Basically you make a sale, which is great. How quickly can you convert that sale into cash? And that takes a lot of effort to, and being able to manage and track the performance of that process as well as the kind of the risk associated with that process is very critical for a lot of companies. A lot of B2B companies, especially.

I think something that I love that you touched on there, and I think is so true is that these types of metrics I think are prevalent in software companies that both have the, whether it's the venture financing to go and build all of this infrastructure out, or whether it's just that, because they're a product business, they already have the technology in place that can generate a lot of these metrics and that their fixation on them and sort of a by-product of having the tools in place and that the value is there, regardless of what type of business you are. And it's more about finding ways to deliver this to folks that don't necessarily have that level of infrastructure there, which I think is awesome.

Jumping ahead, one, I think the big piece of this, right? I mean, obviously you talked about data lakes and your accounting system and how you can get all these relays, where you can get this information and how you can make use of it, which I think is an area that you're extremely well-equipped to touch on. So I'll let you sort of expand on.

Yeah. And I experienced this firsthand, right? Having been in the SaaS world, the VC backed startup world, co-founding a large mobile analytics company, and then starting a liquor distributor where despite my technical expertise, having the data together in a place where I could analyze it was difficult enough, difficult to impossible, or at least too expensive. And then having the people analyze it was even like more difficult and expensive. So looking around, the accounting system is where a lot of this sits, right? So if you think about what's in a typical accounting system or on it, they could just pick out an invoice, right.

The invoice has a date when the invoice is issued, when the sale was officially made, it has obviously who it's sent to, but you also have a payments terms on there. You have line items for every single product or services that was bought, the quantity, the price, you can mine that information to produce amazing information.

One of the simplest things is just LTV, just summing up the invoices from the entire history of engagement with any customer gives you their lifetime value, but then MRR, ARR, those kinds of SaaS metrics, customer retention, net revenue retention, which then you can use to kind of predict, lifetime value of new customers. You might acquire if you know how long they might stick around. But you can even get down to that really detailed kind of product level and understand pricing performance, right? Like which customers are high margin customers, paying good prices for the products or services the business is selling. One thing we see a lot is a business negotiates a good deal because of certain amount of volume is anticipated. And then over time, the actual volumes fall short of what wasn't anticipated. So the discount structure maybe should change. So things like attracting that, all that information is sitting there in the accounting system, kind of waiting to be used.

Another thing about the accounting system. And I think especially compared to CRMs is, a lot of people are in a CRM, which is fantastic. It also means though that it can be not quite as clean or not quite as well-ordered because it's being touched by so many people, accounting is kind of the exact opposite, right? It tends to be really, really clean. Some of the more pristine data that a business has. If you're a customer or anybody on this, listening to the webinars, if somebody sends you an invoice and it's wrong, you're probably not going to pay it, right. So the information on those invoices tends to be really accurate. And in some cases, in many cases different than maybe the deal in HubSpot, because what happens changes over time and that gets captured in those invoices.

So it's a wealth of information that we think has gone on touched for too long in businesses. They're already investing a lot of time and effort across accounting, taxes, et cetera, managing that data. And this is an opportunity to really leverage it, integrate it with your CRM and put it to better use.

Well, let's talk about how that looks in practice. So if we jump ahead sort of talking about how this actually comes into your overall RevOps flywheel and how you guys can use it across different functions in the business. Obviously one that jumps out to us on our side and we have customers sort of working with all this all the time, how can we identify our highest value customers? How can we segment those customers? Who should we be marketing to and when? Which is using those updates in your CRM, from your accounting platform, your marketing team can create targeted, closed loss, nurture campaigns. We can actually go after people that they haven't bought from us in six months, we've had a couple of open deals with them and they're not so warm anymore in sales doesn't want to work at, and you can manage those communications out from HubSpot automatically with some of those segmented lists.

I think also those accounting insights, your marketing team can visualize those account information as well and understand which specific customers have bought in the past and use that to inform their strategy and their segmentation and their persona building. So that instead of thinking, who are the customers, and let's sort of come up with this idea of who our ICP is, instead, you're really informing that ideal customer profile by real financial and accounting information. And I think, especially for those folks on the agency side, this is one of the big reasons why we're huge fans of the Tally Street as a product, but you can come into a business without having a great deal of background on all of these other pieces. And by connecting Tally Street into their HubSpot system, connecting it back to their accounting solution, you can immediately pull a list of, okay, cool, let's go find your highest value customers. Let's reach out to them. Let's do interviews, let's build a segmentation and profiles on each one of these people and your ability to sort of enrich and power both the strategy component, but also the tactics, because these are all going to come in as fields.

And you can start to build segments off of let's do a high value customer campaign and drive people towards a reward or integrate sort of a direct mail solution like a postal or a Sendoso or any of these tools to be able to send thank yous to customers when they hit a certain total value. These are all sort of automated workflows you can build into your system just by connecting the two tools. I think on your end, Brian, I'd be interested. I know, especially one of the areas that you guys think a lot about is around sales and accounting and how those workflows power, if we jump to the next slide.

Yeah. I think, you mentioned segmentation, and described it well from a sales perspective, understanding the persona or the profiles of some of the best customers. And if we're analyzing what's in the accounting system, those are obviously customers who are already customers, right? They've been sent some kind of invoice, so they're not prospects, but it can be mined for you gave great examples again, of using it on the champion side, finding those very best customers and who they are, but the same profiles can be used to identify churn risk. So the account management team, as well as marketing can jump on those before it's too late, customer success.

It's worth looking at the other end of the persona scale too, right? So not the champions, but the ones who were, we call them mismatches, the ones who, as customers never really engaged, maybe they kick the tires, bought something once and then never really came back, never bought more. So at the same time, you look at the champions to develop a profile of target future customers. You can look at the mismatches and immediately, hopefully, right, build out the persona of the profile of the types of businesses and customers you want to avoid in the future because you know that your pack in that case, right, you're going to spend more time acquiring them. And they're not going to stick around that long. And they're not worth that additional effort.

I think something that's so valuable here, and I know that we've seen, so we had a customer, fairly large scale manufacturing business, and one of their biggest sort of constraints was they would take orders and then they would build custom fabricated solutions for customers. And so there's this whole problem of, does this customer pay? Do we have closed AR on them or do they have all these open invoices and they're coming back and asking for more materials and now we're sort of wondering, okay, well, should we be moving this to production? If we've never collected an invoice before, like, do we trust them to do this?

And so being able to sort of reconcile those and their process was to have deals, flag it to accounting, goes to the CFO, they pull over the data. They go back to the sales rep and say, oh, okay. And that might take a couple of days. And being able to reference this directly in the CRM, even for just an ease of access, both in personnel and then systems, I think the value add there is huge because you're getting a lot more efficiency out of your team, even if you're still going through the same process, which I think is hugely valuable.

We've seen that a lot. And COVID maybe amplified it a little bit, but it's kind of, if you think a customer has their own struggles for whatever reason, and they're not paying, then you might want to stop digging that hole in some situations, but don't keep selling and delivering more things if they're not paying. So yeah, having the information inside HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever is a great way for sales teams to see that. Another kind of sales off, real operational component is a lot of salespeople get paid when the customer pays. So a surprising amount of time ends up being consumed by sales teams, reaching out to the CFO, again, asks kind of, "Hey, when's my commission check coming for this." And then they have to tell them, it hasn't been paid yet. Just pulling that and making that available to CRM means that sales people can, first of all, see that they're waiting for the customer to pay before they get paid, but then they can pitch in and help, right. So everybody's on the same page and can help accelerate next selection.

Yeah, I think that's amazing. And I think it's something also where we get tons of requests of, "Hey, we want to do our commissions out of HubSpot and we want to build this." And we'll be like, "Hey, we can build you a report and we can create calculated fields and we can have sort of these other elements," but then there's this problem of like, did that customer ever actually pay their invoice? And now later you have to go do clawbacks and it makes everything complicated. And sort of with this data, you could build that report and have it feed in only accounts that are actually up to date on payments and closed out, which I think is awesome.

I want to jump to another example here, that's on the next slide. On customer success, which I think is something you briefly touched on the last one. But so much of your CS relationship is around, is this customer paying us? What's the value of this customer? What's their historical order information? And if you're using a full CRM solution and everything's all built in, maybe your CS team has really good insight to what's been sold. But I think to your point, Brian, did those orders go through? Did they call and say, "Oh wait, no, we don't to do that." Like, let's change the quantity. Or maybe they took a lower number or the item was out of stock or any of the complexities that happen for businesses that aren't as, and I'll use the word simple, but as simple as software, even though it may not be always the simplest, but I think being able to inform your CS folks for when does a customer up for renewal, if you're a recurring business or when are they due, something that we see a lot with folks that sell consumables.

So we have some customers that sell into healthcare and send machines and vials and consumable items, which is when was the last time that customer ordered? How long ago was it? How are you going to make sure that they're consistently ordering? And for folks who are in more of a commodity type of industry, how do you find out unless your CS reps are calling people and saying, "Hey, what's going on? Like, did you order it from somebody else?" But we've sort of seen solutions here where you can build in calculations to say, okay, based off of their historical order volume, here's how much we think they should be ordering. And if that number goes down, flag it to your customer success team to say, "Hey, you have a customer. They should have ordered. They either went with another competitor and they bought from another vendor, or they have something that you should probably be aware of, because it's going to impact the volume for the business at large." And when you have that accounting data at your fingertips, you can power a lot of that.

I think to your point, there's also tremendous value and understanding just overall trends. Are we seeing higher sales order volume? Are we seeing lower volume? And I think for businesses and we see this a lot where they may manage that front end of the customer relationship through the sales process and sale's job is to go and procure a new customer and move them through. But they aren't necessarily processing a whole deal in HubSpot every time an order comes through. That customer can order asynchronously or order from a forum on a site and being able to track all of this without needing to build a ton of infrastructure, I think is hugely valuable. And it empowers your CS teams to have far more productive conversations, informed by the financial relationship with the business that your customer has.

We see all the time working with businesses that the actual invoice amounts do not equal the sum of deals and that's fairly rare. And you were talking about a few examples for upsells. One, we see a lot too, a lot of businesses have ... you sell something upfront and then you have to sell replacement parts for maintenance services. So being able to even trigger your new deals to reach out, you see that somebody bought product X and you know that in three months, they should need maintenance. So they shouldn't need some other replacement parts. It is a great use case. In the accounting world you create credit memos if somebody needs to return something or there's a problem. And those can be really important signals into customer happiness, with the product, with the service, right? So being able to track and report on those is an early signal that customer success teams can really pay attention to.

Cool. Something that I think is amazing just tear off on our next slide here and something that I know that you guys power, or we may have missed one. Can we go back one slide? Cool. So something that I think is amazing. And so I'll let you speak a lot about what this is and how you can do it, but something that I think is awesome and I get really excited about specific in some of these HubSpot worlds is looking at your CRM solution, not just as a tool to help you manage your marketing function or your sales function, but as an automation platform that you can leverage across your entire business, if you can get that data into your CRM solution or into your marketing automation platform, you can now do things that otherwise you'd be looking at other products or additional solutions to do.

And you can leverage that automation not only for marketing or only for sales, but across other areas of your business. And so I am super excited to cover this, but Brian, I'll let you expand on it. Because I know it's something that you guys spend a fair amount of focus on as well.

I mean, we started working with a lot of accounting firms because we started focus on the accounting systems, right? Getting to be connected to QuickBooks, Xero, et cetera. And what we saw a lot is that as a business starts to grow the built-in features in those platforms, they outgrow the built-in features for helping them with collections. And then they start to look for accounts receivable, automation tools, and we looked at it and we kind of thought, an accounts receivable automation tool is basically some accounting information plus customer communications, right, is really the core function. And for any business with a CRM, you already have a hub for all your customer communications. Why have the separate little satellite function of kind of collections information. So really it's just, if you can take some of that, if you can take that payment information, invoice status, historical payment performance, kind of estimates of credit risk, and you can put that into HubSpot or into Salesforce.

Now you've got all your customer communication centralized, you're able to deliver a better customer experience because everybody knows the status of that customer from the full cliche, the full 360, right? From any opportunities or deals that they have all the way through, what's outstanding, what they've been paid. And CRMs have such rich automation capabilities that those workflows can be used to send the automatic payment reminders, to create tasks for the company owner, the right people inside your business to help follow up with a customer. And it's actually not that complicated. It's pretty easy to get that information, once you connect the two systems to leverage that information, once it's inside HubSpot to use those automations and keep everything centralized in a much more personalized, better experience for the customer.

I think we have a couple of examples on the next slide, an example of how some of that information, shows up. So this is the result of a few automations and taking advantage of the timeline or event activity feature inside HubSpot. So by putting in a notice, whenever a customer has an overdue invoice, you can now trigger workflows based on that to do things like assign a task, right? So the information is all there on their sales history, but also their payment history with essentially real-time alerts into payment performance that can be used across everything that HubSpot or other CRMs do is automate that process.

And the next slide is kind of a high level view of that flow using the kind of the HubSpot many map. But you can start by triggering on that overdue invoice. So as soon as you see one, generate an email to the customer using workflow in the email templates inside HubSpot to kindly ask them to check, follow up on their payments, but let them, let you know if it's already been sent or not.

And then we like setting in a wait period. So wait five days, seven days whatever's appropriate for the business and then check and see if that invoice is still listed as unpaid inside HubSpot. And then if it is, you might send another email or you might start creating tasks for team members to directly follow up with a customer, check-in, make sure everything's okay. Maybe notify sales that if it's very overdue, there's a potential problem. So again, by enriching HubSpot with some extra information, there are just so many features and functions of HubSpot that become more powerful by leveraging that information across those capabilities.

I think one of the things that sort of, you touched on that I love about that as well is, being able to have a lot more actionable things by having it inside the CRM than you would otherwise, right? Whereas as you may have a process where in your accounting solution, maybe your finance team is closing books and they're like, oh, okay, this customer is overdue. We need to re reach out and then they need to go and tell the project team or whoever the CS or the salespeople are. "Hey, wait a minute. We don't want to approve that deal yet." And being able to have this directly inside of your CRM solution means that your salespeople are looking at this and saying, "Oh wait, this customer's overdue. Let's not go in and process this next deal."

Or you're informing your project team and saying, "Hey, bring this up on the next call you have scheduled." And we see this all the time where finance and the accounting team is going and saying, "Hey, customer, you owe us money." And finance people on the other side are like, ah, maybe I'll blow this off. And if you sort of go to who your direct context is like, "Hey, I know we have these weeklies. I'm not trying to shut you down, but we are trying to get paid." It immediately drives action on the client side as well. And I think the power of that is hard to overstate.

Yeah. The automation, the extra efficiency that you get across the teams. I mean, right now with so many businesses that we talked to, everybody's struggling to hire and build out their teams and be as efficient as they can. And this is just a great way to make sure everybody has the information that they need to boost their communication with the customer and be operationally efficient inside the business to.

Cool. Well, let's move to sort of what you can expect is outcomes from this. And I'll let you touch on these Brian, but after this, if anyone does have questions, we'd love to take them. And then in the followup, we'll also distribute sort of links and feel free to try out, tell your story and all that cool stuff. Then we'll give our contact information, but Brian, I'll let you close us out on sort of, as soon as somebody gets these things connected, what can they expect?

Yeah. I mean, the AR automation was just one example of something that you can do, but once you connect accounting with HubSpot, with your CRM, and once you pass in, not just some basic data, but really customer insights, analytics results about those customers, including things more sophisticated like segmentation, essentially everything in HubSpot gets better. So better dashboards. So you actually do get a complete view of the customer life cycle, not just through the deal being won, but all the way through actually getting paid and collecting and validating the deal values across what happened.

You kind of, as we talked about with collections, with all those metrics now in one place where the information is democratized, so everybody in the company can have access to it. Everybody's on the same page. Everybody's connected. It is kind of almost magical. It's really, really easy. I see one question chat about those systems that we support or that are supported. And, basically the first step is to connect Tally Street to accounting. Right now we connect to QuickBooks, all versions, online, as well as desktop and enterprise versions. Xero and Sage Intacct and we have other platforms coming and getting those connected takes seconds. Connecting to HubSpot or Salesforce also takes seconds.

And then the metrics are fully automated and refreshed every day and sinked into the CRM. And we automatically match between the customers in the accounting system and the customers in the CRM. So it really, you can go from nothing to having an enriched CRM in like a minute, no exaggeration. And then start building out all those extra capabilities inside HubSpot using these new insights and analytics.

I'll emphasize on Brian on how easy this is. And that we had a prospect that we were working with. And we wanted to do sort of a proof of concept on how Tally Street would work with their whole process. And we got it all connected and everything up and running in 10 minutes or so. And then we're able to sort of model out here's what some of these workflows could look like. Here's how this data would be enriched. And here's how you guys could end up using this. And I think the ease is amazing. And I think that the matching you guys do is incredibly powerful as well, but I think that is hugely valuable. So I think you had said on the CRM side, Salesforce and HubSpot, and then Sage QuickBooks, and I'm missing one.

Yeah. So on accounting is all versions of QuickBooks, Xero and Sage Intacct, and then on the CRM side, it's HubSpot Salesforce. And then we have a beta going right now with ActiveCampaign.

Cool. Thank you for your question, John. Well, go ahead. If you have any other questions, throw them in the chat, throw them in the Q&A, we'd love to field them. But we want to give you guys our direct information. If you have questions on HubSpot, anything you can do with some of those Salesforce, the automation solutions, feel free to reach out to me by email or connect with me on LinkedIn. And Brian on your end, is email the best way to get ahold of you. How do you want people to interact?

Yeah, same with me. Email's great. So feel free to reach out directly. There's tons of information on our website too, as well as forms there to get in contact if you prefer to do it that way. But yeah, don't hesitate to shoot me an email with any questions, comments that you have.

And we'll send out a link in the recording. So for those of you who are live, we'll send out a recording. We'll also include links for Tally Street, check it out. You can install it direct from their site and that'll be in the followup as well. So feel free to check it out, but we'll also make sure to remind you also. With that Brian, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome. And we'll send out the recording for those of you who didn't attend. And for those of you live, thank you so much.

Awesome. Thanks for having me. This was great.