Lessons from a 2x GTM COO - Cody Guymon | Vivint, Qualtrics, Workato
Lessons from a 2x GTM COO - Cody Guymon | Vivint, Qualtrics, Workato
Leveraging focus and prioritization to succeed in your Operations role
Cody Guymon is a bit of a unicorn in the Operations community. He’s succeeded in growing into two GTM Chief Operating Officer roles - first at Saas giant Qualtrics, and now at Workato, member of the CNBC “Top Startups for the Enterprise” list in 2022 and fast growing Saas startup.
As GTM COO, Cody’s Go-To-Market Ops organization is extremely similar to what many think of when they picture a centralized Revenue Operations team, with focus areas in Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success.
Cody got his start in Operations managing revenue cycle for a company in the Healthcare space, before leading operations teams at Vivint. After Vivint he moved to Qualtrics, where his career accelerated into senior leadership roles. In our conversation, Cody highlighted five focus areas that served as the fuel for his career progression.
Each of these four topics is highlighted below, as well as takeaways that can be applied to your own situation as well.
It’s all about relationships
Ops roles can be the best of both worlds - we get to contribute to the team and individual success of Marketers, Sales Reps, and CSMs while not necessarily being in that role on a daily basis.
One of the things Cody highlighted as key to his success (as well as his enjoyment of his role) is this partnership aspect with the GTM teams. He says, “I love the partnership with the Revenue Org. I love that it's close to the Revenue Org and you're getting into strategy with Revenue leaders and teams.”
Sometimes we talk about the actual “end users” on the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams as being internal customers for Ops teams. This line of thinking is a useful approach, and can help when you’re thinking about how to role out new tools, improve processes, or provide enablement.
Cody’s mindset and recommendation is to treat the teams you work with as true partners. Rather than viewing them as a team that has different needs and different goals, always look for ways to win together.
What does this look like?
Actively seek out (and more importantly) act on feedback that you receive
Include appropriate stakeholders in the planning process, not just when everything is done and ready to go
Build relationships now to help with trust and respect when things don’t go as expected
Put yourself in the roles of those you support to understand what inefficiencies and roadblocks they might be facing
Realizing that there’s likely truth in all of the feedback you get, even if you disagree with it
Ultimately, in the end - if Marketing, Sales, Partners, and CS are successful, then everyone is successful.
Takeaways:
Look for team wins, and acknowledge everyone’s contributions
Focus on building relationships with your peers as partners, just like you’d focus on building a tech stack
When you’re dealing with someone who is unhappy or frustrated, try to put yourself in their shoes. A mis-routed lead is a missed chance to get closer to quota. A typo in an email is a hit on credibility - the things we do have a real impact
Focus wins (and gets you ahead in your career as well)
The saying “to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” could very well be rephrased to say “to an operator, everything with a problem needs solving”.
As operators, many of us are hardwired to default to find and fix issues. At first, it seems like the more problems solved, the better off we are. In reality, the opposite is often true.
Cody credits some of the success of his career to his ability to be laser focused on high priority projects. He says, “it's more and more important to be able to prioritize urgent and important, and say no to everything else. It’s a hard skill to learn, especially for Ops people who support others and may generally be a people pleaser and want to say yes to everything.”
I can certainly relate to the idea that saying yes to everything feels good, because agreeing to help someone can make you feel like you’re going to help improve someone’s professional life - you’re going to give them some data they need, or answer a question, or enable them to do something faster or better.
Cody continues, “Some people think that's how you get ahead in ops - you just say yes to everything. You do it all very well. But actually, no, that's not the case. You get ahead in ops by delivering amazing outcomes that are urgent and important, and you don't get bogged down by stuff that isn't important. You get ahead by innovating and creating time to innovate.”
I’ve written about saying no before, and it’s a common refrain in the Ops community, but it’s definitely something that is easier said than done.
Cody recommends always keeping your “urgent and important” list front and center. If you’re not familiar with the “urgent and important” phrase, it’s pulled from the Eisenhower Matrix, a prioritization framework that draws its name from former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was quoted as saying, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
In the Eisenhower matrix, you can drop tasks and projects into various spots on a matrix to help you determine what you should be working on. Here is an example, with the “Urgent and Important” quadrant that Cody refers to highlighted in green:
He says, “I always prioritize the things that we are working on with an urgent and important matrix, and just try and stay in that urgent and important quadrant. Oftentimes Ops people get inundated with very urgent, not very important stuff. You have to be comfortable saying no.”
He continues, “If you can pull up your urgent and important matrix you can say, ‘Hey, here's my priority list. Does it bump any of these things? Usually people will say, ‘Oh no, it isn’t a higher priority. You’ve just got to say, ‘sorry, I'll get to that in two quarters’ and people generally go find somebody else that actually has bandwidth to go do it.”
That last part still sometimes scares me. I worry about trying to stay on top of all of the “traditional” Ops responsibilities, but that can make it so that things get easily overwhelming. Even if it’s something that you’ve done a hundred times before, if it’s not on your focus list, you have to let it go. Tracking how many of these requests you have to let go in a month or a quarter can be a useful metric to use when trying to request additional resources for your team as well.
A quote from the writer James Clear (author of the book Atomic Habits) sums up the catch-22 that sometimes is prioritization. He said, “A simple filter for managing your time: You're not focused enough unless you're mourning some of the things you're saying no to."
Takeaways:
Have a priority list, whether you use the Eisenhower method, or something else
Use your list to help others understand and to get prioritization input from them
Get comfortable letting go of things that you could and should do if you had the time (but you don’t)
Don’t put an artificial ceiling on yourself
Many of us can impose unseen barriers on ourselves within the organization we work in. Many times these barriers or limits can be informed by the org structure of the company we work in, or even just someone’s job title or level.
In one role I even had a boss who told me not to talk to his boss without checking with him first - even if it was an informal conversation or check-in. These limitations can stifle innovation and make it difficult for the best ideas to get traction.
Cody makes it a point to connect with anyone he feels like would be relevant to get to know in the organization. He shared a story about connecting with Ryan Smith, the CEO of Qualtrics, not long after Cody joined the company.
“With Ryan Smith, shortly after I started, I just threw 30 minutes on his calendar - I got to know him and talk to him. Some people that had worked there 7 or 8 years had never talked to him, and I was floating ideas by him and chatting with him,” Cody said.
He continued, “I think some people put these artificial ceilings on themselves that don't exist. And they think, “oh, I'm an analyst, so I can't talk to anybody that's a director and above’. That's all just made up. They’re limits that we put on ourselves that just don't need to be there.”
“So I try to teach that to my team - if you have a great idea, come to me, come to Vijay (CEO of Workato) because that's usually where most of the innovation comes from. From the people that are closest to the problems. And those are usually analysts, senior analysts, people in the weeds that are in the trenches.”
While you might not have the same glowing experience that Cody had if you reach out to the CEO of your company, the point here is that you should feel empowered to take your ideas to the “right” person in your organization, whoever that is, regardless of title.
If there are official processes or systems, of course use those. But, don’t automatically discount someone because of their title or responsibilities.
Takeaways:
Have a growth mindset when it comes to building relationships in your organization
Begin to build relationships now
Understand the lay of the land - if you see a problem and have an idea about how to fix it - who can help clear the way for you to get things done?
Break away from the keyboard and get outside of your comfort zone
As Operators, many of us prefer to spend a lot of time in a software engineer-like existence - hidden away in a dark corner, pounding away at a keyboard, swigging down energy drinks and getting things done.
While there certainly is a time and a place for hands-on-keyboard execution, that alone won’t help you in making the case for an increased role and responsibilities.
Cody says, “I think that ops people have to become “strategy and ops people”. They have to think holistically about the company and not be like people that are just going to sit in the back office closet and do the ops quietly.”
He continues, “when you do that, when you come forward with strategic ideas about the company direction or you have data that's relevant to some strategic initiative and you present it at the table to say, ‘let’s go this way’, that’s when you start to get a seat at the table in a way that is meaningful - when you have influence in an organization.”
It’s comfortable and easy to be behind a keyboard and complete tickets all day. It can even be a bit rewarding - you’ll get a little dopamine hit every time you update the status to “Done”. But if you’re content just focusing on what’s been handed to you and never diving deeper, you’ll struggle to make significant progress in your career.
One thing that can be helpful in multiple scenarios is to ask the simple question - “Why?” Of course, you don’t want to ask it in a sarcastic or snarky way, but if you ask with real curiosity, you’ll learn much more than you would reading through a ticket.
Imagine the layers of detail and thought behind these scenarios that might be similar to ones you’re dealing with on a daily basis:
“I need to see how our MQL numbers compared to last month - can you pull a report?”
“I don’t like our webinar tool.”
“We need to send an email to every contact with an open opportunity - can you build it?”
“Can you see if these two tools can integrate?”
“I didn’t get any leads routed to me yesterday.”
Really understanding GTM data is a great opportunity as well. Noticing trends, outliers, and issues can be a great starting point on the path to finding something meaningful to fix.
Credit - Liz and Mollie
Takeaways:
Try to push yourself to do something new this week, something outside of your comfort zone
Set aside time each week to review key metrics and data and have enough time to follow through on some questions that might come up
Work with stakeholders sending you requests to understand more about what they’re actually trying to accomplish
Wrap Up
Cody’s career path and success is a testament to how intentionally partnering with GTM teams to win together, focusing on impact, having a growth mindset when it comes to connecting with others in your org, and using data to inform your strategic decisions and recommendations can have an outsized positive impact on your career.
Each of these tasks is not a one-and-done type of approach. These are habits that will take repeated effort to build and perfect. The actual implementation will likely be different in each stop of your career as well. My guess is that there’s one of these 4 topics that stuck out to you - I’d recommend starting with that one and then building on the others as you can.
If you’d like to connect with Cody, the best place to reach him is on LinkedIn.