Placing Customers' Needs First in Sales with Laci Garbs, Rystad Energy

Hi, this is Clint,

And this is Lizzy.

Today we had a fantastic interview with Laci garbs, VP of commercial operations at a company called Rystad. Looking back on the discussion with Laci, it was just really cool in that she shared some kind of deep insights about herself as well as the company that she works where and how she approaches the job. And it really just came across. She's just a really humble person.

Yes. Humility is the word that takeaway really see. And I appreciate that coming from an executive who's had many years of experience.

She's very genuine, very genuine, very humble, even though she's carrying the vice president titles. You can tell she rolls up her sleeves, she just digs right in, and she's not afraid to call out when she's made a mistake. She's not afraid to say I may not approach it the right way. But hey, I did it. I just I love that attitude.

And the lessons learned that she shares on this episode I think are going to be really insightful. For some of our listeners today are many of them.

And what about that insight she gave on how to create sales culture, I won't give it away. But I gotta tell you, that was one of the best comments I've heard yet on how to create a sales culture.

Totally agree with that. The one thing that I was most delighted to hear is that within her role as VP of commercial operations, she had mentioned that the sales team and the customer success team that sits in her group that she's responsible for, I should say, they're focused on customer outcomes, but anything else which is rare, and I like that.

Putting the customer first above their own employees within the company. I love that. So this is a great session. Great podcast today. Everybody enjoy. We had a fantastic time recording it, you're going to enjoy it as well. Thanks for joining us today on the Fuel Growth podcast.

What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?

Brand? Customers?

Products?

Customers?

Employees?

Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Joining us today is Laci Garbs, Vice President of Commercial Operations at Rystad Energy, the biggest independent energy research and business intelligence company in Norway, and a world leading analysis company for the energy sector. Laci serves as the Vice President of Commercial Operations at Rystad, where she brings to the discussion today a wealth of experience in the energy industry from Sales to Asset Management, and now leads growth for her company by building and streamlining all commercial operations. Welcome to the pod Laci.

I might need you to introduce me just casually whenever I'm out and about. If you're ever looking for a second job, it'd be great if you just want to walk around and introduce me.

Thank you! I'll just shadow behind and bring the radio voice to the discussion.

Even better, even better.

Well, we're happy to have you join and learn from you today. Laci, we always start with an icebreaker question. I've chosen one with your interests in mind as a problem solver who I've heard loves puzzles. Can you tell us what's your favorite board game, card game, or puzzle game?

The 10 year old in me wants to say that Dream Phone is my favorite game because I did love that as a child. Although that probably dates me a little bit. But I'm told no one can see me. So the guess is there's I also grew up really loving the game of Life. And if I have to pick a card game, Spades, by far is my favorite, I think the strategy behind Spades and I'm trying to learn Checkers from my nine year old niece, but she just crushes me every time. And so I'm not sure that my ego can take much more bruising from just getting demolished by a nine year old.

Yeah, give you credit for time. Something new though, that's for sure.

Are you a Wordle person? Do you do the daily Wordle?

I really liked Wordle. If you've ever played that. I have Worlde it's a kind of tangential game from Wordle. Much like Hurdle was which I also played until they close that one down. But it gives you the outline of a country and then you have to guess what country it is. And it tells you how far away you are from the country. In miles. If you're in the US in kilometers. If you're anywhere else, as far as how far away you are from from your guess to the country that it actually is, and in which direction you are. I have I also know that I'm terrible at geography as well. I know I'm not really bolstering myself up as being the one who should be on this podcast right now, given all of my inefficiencies I'm talking about but it's a really fun game. Oh, that's a great one. Yeah, there's an iPhone game called States or something like that, that I used to play with kids that pop up an outline of the US state and there's nothing more humbling when you're when your nine year old crushes you not only chess and checkers, but also at geography games. We have a lot of very intelligent knowledgeable people that work here. And so whenever I play Worldle with them, I just feel so incompetent because they know it within five, four or five guesses and I'm sitting there just doing my best.

I'm sure they know the European country as well with a business based in Norway.

Absolutely. It's incredible.

So Laci, let me let's jump in here you support the sales organization at Rystad by leading sales operations or what you call commercial operations. What exactly is the difference between sales operations and commercial?

That's a good question, my husband asked me the same thing. The sales team is what you would know as a sales team. So we have our account managers, our business development manager, so on and so forth. And then, within our commercial team, we have the client success team, our client success team are the individuals that partner with our account managers, and work with our clients on helping them better understand the tools, how they can use those on their day to day workflows, answering any questions that come in. So our account managers and our best managers work as an account team to provide best service to our clients. So we can understand both like the strategic side of our clients, as well as the day to day data analysis side of our clients, and really make sure that we're putting together the very best deliverable for those clients that we have. So that encompasses the entire commercial thing. So you're supporting all those commercial operations. Yes. Our Sales team and our Client Success team are what I refer to as my clients. So it's my job to make sure that their lives are as easy as possible. And if they spent all their time doing what they want to be doing, and what they're really great at doing, which is serving our client.

Would you say that the culture that you're trying to set within your across your teams is one of customer-centric culture, rather than sales?

Very smart person once said to me, "life is sales", by the way that was my wife. So when we get on the call, because a very smart person who was convincingIncredibly customer-centric. So Raystad, as an organization, I can't just even just speak for the commercial team. But Rystad, as a company, is incredibly customer centric. It's all within the mentality of, you're not doing your customers a favor for them, subscribing to your solutions, your services, find your tools, whatever any organization is doing. They are doing you a favor, by purchasing them, right? That they are the people that are making sure that you're continuing to innovate as well with what their feedback is, you're building a product for them. So we want to say as customer as possible, we want to build a relationship, we want to understand their pain point, we want to be able to provide them solutions that aren't just going to help them out in this next year, the next year, but 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we want to make sure that we are staying up to date with what they need, and providing that proactively versus retroactive.me that I needed to empty the dishwasher. Life is sales.

If we're talking about embodying a culture of customer centricity. Can you describe to us what practices your team may be putting in place Lacy to emphasize that that's the culture that you're setting within the organization? What specifically, maybe within your work you ever see in commercial operations?

Yes, so I think everyone thinks about their customer journey. If you if you are a company that sells anything at all, you think about what your customer journey is. The commercial team really focuses on our customer journey. And our customer journey doesn't just involve the activities of the salesperson and the client success person. It involves the activities of our marketing team, and that split down from regional to corporate to the events team. It involves the activities of our analysis team. So how are we making sure that we're integrating them and not siloing them because they are a huge value to our clients, our clients want to talk to our experts. So we're, we really focus on the customer journey. And within each step of this 20-ish step customer journey, we're saying "Okay, and here's all of the people that are involved in this. And not only are they involved, here's the activities that they're doing. And here is how those, activities add to the value of our client". So the entire part that we focus on, every step thinks that what the value that we're adding to our client, and who's participating within that value, and then what is the next thing that we need to deliver on? So that's how that's how we think about it. And then we also use that to build our strategy, as far as you know, what tools are we using? What processes do we need to put in place to make sure that we are fulfilling all of these essentially, service agreement that we're providing?

So one of the things I'm hearing here, Laci, which is really striking me right out of the gates, is that when you think of your operations role and what your team does inside of the company, it sounds like you're putting the customer first and foremost, instead of your own salespeople and a lot of a lot of sales operations leaders think about making the lives of their salespeople easier. But what I'm hearing from you is what your number one priority is to make the life of your customer easier. Am I hearing that right?

Right. At all times is to make the customer's life easier, make sure we're delivering on what we should be. That being said, when you think about what my role is, again, my customer is the sales team and the success team, that their customer again, the end goal is the individual to prep dry said tools to use our consulting services and so forth. So I can't just think about what's going to make the sales team and success teams lives easier, I have to think about what's going to make the customer's life easier, because then that is what our commercial team needs to happen. So I'm a firm believer that strategy starts at what your end goal is, and then you work your way back. So it's almost like a root cause analysis. So I'm a big fan of taking what is our very end goal, and then from each step, what is then the client success team's goal, what's the salespersons goal, and then that will eventually lead to what my strategy is. So everything we do at Rystad is customer focused, is people focused. And that goes from training, to what our leadership role modeling is, to what our performance metrics are, what our sales culture is. So everything has that very end goal in mind. And then if you've meet that all the other goals should be met along the way.

You bring up a great point there the alignment of culture, and goals and people and processes. What are some of the most visible activities and tasks that your team is doing on a day to day basis to kind of bring all those parts together?

I don't know, if we have half the time to list all of those things. One, we make sure that we focus heavily on the team aspect of what we're doing, right? So if it's good, for one, it should be good for all. And I think that drives a lot of those day to day activities. We don't sit there and mandate, "Hey, as an account team, you need to make sure that every single day you're meeting together and discussing your client's problems and making sure that you're working together as a team." But based on what we've implemented, as far as the understanding that our culture is very team focused, it's very helped each other out, make sure that we're delivering kind of the end value to the people we need to be delivering that to, that we're meeting our individual metrics, that creates those day to day activities. So that creates those those one on one conversations. We also are really big about just getting up and walking over to someone's desk and asking them a question. And I know in the virtual world that's a little more difficult to do. But that's also, one of the big issues that people probably had during COVID was this idea of, "I just can't call someone on Teams, I just can't just hit their name and call them I don't want to bother them." Well, you'd be doing that if you're getting up and walking over to someone's desk. So that's really important to make sure that people feel really comfortable with getting up and walking around and going to chat with people and asking questions and collaborating. Because without collaboration, you're not going to get innovation and without innovation, you're not going to grow and develop and you die. So that is I think one of our biggest day to day is just making sure that we're talking about all the issues, if there's a problem, we're not embarrassed to share the problem, we're going to discuss the problem and say, "Hey, I maybe messed up, or do you see a way out of this?" And making sure that we're not beating someone with a stick, if they mess up. We're going to fix it and make sure that we're going to learn from that as well. So you talked about walking around the office? Are you guys back in the office? Is the company largely back into an office culture? Or do you have a hybrid? Yeah, so the company mostly does hybrid, but it's three days a week for for everyone across the board, everyone needs to be in the office three days a week. I think we have a really fun office culture. And so in the office that I'm in, a lot of people come in, you know, four days a week plus. People really want to be in the office, they kind of like each other. Everybody likes each otehr. Exactly. Everybody wants to be happy, right? So if walking around the office and joking around every once in a while to break your brain out of whatever you're focusing on, helps you out, then then come to the office. I personally really like being here. Because even if I don't talk to people, it's nice to know that they're out there. And I'm not just alone in a dark cave, working away.

Laci, I'm hearing a lot of learning through osmosis, learning from each other by way of conversations, feeling comfortable reaching out to people directly. What about things that are maybe more quantitative? Are there any tools that you're using to monitor maybe monitor is not the right word to use, but to measure activities across the team?

Well, we use Sugar a lot, I think that that's one of my number one tools that I use. And by think I mean that I know, because a lot of our decisions are data driven, and that's across the board because of the fact that we're at energy research company. So obviously, that very data driven. But also everything that we do as a commercial team, it's really important to back that up with data to to make sure that, you understand it historical, and then you can always forecast with that as well. So everything from what are our commercial processes, right, I can take our data and understand what the best trial looks like. And then that can be our trial guide. Because I understand, you know, from everything I pull in our CRM, often people were on trials, how long that trial lasted, who all was involved, so on, and so forth. And now I know, okay, to deliver the best trial to our clients, this is what we need to do. So all of our decisions are very, very heavily data driven. And I use Sugar CRM for pretty much all off that.

So you talked a little bit about those trials is that where leads come from for you? We all know, leads are the lifeblood of any sales organization. That's what keeps everybody excited in opening up their CRM system frantically every day to see those new leads, is it trials that really are the starting point to the lead process?

No. Now a lot of our leads come in through our marketing activities. So our marketing team. Marketing and communications team does a lot to generate leads for us. So that's through our webinars, our white papers, any anything, any of our marketing collateral that we push out, that's a huge resource for leads, our lead manager partially generates leads for us, and then also takes a lot of leads, and qualifies them. But the actual push of our our leads into our system, a huge portion of that the majority is from all of our marketing efforts, our our awareness, our branding.

So you're touching on one of my favorite topics, alignment between marketing and sales. It's often described as, that classic challenge between Venus and Mars are two different types of personalities, two different types of metrics very often. And unfortunately, just too often two different types of work departments that don't know how to work well together. First question for you, that lead manager that you just described, is that person report into marketing or into sales?

Into Sales

Into sales. Okay? And sounds like they're on the ground floor of that handoff, from marketing to sales?

Yes, very much so. So as you know, leads come in to them. And it could just be someone who was really interested in a small snippet of a white paper, right? They, they might not really have a deep rooted interests, or even a need to subscribe to a tool to meet with, you know, our expert, and our lead manager understands has those conversations, researchers understand who would actually benefit the salesperson versus what, because the last thing we also want to do is pester leads, right? We want to make sure that if they send us an email or reach out to us that they're not been getting eight phone calls every week to buy something if they don't need to buy it. So that's with the end person in mind. That's really it.

What are you thinking about? And what what have you put in place to streamline those handoffs, those operations between marketing and sales, what comes to mind as key areas to focus on?

If I think about when when leads come in: one, obviously we use Sugar to almost prequalify those and based on where the lead is, what type of company it is, so on and so forth, that gets automatically assigned to someone. So if it's a client or a prospect that falls within a salespersons' remit, it automatically assigned to them. And then we make sure that we have different performance metrics in place that we don't want a certain number of leads that have not been touched to be sitting there for over a month. So if someone comes into the system, and they're looking for information, we want to make sure that our sales team is immediately reaching out to them whoever it falls under. So we have different types of leads, whether it's Assigned, which is Brand New, whcich it's Recycled, which means that we've reached out to them it's In Process, so on and so forth. We identify what type of lead it is. And one of our performance metrics is making sure that there's not a certain number of Assigned leads in our system at the end of the month. So that way, we know that they are being pushed through and reached out to qualified or disqualified whatever that may be. So that is one of our biggest incentives to make sure that that we're moving. And then we also, if something comes in through a marketing campaign or white paper, we make sure that we're asset tagging it because the marketing team has that ROI. Sales and marketing has an ROI in total. And marketing is a huge piece of that ROI. And credit shouldn't be given where credit is due. You should always always give credit to the marketing team, if they brought in amazing leads, that became an opportunity that generated revenue for us. So we make sure that those are also tagged to those campaigns. So at the end of the day, we can say, "Hey, because we did this event, or because we ran this webinar series, we were able to generate X number in the pipeline." And that's all credit marketing team. So both teams are heavily incentivized to make sure that, that we're pushing those leads through the system.

You're calling out some excellent points. Laci, we have talked in the past about sales leaders tracking data, like you've just mentioned, but we've not heard, it's not to say it hasn't been done by other sales leaders that we've spoken with. But it's rare for sales leaders to bring up the incentivizing behind it and incorporating that as part of performance measurement. So I think that's an important call out. I just wanted to switch tracks and cover enablement. This is a heavy topic at most companies and how they enable their sales team members. And in your case, it would be both sales and customer success executives. And so what sort of programs, if any, do you have that your team commercial operations oversees, when it comes to enabling both parties, sales and customer success under common?

I think the one thing that we do, and we are continuing to develop even further, and probably the most important thing you can do when when you're thinking about how do you really incentivize a team? How do you reward it's to reward the activities to reach the goal and not the goal itself. If you reward the goal, you're saying no matter what, just get to that goal, and you will effectively cannibalize your culture. You become a sales organization that is saying, "I don't care what you do to reach that goal, but you need to have that goal." If you if you think about what activities need to happen to reach those goals, and incentivize those activities, then you can develop; then you're not only incentivizing, "Hey, make sure that we reach the targets, whether that be a revenue, target a growth target, whatever that is, make sure we reach these targets. But to continue these targets, we need to do X, Y, and Z." And you can build the team environment that you want to build while also reaching those goals.

That's one of the best pieces of advice, I think I've heard yet on how to build a sales culture: focus on the activities and incentivize the activities. I like that.

Thank you. Yes, it's just so important. It helps make sure that your team is functioning the way you want to function. And then it's also really a lot easier to train and pivot. So if you need to adapt an activity, if you need to add one, if you need to remove one, it's a lot easier to take away those pieces versus to crumble the whole puzzle and then rebuild it. So that is that is probably the number one piece of advice. If it counts as advice that I could ever give anyone is to make sure that we're focused on the individual activities that we are rewarding.

Yes, it is very good advice. And when I think about you haven't given examples, specifically now on the activities themselves. But I am curious, if you have the activities that you're expecting of your sales executives, or customer success executives. What does the team the commercial operations team put in place to enable the team to follow through on those activities? And you talked about tooling earlier. I'm wondering if it's maybe a people process and technology, that is part of making sure that the sales and customer success executives feel enabled to follow through on the activities that are expected to then reach the outcomes or the goals that you're looking for.

Yes, so just on the on the tools, piece of this. So our sales team uses several different tools, whether that be prospecting tools. Sales Navigator, for instance, whether that be tools that you know, DocuSign, for instance, that you can quickly send off an agreement and I will say, I don't know every tool that's out there, right? I just recently discovered, you know, these client success tools that are available and I'm purely speaking to the commercial team, but there are so many available systems out there that we may find a use case for we may not. But our salespeople and our clients, first people encounter them every single day. So we've made sure that one that can always be fed back so that we make sure that, "Hey, if you think of something that could be useful, please send it my way. And we'll make sure that we evaluate it as a leadership team." Because the last thing I want is for someone to say this tool could have really, really helped me, but no one paid attention to me, and I lost out on it, and now I'm less happy in my role. Because again, my end client are the people who are going out there and speaking to our clients, I want to make sure that they are as happy as possible, and that they feel the most efficient in their job. So it's really important to kind of stay ahead of that and make sure that what we are putting it in place. That being said, and maybe we're going to talk about this, or maybe not. So we've recently in the past few years, added some some new tools for our team, and we've updated several of our parts. And one of the things that I have learned is sometimes if your people don't immediately understand why, if you assume they understand the "why", then they're never going to adopt the "what". So if I don't explain why we're doing something, and I just say, "Guys, this is what we're going to be doing now" and don't say "Hey, we changed his process, because we noticed that there was a ton of fat that we could trim. And now you have four more hours a week that you can dedicate to speaking to our clients" versus, inputting things into a system, or making sure that we're uploading documentation, if I just say "This is what we're doing", they're gonna say, "Why would I ever do that I'm very comfortable doing what we do now". So that's one of the key lessons I learned is making sure that I give the why so that they will understand that's the what. And then that's also kind of falling in line to make sure that we have the best implementation as possible. So that's not just then introducing the new tools, the new process, that's making sure that in two weeks, we have an additional training on it, we have videos uploaded, we're making sure that there are now performance metrics included so people know to follow along. And then again, incentivizing those activities, whatever they may be, and that needs to all be built into our implementation plan. Otherwise, we're wasting money and time and effort actually putting this stuff to work.

That's excellent advice. Any other lessons learned along the way from possible mistakes you made in the past? I love the point there have explained the "why" otherwise, people won't do the "what".

Yes, I have so many things that I've messed up. I'm never ashamed to say how much I screwed things up. But it's good. I think the, and this maybe all goes back to that idea of making sure that you're incentivizing the activities, is with every issue, understand the root cause analysis behind it. So one thing that I would say, as an individual who, who I have sometimes a very low need to defer and can figure that out, "I'll just handle it, don't worry, I can take care of it." I have in the past missed the root cause of problems and taking them very face value and said, "Okay, I'll handle that no problem." And what ends up happening is any work that I put into an issue just immediately implodes, I think that has been such a big lesson is taking issues or problems, and taking the time to really understand the very, very basic root cause of that problem. And not saying, "Okay, this broke", and taking one step back and finding, at what point I need to understand the structure behind it. And if I can understand the base structure, then I can actually fix the problem and make sure that problems like that don't happen in the future.

There's a theme in there of unpacking one level deeper each time, right. So that's great, great advice. Appreciate that.

Well, Laci, as we're closing things out, we like to always ask, where can our listeners find you? Where can they learn more about you? So I'll leave that open for you to answer for our listeners.

I don't have Twitter, but I do have LinkedIn. So Laci Garbs on LinkedIn is where I'm at. I wish I had Twitter but I learned that my millennial brain can only handle so much social media so I chose Instagram

Same!

Definitely LinkedIn please, and I appreciate you guys having me on. This has been great. That's amazing.

Well, connection requests will come flooding in you bet. Well, Laci we really appreciated having you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here and just really want to wish you all the best with everything you're doing sounds like you've got a real fun job and you bring great attitude to it!

Yes, I have a fun job, a fun team, a really cool boss that I work for, so I'm lucky!