The hard truth about aligning marketing and revenue teams 

 [00:00:00] Jason Hemingway: Welcome to In other words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with business leaders redefining global enterprise scale. I’m your host, Jason Hemingway, and today we are joined by Lorena Morales, Director of Global Digital Marketing Revenue Operations at JLL. We’ll be exploring what really gets in the way of enterprise growth and why scale often stalls due to fragmentation.

We’ll talk about what it takes to bring strategy operations, and go-to-market teams into alignment, and also about how AI is helping teams move faster without losing focus. Lorena, welcome to the show. How are you? 

Lorena Morales: Hi Jason. Thank you for having me here. I was doing a lot of podcasting last year and the previous year before that, but I feel like this year, I’ve been swamped with all the projects and I’m just happy every time that I get to do this again.

So thank you for having me here. 

Jason Hemingway: That’s a pleasure, and thank you for joining us. So, let’s start. I always like to start with a bit about your career and career [00:01:00] paths and you’ve moved between creative disciplines, strategy and now very firmly in the operations role, coupled with marketing in the job title that you have being all encompassing.

And that is very much a unique combination but if you could tell us a little bit about your journey and what pulls you to the world of revenue operations, that’d be really good. 

Lorena Morales: It is, like, when people ask me these questions, I’m one of those so-called unicorns that for me, it’s only in the design thinking world, we call ourselves a t-shaped people.

Right. It’s a very design term. Most of my career I spent, you’re right, in product design, I was more of the creative side. My bachelor’s was fully in product. I understood very, very well how to create pretty much everything, product and services. And then, I realized that, wait, I don’t understand very well how to sell these things.

And so that’s when I started to kind of move into marketing, but keeping the creative side of things.

[00:02:00] And so I rebranded most of the companies that I worked at in my previous years here, in the Bay Area. I was very, very excited about like doing hypergrowth and all these things. And I realized that most of the companies that I was working for, they didn’t think very well about branding because it was more like the investors could ask them like, do we need to have a website?

Do we need to have a logo? But it was not very well thought and so, that’s why you saw many of the companies that started from the ground, like Uber and Lyft, and like all these companies doing rebrandings very, very often. And so I fell in love with that side of marketing. I spent most of my career there and soon, I realized that I was a unique

kind of marketer because I always reported to the CEO. So that’s when I started to get into the real deep numbers of the organization and, kind of, started my operations career, if you call it like that. However, I was [00:03:00] never the person on the systems, and I think that’s what makes me unique now in the revenue operations side, I was always more on the customer side of things.

I did partnerships, I did paid, I did events. I actually did field for a while. I did pretty much all the marketing engine and then, I became the vice president of the first consultancy doing revenue operations as a service. So I started understanding how am I gonna sell these? Because people don’t believe in this.

It’s like a religion, right? Like you kind of trust that your numbers are gonna go up, but you don’t see it. And so that was my first challenge and that’s when I learned the revenue operations model and the methodology. And I fell in love with it. The person that hired me is still a really good friend of mine, Jason, and he told me like, I think you’re gonna be doing a great job selling this thing.

We opened the category with G2, back then it was G2 Crowd. And so [00:04:00] it was an entire journey on becoming the revenue operations person. And I am one of the original ones, right? Because I’ve been doing revenue operations now for 8 years, almost 9 and nobody was doing this before. It didn’t even exist.

It was, you were either a Salesforce shop or a Marketo or something but the full thing didn’t exist. And then soon, a friend of mine from the connections that I did earlier on in my career called me and he was like, JLL is looking to build this function from zero, like nobody has hold this position ever.

Could you be interested in interviewing? And I was like, that sounds intriguing. Let’s do it. A very long interview process, but, at the end, the person that hired me trusted that this was needed in a global organization. And fast forward to today, 4 years later, I have one of the most nimble, but like one of the, let’s say, largest teams in digital and it’s fully revenue operations.

And that’s how I ended where [00:05:00] I am today now, running revenue operations in a global 

Jason Hemingway: Fantastic journey. It’s interesting. I think I completely agree with you about that kind of rev ops terminology, coming into the fore. I can’t remember exactly how many years, but it wasn’t around when I started marketing for sure.

And I think it’s also in the growth of, technology’s kind of grown as well, hasn’t it? So the operational side of managing technology, as well as how you bring different teams together has been really important and JLL, just to talk a little bit about them, I mean, that is a big revenue operations organization, right,

there’s, how many is it? I wrote down 80 countries that you operate in, 300 offices, so, it’s not a small thing to bring all of that together, right? 

Lorena Morales: It’s not. Definitely, it’s not Jason and it was, I think I’m one of the very few people that have done revenue operations at Hypergrowth SaaS and then transition to Fortune 200, you don’t see that path that often because it’s a different beast.

Like whoever thinks revenue operations is the same flavor in every company, they [00:06:00] are wrong because there was never best practices. So I had, I think the talent that I have, and it’s my value proposition to organizations is, I unlearn things very fast, and people don’t sell that, right? Like, they are like, this is my playbook.

I’m the opposite. I’ll bring what I know. Of course, I’m not an idiot, but I’m very, I unlearn fast in order to kind of see what and what is needed in the new place. And that’s exactly what happened with JLL. You’re right, it’s a massive, a company that has been forever in the market, I think like more than 300 years.

And so with that comes its own nuances of systems, its own bad behaviors, its own localities that you need to kind of, a lot of change management, of course. 107,000 employees, and so, revenues that are on the billions now and you’re responsible to make those changes worth [00:07:00] it, right, it is an interesting world.

Definitely. And I’m more than happy to go into the details of like, how I did it over the past four years. 

Jason Hemingway: I think it’s such a large organization and in many organizations, let alone, I mean, even the scale ups that you’ve worked with, you know, to bring different disparate parts of the business together or silos, teams in businesses is hard.

How do you do that in a hugely massive company? How do you, where do you start? Where do you even start with that problem? 

Lorena Morales: I think by being open to what you’re gonna see and encounter, and that’s what I’m telling, like the unlearning element, because my whole messaging in my previous company, we actually did a million campaigns around the silo no more, messaging, right?

Then I come to JLL and my mind and my world changed completely and I started to see that there were functional silos. 

Jason Hemingway: Like silos within silos, right? 

Lorena Morales: Silos within silos. But that were very functional and so I was [00:08:00] like, why am I gonna break something that is working? That was not idea, right?

Like I feel like every single person that comes into a new position tries to scrap everything and start from new and that’s not the way you should do because someone did it before you, and if it’s working, why would you make more mess? And so I started to change my messaging around, where do you have your silos?

That’s where you need to be careful. If your silos are in data, you have a problem, but if your silos are, for example, are micro teams of operations or micro teams, of even sales ops, which in JLL, we have the very interesting problem that we don’t have sales operations across the organization.

What I run, all the organization and so I need to play with those things, where they do have it, but the other places where they don’t and the ones that they have it, those are the functional silos, right, exist in their own bubble. And so I think to your question on where do you start is.

There’s a lot of auditing [00:09:00] work that any revenue operator should be doing, and it’s not only on the tools, let’s be careful with that because every single time that someone mentions an audit, they jump right ahead to, oh, it’s a tool stack that you need to have to audit. Absolutely. That’s gonna come,

but later, you need to understand who are the people that are facing the biggest pain points within your organization and how you’re gonna serve them. And so I think that was my first, the amount of meetings that I used to have year one. It’s just unbelievable. I mean, I’m still, 90% of my job is holding meetings, honestly.

Jason Hemingway: I completely, I can empathize with that hugely. And I think that’s it. It often, you know, as a person, I’ve worked in B2B technology for 20 plus years, and I think that the one big thing that people miss is, you know, it is people as much as it is technology. And its process around the people and technology that you need to, sort of, so I’d imagine that when you start an audit, you think about, well, what are the people doing?

What are the systems? What are the processes? And you kind of build up [00:10:00] a picture and look for where it’s fragmented. Do you have specific frameworks and practices that you use? I know you talk a lot about unlearning, but there must be, I mean, I guess that is a framework in itself, right? Unlearning, is a philosophy, maybe not a framework?

Lorena Morales: It’s a philosophy, well, it comes with frameworks I think Eisenhower is always super useful for me because, also, I came with the chip of the super high growth organizations that everything is urgent and that was my education in Silicon Valley, right? Like everything should feel urgent and you should act on the urgency. And Eisenhower has been super useful for me literally in every single job that I’ve had for me to learn how to prioritize the urgent against important, it’s,

especially visible in an organization like JLL because we are not, we don’t have Slack, we don’t have those things. It’s a very email-driven organization. And so if I can have the opposite problem where, like, if I don’t follow up [00:11:00] enough, then things become quiet and it’s tough.

So that’s what I’m saying, like, it’s a really good world to be in because I bring the fast, let us sprint, let’s do these things, testing, and in JLL, it’s like, wait, wait, wait, you need to find dependencies. You need to find all the teams. You need to document every single thing. And so in terms of frameworks, I could say like that Matrix has saved my life

over and over and over again. And I learned a lot from project management in my old days, I have a bunch of tools that make my life easier. I run a lot of Smartsheet reports on understanding primarily the bandwidth of my team, even though I don’t measure people by, “man by the hour”, I do understand when projects are off and on very well.

Jason Hemingway: It’s like capacity management, isn’t it? That’s where it becomes, I think, when you are a big, big business, although I like your point about, you know, the fast scale businesses you’ve [00:12:00] worked for, and I’ve done the same, is that everything’s a priority. And it’s like, okay, well, how do we do that?

And at some points you meet capacity issues where people just, I can’t do anymore. What do you want me to do? And that’s where the job of a leader comes in to sort of say, well, how do we align what we are doing with all the biggest growth challenges? And that kind of brings me on my next question, which is more about, I guess alignment is a huge thing as well as project management.

It’s aligning around what the business goals are, but, you’ve talked a little bit before, I’ve heard you speak about alignment becoming a growth challenge for businesses. Why do you think alignment is that big challenge? What is the thinking behind that? Is it those different teams? 

Lorena Morales: When something doesn’t touch a personal fiber,

you’re not gonna do it, you’re not gonna prioritize it. And that’s a human thing, that’s a human behavior, right? And so, when you’re talking about changing human behaviors, that’s when the alignment problem arises because the [00:13:00] whole marketing and sales misalignment, where did it start?

When marketing was sending trash leads to sales, and sales was like, can you please stop sending me trash? Because you were just creating leads and this is a problem that started like more than 20 years ago, right? We think we got it covered, but the reality is that sales are gonna look for their backs, and marketing is gonna look for their backs, and that’s where you have it.

However, organizationally wise, it also starts when you don’t have a clear North Star to drive the organization through, and you’re gonna be surprised. But we didn’t have, we didn’t have really targets until 2023. Like, imagine that, like the OKR system, it’s fairly new. Like we implemented OKRs in 2023 and it was a game changer for the organization.

I already had my team and I was already managing a program that I run globally that is a lead management program. I already had KPIs on revenue and [00:14:00] pipe of course, because that was my formal education, right? But in the organization, that was not a requirement. And so, then, when people started to be accountable for, this is your OKR, this is your thing that you need to hit at the end of the year, suddenly the entire organization was like, Lorena, I need help from your team.

It was a very interesting moment in time because the first year and a half, two years, for me it was like, hey, I’m the revenue operations team. Do you wanna partner with us? And nobody knew what was said, nobody knew the value, nobody knew pretty much anything. And so it was like an education process that took a little bit.

And then when they started to have their own personal fiber touched, they were like, oh wait, this team might be able to help me. And so it’s when we started to have like proper visibility into the globe and we started to manage way more countries than ever. So, I think it’s a combination of things, right?

But it has to do with how [00:15:00] you influence human behavior. Definitely. 

Jason Hemingway: And I think, I love that OKR side of things that we, you know, I’ve operated that for many years and measure what matters. That kind of, John Doerr, exercise, I think OKRs are really important. Do your team level, so I guess the business has the level one OKRs and it layers down into different teams.

Is that how you kind of manage that? 

Lorena Morales: We have it at the MLT level. So for example, the market leadership team has their own, and then we divide them by areas of touch, right? Like for example, we have digital, we have brand, we have communications and those things, and then it cascades from the MLT down to the other sides of the organization.

Yeah. 

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. It’s very similar to how I’ve worked in many businesses. Well, I think when it’s at strategic level, if the business has OKRs, then cascade down, that’s where you can really make it work. Are there any pitfalls in the OKR process that you’ve uncovered that you think would be a [00:16:00] good lesson for people?

Lorena Morales: I think my learning through these years is, well, when JLL was locally very intentional about how they put it, so that was a good thing. However, it’s been a learning curve because I think sometimes we miss the fact that the person that puts the high level OKR is not really in the day-to-day work of the people in the trenches

down, and so there’s a break in, okay, you need to hit a pipe and this amount, but then on the trenches you don’t have the proper systems to track that number. And so, I am sure a lot of organizations go through that pain. We are currently trying to kind of solve for that issue where it’s like, well, we don’t have systems across all the organization, but all the organization runs into that high level metric.

I think that has been the number one challenge. Other than that, it’s to maintain them, right? Like, to make sure that [00:17:00] you review them every single quarter, and you’re very diligent on keeping temperature on, like what is the process? Because if you are planning, like, planning year, you should start like November the previous year.

Right? For us, we have, it’s been a learning curve and we probably sometimes start later in the year and to make sure that you have QBRs in place and that you have all the teams kind of working together to make sure that you are running through that number because what is gonna happen in a lot of organizations is if there’s not

a police or a guard of the OKRs, you’re gonna see the hockey stick, a phenomenon where you see everything flat, flat, flat, and then at the end of the year, so they 

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, everyone’s rushing to. 

Lorena Morales: Exactly. So, those are the things that I think are learnings from every organization. 

Jason Hemingway: And so, you talked a little bit about, if you could go into a touch more detail about, so that is all about team alignment, isn’t it?

That’s all about how you keep those teams together, not just on, I mean, [00:18:00] OKRs are one mechanism. Are there other ways that you keep teams aligned around campaigns, regional needs, all of those internal metrics that might, you know, at some level present that problem of being competing metrics. So, you know, where should I focus?

I’ve got to do that, but you are asking me to do this. And how do you keep that team alignment and all of those kinds of things? 

Lorena Morales: What works for us, especially on the campaigns because we have centrally led and then we have localized campaigns. I think, and this has nothing to do with what I’ve done, but more the organization decided to put a center of excellence and make it a COE.

So we are very vigilant on like exactly what is going on with the campaigns. What my team does is, and this is no rocket science, like what we saw is functioning very, very well, is office hours by region, to really understand on the monthly basis. And the beauty about office hours is that you need to cross pollinate a little bit on the teams that can actually answer those questions.

[00:19:00] Because if you have a global organization and you are, and I’m the only one running my office hours, most likely people are gonna have questions on the influence against source, people are gonna have questions on like the dashboards, which is, I do, some of the dashboards, but my team runs some of that, but most of that is another different team, that we’re very, very close by.

And so I think you need to be very, it’s like a trade show, right? Like I told you that I used to run trade shows. People don’t tend to take customer success to trade shows because it’s expensive. But if you think about what is the goal of people going to a trade show, most likely they’re going to want to know about the product and who is the best person to answer those?

Customer success. It’s not necessarily sales. They’re gonna try to sell. It’s the same on your QBR’s, on your office hours, like make sure that you bring the people that are actually gonna bring solutions and you are not the person that says, oh, let me get back to you on that one.

That’s 

Jason Hemingway: interesting. Operating ‘Office Hours’, a [00:20:00] very good tool, I think, in the toolbox. Let’s talk about two other things I want to get into. One is sort of the typical metrics that you use on a day-to-day basis to see the health of the things going on. And then, and that’s part one and part two would be just

how you adapt to regional. We talked about localization then, which is obviously, because you know, we are a language technology platform. It’s quite interesting to me and, but, let’s deal with the first bit first, which is what’s a typical kind of dashboard, health metrics that you would say, right, that’s what we need in place.

I appreciate 100%, every business is unique, but there are some sort of parallels between the kind of thing that you’ll be looking at. 

Lorena Morales: From my operational education, I always advise people to look into 3 VC, which is, which stands from value, conversion rates, so those things, you should keep an eye, yes or yes, right?

However, at my role in JLL, I look at things that are [00:21:00] very pertinent of, I suppose only to JLL because as I have a program doing lead management, I need to know how responsive is sales to the leads that we’re handing off. So for example, so sales responsiveness is one of my top, top, top, top metrics because I need to know, how is my partnership with them?

And the only way that I know how good or bad or medium is that level of trust and confidence is through sales acceptance rates. We haven’t been able to go fully into what revenue operations should look into, like, for example, in NRR, ARR, churn rates, which is something that absolutely everyone should be measuring.

In JLL, it’s a little more complex than that, because we don’t have full visibility into cross or sub cells, all those good stuff, but we keep a very close eye at a pipe, pipeline and revenue because for us, fee revenue is one thing, and [00:22:00] then, general revenue is another thing. So for us to understand those numbers is really, really good in order to kind of go to the next level, which is what I told you, like how long a customer stays with those LTV, like all those good measurements.

But for us, on a more global scale, which is something that you can bring to a global MLT is definitely a pipeline and revenue. 

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, look, I think that’s a very good and modern way of thinking about it is what are we bringing to the business in terms of pipeline. I know there’s lots around that.

I always talk about demand, you know, I look at it from a, not necessarily operational view, but a way of explaining it to people, I always talk about demand creation, which is kind of your brand work that you have to do, you know, keep that going. And then demand capture, which is just capturing what’s in the market, that 95 –

5% rule and then, I put an extra one on there, which not everybody talks about, which we’ll actually talk to some of the things you talked about, which is NRR, which is adoption is, you know, for a product that’s [00:23:00] technology product, it’s quite easy because you can get product technology, adoption rates and things like that.

But it’s those three mechanisms that I think that’s a demand engine. That’s how you sort of look at it, which is one of my ways of sort of thinking about it. But let’s go to the second half of my question, which is a long question, I’ll grant you. That, you know, how, so, you talk about centralized center of excellence, which is obviously excellent.

And then you’ve got regional teams and, how do you, or how does the business give the regional teams that flexibility to adapt what you are doing centrally to their local market, you know, the environment they work in. How does that kind of work for you at JLL? Do you have a thought? 

Lorena Morales: That’s another piece.

Like even though, for example, budgeting, that is centrally led, right? For the content, for example, for campaigns, the local regions can absolutely utilize that for their own purposes. And even if the [00:24:00] budget doesn’t come centrally, they are gonna utilize the messaging and the content from the centrally led campaign, how we keep it

in, I don’t wanna say control because I don’t like that word, but how do we keep it in the spectrum of visibility is through my team. Precisely. So that’s why you have a revenue operations function that understands, okay, this is a calendar of the centrally led campaigns. However, we hold meetings with every single region.

I run some of them weekly, my full team runs that every month on the Q&A for each one of the countries. So they can come to a table and say like, how do I see my campaign? And then all of the metrics coming to one single dashboard, regardless if it’s centrally or local. And then you can filter according to just the global

campaign or the localized one, but that’s why you have to have a team because you need to know and kind of accept that, have peace with that, like, yeah, one is central, but that doesn’t mean that [00:25:00] there’s no other activities happening simultaneously. And you need to take the temperature on all of them.

Jason Hemingway: And I presume that’s kind of a metrics-driven or calendar-driven approach, I guess, in some senses, but they’re given the flexibility to adapt, you know, messaging, creative execution or how does that kind of piece work? Do you, I know it’s not rev ops necessarily that does that, but 

Lorena Morales: for my understanding, it’s exactly like that.

Like, they need to be utilizing, of course, the same branding and materials, but like, I think the content is recycled in a lot of those places. It just makes sense. 

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, no, and I think that’s a model that many people use. It’s like that center of excellence that, you know, you give people leeway to, kind of, or actually manage it for them to.

kind of give them leeway to do. I mean, nobody disputes the facts that you need multilingual content across the globe, so you’re gonna have to, you know, do something. Right, okay. Well look, we’re probably about halfway through, maybe a touch over, but I always ask this, [00:26:00] it’s like a little mid-show question I like to call it, which is called in inbox confession.

And so, it really is, what’s the one thing that you wish you could automate to make your workday easier? 

Lorena Morales: Since I was telling you that we don’t have CRM in all of our regions. A lot of the tracking is manual, like literally, someone like putting their leads in an Excel sheet, and then we process that through my team.

The amount of manual work that has cost us as an organization is massive. And so I been trying to look into some automation in that sense, to really help the marketers, who are obviously, who are the ones that are struggling. I think that one. And then on the other side, the qualification piece for us is, it’s very interesting because it’s a multi-grid.[00:27:00] 

Our multi-product organization is a matrix company where the same business line can look very different in another country. So what is gonna be an MQL in Germany for the same business line might not be the same on Japan. 

Jason Hemingway: Qualification criteria and, 

Lorena Morales: Exactly, so those things are kind of like my, that’s where I would see automation happening and really helping us and we’re working through it, of course.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. Also, I guess their current projects, which sound quite interesting. Well, let’s talk more, we’re talking about automation making things easier. I’m gonna ask a little bit about AI because you know, that’s the topic dejour, as it has been a couple of years now, I guess but it’s just coming to the fore more, more and more. And you’ve written especially about cognitive overload and the constant pull of meetings and messages. Where is AI [00:28:00] hindering and helping from your perspective? 

Lorena Morales: I wanna say organization, and I’m gonna say personal. For me personally, I found that

meeting note takers have been a game changer. Like I try to use, I was reading a report, that just came out, I think from the New York Times that it was saying, there’s actually now, they did this study where they put people to use AI and people to not use AI at all, writing emails, this type of stuff.

And apparently now they’re starting to see that there’s brain atrophy in people that are using AI, right. And so, I’m one of those, I mean, that I try to use AI to check the work that I already did, not really to do the work for me, because that’s my fear. Since nobody really knows what the hell is gonna happen with AI,

I don’t wanna be the human that doesn’t know how to do anything in my [00:29:00] day-to-day because the robots did all my life. And so personally, I try to be very cautious on like how I use it. So, for example, I do the email and then I say, hey, help me understand what could I have missed based on this response.

That type of prompting is more where I am looking for and then the note taker that I was mentioning in the meetings. I tend to be a person that is very, like, I literally live with a notebook everywhere, right? Like, I don’t, yeah, even though I have like the notes everywhere else, like, I live with a notebook right by my side.

But the note taker helps me visualize what happened in the meeting and kind of work out my memory. And if the AI is gonna say, this is what this person said, I, kind of, match that with my personal notes and then make a conclusion out of that. And so that’s where I see like more the efficiency piece on my day-to-day,

given that I’m in a lot of meetings. [00:30:00] On the organization, it’s been really interesting to play a little bit with it, for example, to understand RFPs, RFIs, a massive amounts of information that, for example, if I run a, tell me what has been a good RFP over the last two years for this customer? Our contracts tend to be like multi-year.

Regardless, you need to go through RFPs, RFIs, at a certain point and the amount of time that it would take a human to read through all of those documents is again, massive. And so for us, if I just say, can you explain to me what is a good RFI for Spotify in Boston? And that’s just a random example,

it’s been very, very helpful for us on that sense. And then, where else, we’re trying to use it, of course, I told you again for qualification, like, can you tell me a square footage of a successful lead over the past four years? And then [00:31:00] give historicals and then understand like what is really the square footage that we would qualify far from band and from merit,

and then like all these things, really understand that based on closed won deals instead of like coming from sales. 

Jason Hemingway: Actual data. 

Lorena Morales: So, those are kind of, like, the things that come to mind. 

Jason Hemingway: They’re good. I think it’s the same, you know, and I talk to quite a few people, obviously, you know, as a technology business, we’ve got lots of AI in the technology and I think that the confusion or sort of the crossroads that people are sort of at, especially in day-to-day work, let’s talk about day-to-day personal work, is to what extent do I

use it as a kind of guide to get me going and then review things that I’ve done. But I’m really keen on the need to do the thinking as well. You need to have your own thoughts. And it comes down to creativity. You know, you can write a video script on a product launch really easily, but if you do that and you use, particularly generative AI to, kind of, do it, you are not doing the [00:32:00] thinking.

And I’m not saying you have to think about all these things for long. You’re not doing the thinking, and sometimes you, that means you don’t have the criteria with which to evaluate what the output is, if you see what I mean, because you’re just letting an AI draw up and then maybe you ask the AI to review it and review itself, but you know what I mean?

It’s, kind of, stopping the thinking. Also, if people shortcut that thinking, when you give a document to somebody else, you say, oh, I’ve put this together, here it is, use that. That person then, also doesn’t have the knowledge or, I just, you know, I’ve GPT that, you can look at that.

They’re like, well, I would’ve liked to have done the work before you give me the answer, you know, and do the actual cognitive thinking, which I think is interesting. But that said, on the repetitive process manuals, tasks, which are just, you know, data gathering in and you know, that can absolutely speed things up and idea generation is quite good for that in some senses.

I think there’s a human element as always with lots of this. So, talking about that sort of human element and also, I guess, [00:33:00] AI in your business, what does it sort of look like from a revenue ops organization? Is it a lot about that? You talked about automating, you know, some of the more manual tasks.

Is that where you would see most value? I know you’re not necessarily through that journey and who is, I mean, we’re constantly all learning, I guess, but is it, how does it kind of, what’s success look like? Do you have any sort of thoughts in your organization about what that look like?

Lorena Morales: Definitely. We’re thinking of the reporting side of things to make it more efficient more readable, more digestible for the people that are non-data-driven. In that aspect, I see there’s gonna be a lot of applications definitely for our organization, however, it’s very funny, like the amount of people that target me on LinkedIn with Agentic AI for sales.

I’m like, you need to be very careful with that stuff because [00:34:00] it needs to learn from somewhere to make the decision, right? And if the real humans are still very lacking of the touch of what it really needs to happen for a conversion, I don’t see how an Agentic AI is gonna do it better than the human yet.

And for us specifically in the $20 million deals, I foresee that the white glove treatment is always gonna be needed. Why? Because people still want humans to go through those transactions, like, if it’s full buildings, if it’s full project management, if it’s a design, if it’s these things where at the end,

you value them. I was watching with my wife, this podcast on AI where it said, like, think about sports, right? The thing that you like about sports is a failure, is a failure moment. That’s what creates the motion in the aha, the human imperfection.

And so when you take that to [00:35:00] business, do I want the perfect AI to tell me the perfect messaging that I was looking for? Not really, probably, I’m still gonna want someone that sits down with me through the conversation to talk, to kind of those nuances of the things that haven’t worked but what if you enhance that with, if they, AI already tells me that I need a numerical, for example, the square footage.

And now, if I am an SD and I already know that the square footage that I’m gonna need, and on top of that, I put like some of the motion behind it. I think that’s what is gonna be successful. But I don’t think anyone is ready yet. Like the more conferences that I go, the more places that I read.

It’s not there yet. 

Jason Hemingway: And I think there’s a lot around it as well, isn’t there that humans still need to do, you still need somebody to make a decision what that AI should be doing. You know, it’s not like, it’s just, I mean, you can to some, in some cases you can set it up, but there’s [00:36:00] always, you know, how do you refine it?

How do you make sure it’s doing the right thing? Who’s actually behind the curtain? If you use a wizard of oz kind of analogy to it, you know, what’s actually doing it? But I love that sort of, and I think it’s very true, especially in, you know, technology sales, big deals like yours.

It’s you, at the end of the day, you wanna look someone in the eye at the very end and go, right, not you wanna look someone in the eye, not in the AI is, I’ve just made that up, but, you know what I mean. It’s that you wanna have that personal connection. You know, it’s a lot about trust, isn’t it?

And that’s what you’ve just basically said is, do I trust the AI yet? Not yet. It does a lot of good things, but, okay. Well, let’s move slightly on from sort of AI and into sort of leadership and, how do you kind of, as a leader, stay grounded, stay connected to the team, keep them motivated?

Lorena Morales: It is, and I am one of the few people that I got to teach through COVID. I was a professor through COVID, [00:37:00] and I think that taught me a few lessons of, like, how can you really connect with people over zoom, right? Because I feel like after COVID we saw what they started to call the fatigue, the zoom fatigue, and I don’t think it went away, right?

Like, I think especially, and now with the traveling cut, like I used to travel a lot more to see my team before, and now that’s not the case. So what I tried to do is, while I was a professor, I used to do like random questions that would really let me know what was the state of my team.

And so for example, I used to ask, what color is your brain today? And they would tell me, red or blue or, and that would give me a hint, right? And onto how to proceed with the conversations that I’ve had to have. I think I am very good at making my team know that yes, this is a business and this, [00:38:00] and you have a purpose, and there’s an exchange of you doing a work,

then the company pays you, right? Like at the end it is a business and it’s not a charity but at the same time, I think I’ve learned to connect with my people on the human level to really understand what’s going on on their, 5 to 9, right? I don’t only care about their 9 to 5, but like the 5 to 9 side of people really, really interests me.

And so I have all the personal contacts from all my team. I make sure that in their special moments they receive a little something from me. For example, one of my teammates just left for maternity leave, creating this safetiness of you don’t need to worry about having your job back. If I have a commitment with you, is that,

I shouldn’t punish you for being a mother, which I think a lot of organizations do. On the contrary, I’m making sure that your job is still there intact when you come back. And those little [00:39:00] moments, you know, when people are like, you know, I’m struggling. I’m not a hundred percent,

I’m at 70. That’s another question that I generally do on my one-to-ones. Are you truly at a hundred? If it’s not a hundred and you can put like 40 hours this week, it’s totally okay. If you tell me, “I can put 22”. Perfect. Then I’ll put the other. 

Jason Hemingway: It comes back to that. You want to trust the each other, you know, trust that I’m not just looking at you as some kind of drone, that I want to do this 9 to 5 and then see you later and we’re off.

It’s like, I trust you as a human. I want you to enjoy your job. I always want people to enjoy their jobs. I’m very passionate about what I do, but I want other people to have that and enjoy it. And if, and I also want make sure people are okay. I think that’s, especially in fast-paced global environments, I guess, you’ve gotta keep an eye on that. 

Lorena Morales: It’s a very interesting duality, Jason, because at the end, same thing, right? Like you are there because there’s a money component and that’s another, like, when I [00:40:00] first hire someone, the first question that I do is, and this is not very popular, maybe I’m gonna lose followers on this one.

But the first thing that I ask is like, tell me at an amount, tell me what’s gonna be the amount that makes you not think about money. In the hiring process, right? Like, what is that number that I can work around in order for you to not have money in your mind? And then they can tell me whatever they have, and then I’ll try to do my best to hit that number.

Right? Because if you remove the money component, I think people tend to unbuild the layers that actually do culture in a company, has nothing to do with the revenues. 

Jason Hemingway: Well, it’s a classic, you know, in sales. It’s always like, if I took price off the table, what’s the, you know, and that’s an interesting, and if you do that, I know that sounds a bit mercenary if you’re applying that to a human, but I get the point.

It’s like, let’s not worry about that bit because, you can assume that can be fixed, but what’s the other sort of [00:41:00] non-monetary kind of angle anyway. Okay. Right. Well, we’re sort of getting towards the end and so, let’s talk about a couple of things. I’ve got a quick fire thing at the end, but,

just quickly, what is one common mistake you’ve seen when people are trying to scale revenue ops and marketing? 

Lorena Morales: I think the biggest, and I don’t know if it’s a mistake, maybe it’s a learning, to buy the tools. I feel like there’s an overlap of tools that you think are gonna fix your problems.

And honestly, they are cool and they are interesting to play with. Like, I recently played with clients up here and I get it, I totally get it. I could be like, can I bring this? And I think that temptation is so real that people tend to end up in a debt, like what they call the tech debt.

And so, I think that’s, kind of, like, the biggest one, like to really not make sure that you are [00:42:00] proliferating and like really understanding what is the usage of what you currently have. And scaling based on extra products is not the right way to go in my own opinion. I think that’s kind of, like, the biggest one for sure.

Jason Hemingway: Interesting. Interesting. And so, the last kind of question before a little quick fire round. What’s your best advice for somebody who’s just building their first rev ops function? 

Lorena Morales: Really digest and spend enough time in the P&L. A lot of people don’t do it, like, we come because we think we’re gonna partner with the CRO, with the COO and we don’t understand how we sell what we sell.

And understanding the products, I think it’s like the biggest learning that someone can, but really understand that, like what is the sell cycle? What are the stages? Like if you can do a little run up report on like, what are the stages that are kind of, [00:43:00] lacking movement, if your deals are stuck, are selling in stage three or stage four?

Really understand like how that happens. That would be my first advice, like, really make sure that you understand how you’re selling and then the way you’re selling and what are the teams involved in that sell component.

Jason Hemingway: I think you’re right.

So right, last little thing before I let you go. Just a tiny bit of a quick fire round, I’ll just give you. How would you describe global growth in one word? 

Lorena Morales: Painful. Global growth is painful and I haven’t seen any organization that has had a smooth ride when there has been global growth.

Interesting. But, it’s enjoyable and it’s worth it. Yeah, 

Jason Hemingway: that’s the bit, I wouldn’t wanna scare everyone off. I think it’s a good thing, you know, but it’s like a nice pain, I guess, if you get it right, which it is a bit like going for a jog and aching a [00:44:00] little bit afterwards. It’s painful, but you’re rewarded.

Yeah. I love it. And then if we were gonna ask for another voice in marketing or rev ops that we should be listening to now that sort of inspires you or you find an interesting kind of leader, thought leader or whatever you might wanna call it. Whom would you suggest? 

Lorena Morales: Jeff Ignacio is my go-to revenue operations person.

He’s brilliant in every single thing that he does.

Jason Hemingway: Brilliant. Well then, we’ll end it there. Thank you very much, Lorena. What an amazing session talking from, you know, rev ops to leadership, to strategy. It’s just been fantastic to have you and thank you for being here. 

Lorena Morales: Thank you, Jason.

What a happy Friday for me. 

Jason Hemingway: Well, that’s it for another episode of, In other words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a massive thank you to Lorena Morales for sharing what she’s learned from leading revenue operations across the globe and at massive scale. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to follow, In [00:45:00] other words, on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice, or even @phrase.com.

Stay tuned for more candid conversations on leadership, AI marketing, and what it really takes to scale globally. Thanks for listening. See you again.