SalesTechStar Interview with Matt Curl, COO at Apollo.io

Matt Curl, COO at Apollo.io comments on the changing role of today’s B2B tech COO in this conversation with SalesTechStar:

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Hi Matt, take us through your journey in Operations and how you’ve helped enable better Ops processes over the years across the B2B SaaS companies you’ve worked at?

Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here! I recently joined Apollo.io as the company’s first Chief Operating Officer where I manage the company’s day-to-day operations and work closely with our CEO, Tim Zheng, to drive revenue growth and scale operations globally. I’ve watched Apollo from the sidelines for a few years now and am a huge fan of their team and product. Tim and his team have built the most simple, powerful, and intelligent go-to-market platform — from data to engagement to deal execution to forecasting — consolidating the entire sales tech stack. The product is phenomenal for sales, which is why Apollo is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies used by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally.

My first official job in Silicon Valley was with another Y-Combinator company, Fivestars.  I joined to build out what we know today as ‘RevOps’ along with helping standup several of the traditional G&A functions.  About a year into that journey, we lost our VP of sales and I was asked to lead sales for three months on an interim basis.  Three months turned into nearly four years where I led, built, and scaled our sales and RevOps teams from about 20 people to over 225 people.

Over the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to find myself in situations that gave me opportunities to both build and scale teams.  Product-market fit is not always a given and I consider myself fortunate to have worked at companies that had enough of it to be successful.

I’ve spent the majority of my career scaling revenue generating teams; what I’ve found to be unique is that I’ve always simultaneously led the operations and systems teams.  I’ve led and built almost every go-to-market (GTM) function from scratch, except for marketing. Despite my heavy background with GTM, I have had three ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences that substantially broadened my horizons through significant time spent with R&D teams.  Once at Fivestars, leading our centralized systems and analytics teams; including data science, product analytics, and analytics engineering.  The second, at Checkr, where I built the business case and became the owner for the company goal of ‘creating and launching Checkr Self Serve’.  The third when I operated in a CEO capacity as the GM of Tessera Data, Checkr’s wholly owned data subsidiary.

These experiences greatly influenced how I approach operations. I heavily index on context, instrumentation, measurement, and benchmarking.  I also routinely tap my network. RevOps professionals in particular are incredible knowledge holders, and I leverage that information to find, identify, and improve how teams operate.  The ability to understand a broader range of perspectives from the different roles I’ve held has been really helpful in developing a starting hypothesis for where large opportunities exist.

What are you most looking forward to as Apollo.io’s new COO?

If I were to list what the perfect fit for my next role would be, leveraging both my experiences and interests, it would be Apollo. The company is in the revenue technology space, it’s experiencing fast growth, it has significant data assets, the primary GTM motion is product-led growth, and it’s riddled with talent and conscientious professionals.  I’m most looking forward to harnessing the company intrinsics, along with my experience, to build a segment defining company.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Shane Evans, Chief Revenue Officer at Gong

How do you think modern day tech COOs can initiate better processes for their organizations, to align marketing-sales-finance-growth goals while also taking the brand ahead in a crowded market?

The onus is really on the COO and these functional leaders to set the tone and lead by example. Aligning marketing-sales-finance-growth together takes immense metrics discipline.  You have to be relentless in instrumenting the business; finding and metering the metrics that actually matter and in a persistent state of finding and funding initiatives to improve the business.

A particularly helpful exercise on driving alignment is to create the forum in which those teams are co-presenting the state of the business on a weekly basis.  Given the right feedback, any lack of alignment will resolve quickly. The task of taking a brand ahead in a crowded market really comes down to definitions, and modern COOs can and should focus on bringing clarity by signing off on credible, well researched, and documented plans.

What are the five biggest misconceptions surrounding the role of the typical B2B COO?

1. That you’re too busy or too important to hear directly from the front lines of the business. Without developing deep relationships across the business, you become blind to your internal teams and how they interact with the customer.
2. Inspection means that you’re digging for something or unsatisfied with the current state. To not deeply understand and evaluate your business performance you will wind up consistently out of context and doing guesswork.
3. The role is the same in every company. It’s not.
4. That you don’t need to understand technology. Without this knowledge you cannot make informed decisions for more than half of the company.
5. The COO primarily exists as an execution partner to the CEO.  In reality, you have to play a significant strategic role – especially around operations and scaling both internally and externally.

We’d love to hear about some of the salestech and revtech you’ve often used to drive goals and processes?

If you count Google Sheets and Google Docs as revtech, I’d be happy to tell you about how I use them to drive goals and processes. 😅

On the more serious side, I’ve used and implemented almost every major revtech tool on the market. I can give direct, real, personal stories about how Atrium, Fivetran, Outreach, Clari, Workramp, Apollo, Clearbit, Drift, ChiliPiper, etc. each were the ‘perfect’ tool for achieving huge gains for departments I’ve led.

On the process side, there is no technology substitute better than a strong operations team.  Designing, implementing, monitoring, and consistently improving a logical, clear, and well trained process takes strong operational leadership and equally strong functional management alongside it.

A few thoughts on the future impact of AI on sales and salestech before we wrap up?

We can come back to this in five years and see if I’m right, but here are some of my predictions.

• Traditional sales tech SaaS license counts will fall.
• Data use will increase significantly.
• The LLM that ‘learns’ and adapts the fastest to buying behavior will win large market share.
• We’ll see the rise of bots that ‘detect AI’ and alert you if content, emails, etc. are AI or human generated.
• Sales professionals that excel in face-to-face or in-person forums will flourish.
• Many companies will harm their domain reputation; more tools to prevent this will emerge.
• Heavily quantitative roles will be in very high demand on revenue generating teams.

Overall it will be an incredibly exciting time because LLMs in particular are so adept at solving many routine sales processes. I’m looking forward to helping shape what comes next with Apollo.io!