Episode #7: Habits of a Highly Effective COO - Ben Marchal
Unpacking the mindset, routines, and methodologies of a COO from a $50 million ARR company.
Meet perhaps the most effective revenue operator I know: Ben Marchal.
After a two-year stint at McKinsey, he joined 360Learning as an Ops Manager when it was at $10 million ARR.
Four years later, the company is at $50 Million ARR and Ben is COO.
I also work at 360Learning, and have collaborated closely with Ben over the past two years, reporting to him directly for 10 months.
Sometimes you meet people who have special gifts. They just seem to perform at a higher level, to see more clearly into the heart of issues, to consistently separate the essential from the trivial, to drive action in the right direction. Ben is one of those.
My goal when I meet super talented people like this is to absorb how they work, to add a bit of their skillset to my own.
It’s not about what they know - Ben freely admits that he’s not a functional expert in many of the areas he manages as COO.
Rather, their effectiveness has a lot to do with mindset, routines, and methodologies.
That’s what we dive into in this episode.
My Take-Aways
Performance improvement is the reason for being of ops:
This may seem like a trite observation - but how many ops teams truly follow it in practice?
Yes, ops needs to be strong on process, tech, and daily operations. But if you don’t have performance of the business as your North Star, you likely won’t be fulfilling the true potential of ops.
Ops needs to be focused on core business KPIs:
An outgrowth of the first point is that ops needs to monitor KPIs daily and use them to drive prioritization and strategy.
Being rational and KPI-focused is how you go from being a service-department to a strategic partner, because you can go to an executive and say, “your team is asking me for these 1,000 things, but based on our KPIs, these are the most important areas to focus on.”
Alignment flows naturally from that discussion.
An effective mindset is similar at every level of responsibility:
Ben’s mindset hasn’t changed significantly between being an individual contributor and becoming COO.
He focuses on four main things: 1) Being low ego, agnostic. Focused on data and what it shows. 2) Being both big picture and granular at the same time. 3) Ability to cut through noise and prioritize. 4) Ability to communicate at different levels. These are all things he learned at McKinsey.
His continually focuses on where the biggest gaps are in the business, and then uses an impact/feasibility matrix to determine the actions that will be most impactful at driving change where it’s needed most.
Importance of qualitative feedback:
Ben listens to call recordings constantly, despite being incredibly busy.
KPIs tell you what is happening, whereas direct customer insights give you the “why”. Both are necessary ways of connecting to the reality of the business.
About Today's Guest
Benjamin Marchal is COO of 360Learning, a learning platform that enables companies to upskill from within by turning their experts into champions for employee, customer, and partner growth.
Ben worked at McKinsey for two years before joining 360Learning, where he started as an Operations Manager and progressed to become COO in 4 years.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:15] - Ben's vision of operations. Ops exists to help each team perform better today and to be ready for the future. Four key activities. 1) Source of truth for KPIs. 2) Identifying improvement areas. 3) Helping teams implement those improvements. 4) Maintaining and running the business.
[02:38] - How Ops teams can balance taking requests from teams they support with proactively pursuing strategic improvements. If Ops teams don't monitor KPIs, then they are stuck in implementation mode and don't partake in strategic discussions. Conversely if they focus solely on strategy, they become disconnected from the field and fail. Both are important.
[05:34] - How Ops teams can make time for reviewing KPIs. Ben looks at them first thing every morning. Creates a sense of ownership. The need to create a KPI tree (first, second, third-level metrics). Creates a clear picture of where to focus efforts. This enables strategic discussion with executives and ability to push back on requests. Importance of being fact-based, rational, agnostic.
[11:24] - Ben's experience at McKinsey and how it's impacted him. Types of projects at McKinsey. The onboarding experience.
[16:48] - Ben's journey at 360Learning, going from Operations Manager to COO. Development of incentives models. Working in Customer Success Ops, fixing churn. Demonstrated that applying the McKinsey model to in-house operations worked well. Began to coach the Operations team. Building the data team. Creating the business plan - demonstrated that he understood the business end-to-end, more exposure to investors and the Board. Move to COO. He isn't a functional expert in every scope, but his job is to make sure the company works on the right things.
[22:19] - Ben's mindset and whether it's evolved as he's gained more responsibility. He believes the mindset has been the same. Four critical things: 1) Being low ego, agnostic. Focused on data and what it shows. 2) Being both big picture and granular at the same time. 3) Ability to cut through noise and prioritize. 4) Ability to communicate at different levels. These are all things he learned at McKinsey.
[26:10] - Looking at a practical example of how Ben prioritizes, given the huge scope of problems that he is responsible for. He thinks about the business in three main areas - demand creation, conversion, and retention. (Product is present in all three.) He identifies what is working well and what is not, then considers what will drive most value for the company using an impact/feasibility matrix.
[28:55] - Challenges of applying this in practice. Justin notes that Ben is also highly responsive to communication, which isn't typical of all execs. Ben explains how he uses a notebook to prioritize the main topics he needs to care about. For "must-do" items, he blocks time in his calendar.
[31:16] - Ben's point of view on go-to-market strategy. First, need product market fit. second, identify who you are selling to - ICP. Could be industry, or size, or use-case. Identify the personas within those companies. Third, how to get the product in front of those people - inbound, outbound, etc.
[36:31] - Importance of qualitative feedback. Ben listens to a lot of calls. KPIs tell you what is happening, calls and voice of the customer tells you why it's happening. Both are important ways of discovering reality.
[38:53] - Challenges of being an international company. Differences in business culture between France and North America.
[43:36] - How the tech world will evolve going forward now that capital is less available.
Resource Links
See my recent post on The Pyramid Principle for discussion of the communication methodology Ben learned at McKinsey.