Why 2 Interns Can Kill $150M

#031

Read Time: 3 Minutes

I sat down with Dana Therrien this week.

• 25 years in revenue operations
• Former analyst at SiriusDecisions & Forrester
• Now SVP of Commercial Transformation at Varicent

His take was not what I expected.

“The tools work fine. They tell you the truth. Nobody wants to hear it.”

When Gong says you are missing your number by 30%, what does the CRO do?

They do not walk into the board meeting and say that.

They spin a story and buy time.

👉 AI is taking away that spin

For years RevOps was the publicist for the CRO

• You shaped the narrative
• You made the slide look right

Now anyone can open the same tool and ask it directly.

The story is gone. Only the number is left.

That is a good thing. It also means RevOps jobs just changed.

3 things you can do this week

👇

1. Ask your tools for the bad news

Do not ask your forecast tool what your number looks like.

Ask it what is going to miss and why.

Then compare that to the deck your team presents Friday.

If the two do not match, you just found the problem.

2. Find out what your reps actually use

Dana made a point I have not stopped thinking about.

Your reps are more honest with their personal AI account than the one you pay for.

Because they know yours is monitored.

Ask 3 reps this week what they use off the clock.

You will learn more in 20 minutes than in a quarter of tool audits.

3. Fix the foundation before the paint

Missed forecasts and bad comp plans are not the problem.

They are the symptom.

If your territories, quotas, and comp plans were not clean on day 1 of the fiscal year, you spend the rest of it catching up.

Dana compared it to crash dieting in January after eating your way through December. You never win that one.

Pick 1. Not all 3. Do it before Friday.

One more thing worth knowing

Dana told me how private equity values companies now.

They take 2 fresh college grads, lock them in a room for a weekend, and tell them to rebuild the target company in Claude Code.

If the grads pull it off, the $150 million deal gets discounted or dropped.

That is happening right now. Not in 5 years.

And it is creating a role nobody has written a job description for yet.

Dana calls it the go-to-market architect.

The person who decides what to build, what to buy, and how to make all of it talk to each other.

His advice was blunt.

Go change your LinkedIn title today. Nobody owns that title yet.

Full conversation with Dana is live on youtube.

See ya next Friday 👋

Jordan