Ghalib Suleiman is co-founder and CEO of Polytomic, an ETL and reverse-ETL platform built specifically for RevOps and data professionals to sync product and billing data into their CRMs without depending on engineering. He spent more than a decade before founding the company running data teams that collaborated with RevOps — and openly casts his younger self as the 'traffic cop' who would tell RevOps counterparts to wait because their asks looked mundane next to the 'sexy' data projects his team reported up through engineering. Realizing those requests were actually the highest-impact, bottom-line work at the company, he built Polytomic to let RevOps serve themselves, describing the effort as 'paying penance.' His through-line is that data silos are a byproduct of the org chart, not bad intentions, and that empathy between data and go-to-market teams is a genuine revenue lever.
“I used to be the guy running data teams who would collaborate with RevOps teams to get them the data they needed.”
“I played the role of a traffic cop. I'd tell my RevOps counterpart, 'Sorry, we're too busy for you. You're working on sexy data projects, and your asks are on the mundane and painful side — just wait.'”
“They remain siloed because the org chart results in teams that are separated with boundaries. Everything follows the org chart.”
“The surreptitious goal for starting a company is me paying penance for all the times I somewhat abandoned my RevOps counterparts — who, in hindsight, were very correct.”
“In a world where they could have served themselves, I would never have been an obstacle.”
“If you simply begin with the last login date into your platform, that ends up being extremely telling as to who is likelier to churn than not.”
“Someone who's heavily using your product is clearly already bought in. Someone who's barely using the product will not listen to an upsell pitch.”
“You own the price books, you know how much to bill them. You just don't know what they've consumed.”