Spencer Hodgson is a Revenue Operations leader who brings a professional poker player's mindset — Annie Duke's 'Thinking in Bets' and the concept of expected (estimated) value — to go-to-market decision-making. His path is unusual: he taught seventh- and eighth-grade math at a Catholic classical school in Alaska and worked as a summer tour director, developing a love of probability and board games along the way. When COVID ended Alaskan tourism he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and took an entry-level SDR role, where he became obsessed with exporting his call data into Excel to compute conversion rates and prove he was the best rep — and quietly worked his way into sales operations. Today he builds expected-value models directly into CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce (using custom properties, workflows, and calculated fields that surface a 'white space' score) so reps can prioritize the highest-value deals without doing the math, and applies the same lens to segment strategy, territory design, and quota-setting.
“Basically applying game theory in a way to all of life, we can try to figure out: what would I stand to gain from any one decision?”
“Everything can be thought of as a good bet or a bad bet. Not, did I succeed or did I fail? Because not winning the lottery or a certain game of poker doesn't mean that you made the wrong decisions.”
“Just because you failed, we should be asking ourselves: was I making the right decision based on the estimated value?”
“As long as you suspect that your hand is better than winning more than 25% of the time, it makes sense to call.”
“In some ways we have it really good in RevOps, because we have the data. It's not quite the same as when you're deciding to start a business — there, you kind of have to jump, you have to leap.”
“Oftentimes the goal is to move up market, but we need to know and understand what do we expect to gain before we invest all of this time and energy.”
“What's interesting about this example is it's told us that the mid market is the route to go.”
“The people who make the better intuitions about this stuff are going to succeed more and their companies are going to do better.”