What Happens When the Systems Guy Gets the Mic

Told the room I was nervous before even starting. Thirty-something people, C-suite up front, boss to the side. Either the most honest thing I'd done in a business setting, or a disaster.

It wasn't a disaster.

The setup

Chemence holds an annual three-day national sales meeting in Atlanta, with everyone in one room. Clinical education, sales, marketing, leadership. Everyone was there. I was asked to present RevOps: what I had built since joining and where we were going.

Two hours. Formal presentation. Jarek, our VP of Sales, introduced me: "y'all know Jack."

Two hours in front of the whole company. That's not something you get handed often. I wasn't going to waste it.

The Price is Right

I didn't want to open with a slide deck. I wanted people engaged before we got into the data. So we played a game.

Price is Right format. CRM objects, workflow counts, system activity. The pitch: here's the daily platform load, guess the numbers.

The number that got the room: roughly 100,000 custom object calculations run through the system every two weeks. Workflows fire. API calls go out and come back confirmed. That's the infrastructure keeping the clinical education scheduler running and sales data accurate.

The clinical education team didn't know how much volume they were generating. Seeing their output as a number in front of the whole company changed how they viewed the work. Before you explain what a system does, show people what it's been doing without them noticing.

What I covered

We spent the bulk of the first session on the clinical education scheduler. Custom objects and internal forms, plus the portal reps use in the field. I walked them through how data flows in and connects back to HubSpot.

📸 INSERT PHOTO HERE: Presenting the clinical educator portal (IMG_1796.jpeg)

The most useful thing I did was ask the room what wasn't working. The reporting workflow wasn't behaving as they needed it to. I fixed it live before we moved on. That's the difference between a presentation and a working session: you leave the system better than you found it.

The second session

On the last day of the meeting, we wrapped up early. I joked that we could do more RevOps.

I expected a polite laugh. Instead, everyone wanted more.

So we ran an impromptu second session. Deeper walkthrough of field use. How to schedule on the road and use the portal. More questions, more live fixes. People don't ask for an extra session out of politeness. They stayed because it was useful.

📸 INSERT PHOTO HERE: Whiteboard systems diagram (IMG_0387.jpeg)

What I learned about presenting

My boss, Stacy, gave me the most useful feedback I've ever gotten on public speaking. The first five minutes are everything. Start with movement and process, not data. Once you get past the nerves, let the nerdiness out. If you're flat about something you built, the room leaves before you finish.

Mike Acton, a mentor, walked through the rest afterward. What landed and where I lost the thread.

Bad presentations from years ago run through my head before I go on. One rule I've held onto: don't lock your knees. Literally. Locked knees cut off circulation and you pass out. But it's also just good advice about how to stand in a room. Stay loose. Stay in it.

Knowing everyone in that room let me open with "I'm nervous" and have it land as honest rather than weak. From there, it was the work.

After

Multiple C-suite members approached me afterward. RevOps work is invisible until you make it visible. You build it and people use it without thinking about what made it possible. The national sales meeting was the first time that room saw what was underneath. Not because something broke. Because I showed them.

Building the system is one problem. Getting the people who use it every day to understand what it's doing for them is another. That's the work too.

But they asked for a second session. That tells me more than the C-suite handshakes did.

📸 INSERT PHOTO HERE: Open Floor slide (IMG_1805.jpeg)