In the 2010s, most businesses had their eyes solely on the Big Three functions to optimize their go-to-market strategies: sales, marketing, and customer experience. However, between the broken CRM data and teams being at each other’s throats every waking second – it was a bloodbath. Discerning where the revenue was coming from was a nightmare.
There was a desperate need for a hero to don the cape. Someone who would unite these warring tribes under one banner. And thus, RevOps was born.
According to a report by Future Market Insights, the RevOps industry is poised to grow at a staggering rate of 17.3% in the next 10 years.
However, RevOps is relatively new. And it’s easy to lose your bearings (unless of course, you have a solid onboarding guide in place) and become overwhelmed by the vast ocean of knowledge that is RevOps.
So, we dove into the depths and retrieved 12 unique pearls of wisdom – shared by our guest RevOps experts on the first season of our podcast: The Go To Masters Show.
Mandatory plug: The Go To Masters Show - Season 2 is now streaming on Spotify, Google Podcasts, & Apple Podcasts.
Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way – let’s delve into these 12 timeless pieces of advice, straight from the horses’ mouths. To make this snackable, we’ve split this vast ocean into 4 zones:
- People
- Process optimization
- Go-to-market strategies
- Cross-functional collaboration.
Ready to take the plunge? Of course you are – let’s go! 🤩
Zone #1: People
How do you build a RevOps function from scratch?
Expert: Josh Pudnos, VP, Global Head of Revenue Operations at Exiger
If you’re coming into an organization where “RevOps” is a foreign word, chances are that only a few people have ever heard of this flourishing function. So, in case you’re building this from scratch, the first step is to establish your guiding principles.
Once your guiding principles are defined, Josh’s advice is to group RevOps’ tasks into 3 main categories: People, Processes, & Technology. Here’s how you further evaluate each of these:
People
Analyze your fellow employees by asking the following questions:
- Who are the people on my team?
- What’s their capacity like – what do they know & what can they learn?
- Who are my key stakeholders and what are their motivations?
- How willing are they to adapt to my proposals?
- How do I get their buy-in?
Processes
If you’re building a function from scratch, existing processes are likely to be inconsistent, confusing, not scalable – or simply put, broken. How do you salvage this?
Josh recommends using the highest leverage activity framework (higher impact produced at a lower time investment). He applied this by asking himself, “What’s the change that I can make today that’ll have the biggest & fastest downstream impact?” – which helped him quickly zero in on 3 essential action items:
- Clarifying lead conversion process
- Streamlining opportunity stages
- Optimizing revenue recognition process
Technology
On the technology front, if RevOps is virtually nonexistent, the CRM usage might not be that great. And without good quality data, the strategic impact of RevOps is diminished. So, as RevOps, it falls in your hands to find tools that automate the necessary data input and improve your team’s task efficiency.
How do you hire a RevOps professional?
Expert: Shantanu Shekhar, Senior Director, GTM Operations at Gong
Another key people-aspect of RevOps is hiring the right talent and helping them grow in their careers. So how do you find the right RevOps hire?
Here’s how you can assess them:
Thought Leadership: Analyze how the candidate has performed in their previous roles, and the kind of impact they’ve created for their organization(s). This will indicate their thought leadership capabilities.
Process Leadership: To assess this ability, take a closer look at the different kinds of projects they’ve worked on, and their ability to drive clear results.
People Leadership: RevOps folks are happy problem-solvers (most of them, anyway). During the interview, give them a RevOps-related problem, and see how they define it. More importantly, evaluate how they communicate it – how do they translate it to drive change? How do they communicate it to the right people? This will help you evaluate their people leadership potential.
How do you empower your reps through enablement?
Expert: Laura Fu, VP, Revenue Operations & Productivity at Olo
The approach to enablement is all about inspiring your reps. It’s not solely about how much information you can give them, but how confident you can make them feel so that they’re driven to do their job.
Another aspect of enablement follows the 7-touch enablement principle: when you teach somebody something 7 times in 7 different ways, it’s more likely for them to retain the information.
Building the reps’ confidence is the key. Good reps search for more resources on their own to become better. The responsibility thus lies on your shoulders to ensure that the right information is organized & readily accessible.
Zone #2: Process Optimization
How do you forecast revenue effectively?
Expert: Darren Fay, Senior Director, Revenue Operations at Henry Schein One
Forecasting where the buck starts & stops is crucial for RevOps. An effective revenue forecast relies on 2 factors: process definition & deal management.
According to Darren, you need to define your stages to reflect the sales process you follow with customers. If not done properly, you might face issues with how accurately these stages are identified. Secondly, provide clear guidelines to your sales teams on the commitment levels to avoid forecasting inaccuracies.
The way you manage the deal flow and align your stages with the sales process is also crucial. You also need to clearly understand how these are used, including the milestones or action items that need to happen for the deal to move forward.
Your commitment levels should be determined by customer sentiment. Once this is done, review these through regular cadences to ensure they’re accurate. You should also keep other hygiene metrics in mind.
3 key hygiene metrics that you should consider are:
- Slippage: When are deals coming out of the pipeline? What is being pulled in the time to close? What is our time to close for an opportunity on how we've historically closed deals?
- Close dates/timeline: Make sure that the close dates for every subsequent date aren’t in the past to avoid errors.
- Opportunity contacts: Ensure you have the right personas involved in your sales cycle.
How do you evaluate a tool to be added to the tech stack?
Expert: Olga Traskova, VP, Revenue Operations at Birdeye
When you join a company’s RevOps team, the first step is to analyze the tech stack. Look into the tools across the different teams, especially their usage and adoption. Make sure each tool adds value to your organization.
When you consider the tech stack, evaluate the business & technical components carefully:
To evaluate the business component:
- What gaps are we closing in here?
- What are we covering with that?
- What are we gaining from these tools?
There’s also the technical component:
- How is the data flowing?
- How are the integrations working?
- Do we see flawless syncs?
- Do data points match across different systems?
- Are data points able to provide us with the story?
How to approach change management as RevOps?
Expert: Rachel Lacsamana, Sr. Program Manager, GTM Operations at Komodo Health
Change is inevitable in RevOps – whether it’s rolling out a new process or implementing a new tech tool.
Thus, change management must be an integral part of your RevOps strategy, because it forms the foundation for relationships, connections, and facilitating conversations.
Here’s how you approach change management:
Problem discovery & validation
Often, when people consider a problem, they start looking for an isolated solution. There’s a chance that this might be the result of something else that’s further systemic. As RevOps, when you’re looking at a particular problem, confirm it by validating the assumption through data, anecdotes, tests & experiments.
Solution validation
Here, the key is to socialize with different stakeholders who will use this process or the project. One of the best ways to do this is to hold focus groups for different functions – sales, customer success, etc. You also need to consider pitching the business case: why should you get a particular team involved? Why should this project be important to other stakeholders?
Team activation
You need to approach this from both a strategic as well as tactical angle. The strategic angle forms the narrative:
- How many phases are you going to be rolling this out in?
- What's the timing of those phases?
- Are we giving the teams enough time to digest this information?
The tactical angle is all about:
- Communications
- Training sessions
- Follow up sessions
- Making sure that you're updating your materials
Check the usage of the product or data, and ensure you have the buy-in from your stakeholders on the appropriate amount of time to measure success, as results might take some time to show.
Zone #3: Go-To-Market Strategies
How do you set up scalable sales processes for GTM teams?
Expert: Saket Kapoor, Head of Global GTM Strategy at Citrix
Building repeatable & scalable sales processes depends on 2 factors: i) the growth stage & maturity of your company, and ii) the ACV of your average deal (along with the number of deals you do in a year).
Saket shares a 5-step framework for creating scalable sales processes:
- Build a strong data foundation. Collect & analyze data to identify weaknesses & high-impact opportunities.
- Perform diagnostics to figure out the root cause behind undesirable metrics and identify potential solutions & tactics used by your most successful reps.
- Test, design, and iterate. Prototype the sales process with a small set of sellers, and then keep iterating on it until you find the sweet spot.
- Design the enablement around this to scale it to your entire sales force. Keep training your sales force as you’re educating them on the new processes.
- Training isn’t enough, you need to reinforce.
The last step is crucial because behavior change is hard. And, at the end of the day, you want to have more consistency amongst all your sellers. It’s not about just the top 20% overachieving, you want the middle of the pack to be doing well too.
How do you build a strong customer base in European markets?
Expert: Semir Jahic, CEO, Salesmotion.io
Building a customer base is quite a challenge, especially when it comes to European markets.
Semir’s focus was on using outbound data to build the first set of customers to create early traction, what he calls “lighthouse customers”.
These lighthouse customers gradually become true champions. For instance, a VP of RevOps at a particular company might become the CRO at the same (or a different) firm. Building a good relationship with them, while demonstrating your product’s value, can help you expand your customer base.
With GDPR privacy, you need to find frameworks and methods like these that’ll help you improve your customer base and your brand advocacy. When you make your lighthouse customers successful – they’ve seen the value that you provide. This, in turn, improves brand advocacy.
How do you improve customer retention & expansion with data?
Expert: Ramabhadran Kapistalam, Head of Global Sales Strategy, Analytics, & AI at Red Hat
One of the most common mistakes you could make is focusing on the wrong indicators, i.e., focusing on the lagging instead of the leading indicators.
Similarly, organizations are focused on driving revenue & customer retention. However, revenue is a lagging indicator. You should focus on the leading indicators, such as customer success, retention, adoption, & customer satisfaction.
There’s another leading indicator that’s often overlooked. Most companies look solely at bookings – both the number of deals, as well as the volume. However, building a pipeline should be the key consideration. It falls under the purview of RevOps to coach sales teams to understand how they can drive pipeline, for it’s the leading indicator.
So what can you, as RevOps, do?
Go out there with a curious mindset, and enquire about the customer. Transition from an analyst to a consultant, even an advisor. Build trust with the teams, and they’ll start appreciating and seeing the value.
Other aspects that must be considered are deal hygiene, pipeline health, attrition risk, customer churn, etc. Integrate these aspects into the selling process, where sales teams can truly act upon them. Identifying the assets, integrating them into your selling motions, and then surfacing them up in a more curated and consistent way, can help you improve your retention & expansion.
Zone #4: Cross-functional Collaboration
Why should RevOps & Finance collaborate to build compensation plans?
Expert: Vicki Werner, VP, Sales Operations - Americas at Verint
As RevOps (or Sales Ops), you should understand that sales & finance are two different functions with the same goal: to make more money.
While finance people want predictability & linearity, sales deals with personalities & people. This intersection between sales & finance is crucial for translating organizational goals into tactics. A well-crafted compensation plan addresses all aspects & risks, ensuring financial stability and compliance.
Plus, if your comp plans are crafted right, your revenue will skyrocket – and that’s your main motivation as RevOps, isn’t it?
How do you minimize friction between Sales & RevOps teams?
Expert: Nicholas Vanholsbeke, Senior Manager, Sales Operations at Numerator
Right off the bat, you need to let your sales teams know that you’re there to help them & guide them; to be a partner first.
Of course, it’s not going to be easy, because there’s a notion among sales teams that RevOps is yet another back-office role. You need to build trust with sales to have the difficult yet necessary conversations.
For instance, if you ask a sales rep about their forecast, they might get defensive. Or, they might ask some tough questions, but that’s solely because they care about the business. It’s in your hands to help them understand that you’re all working towards the same goal of driving revenue growth. You need to support them so that they do their job to the best of their abilities.
How can ABM & RevOps align with each other?
Expert: Lorena Morales, Director of Global Digital Marketing Revenue Operations at JLL
Marketing, especially account-based marketing (ABM) has more in common with RevOps than you know. ABM works only if you have an unwavering customer focus.
It is often wrongly implied that ABM is solely marketing’s focus. Both sales and marketing need to be accountable for the revenue that flows through the funnel. It’s not necessarily a tech stack alignment that is required. You need to align tools & data, no doubt.
However, you need to understand more about the players on your team. You need to speak the right language and have tough conversations with your sales teams on how to bring in more revenue.
Alignment is the need of the hour when it comes to ABM & RevOps. It’s more about aligning mindsets rather than tools. Focusing on customers and revenue doesn’t have to be 2 different things, it should rather be a twofold strategy.
Summary & Conclusion
Alright, phew! That was quite a deep-dive, so let’s resurface for a breath of fresh air.
Here’s a quick summary of what we covered in the blog:
- If you’re building a RevOps function from the ground up, start by setting your guiding principles. Focus on people, processes, & technology.
- When hiring for RevOps, look for 3 qualities: Thought Leadership, Process Leadership, and People Leadership.
- Enablement is not all about providing information; it’s about inspiring your reps to perform better.
- To forecast revenue effectively, rely on clear processes and good deal management.
- Evaluate both business and technical aspects of each tool in your tech stack.
- Change management is crucial for RevOps - identify problems, validate solutions, and make sure your team is on board.
- To build scalable sales processes, training alone isn’t enough. Reinforce changes in behavior.
- Build a strong customer base in European markets with concepts like “lighthouse” customers.
- Focus on leading indicators like building a pipeline instead of solely focusing on lagging ones.
- Work together with finance to create comp plans that ensure stability & compliance.
- Become a trusted partner to minimize friction between sales & RevOps teams.
- To better align ABM & RevOps, focus on customers & revenue as a unified strategy
We hope that these pearls of wisdom help you navigate through the uncharted waters of RevOps. Good luck! 🚀
P.S. Don’t forget to tune into The Go To Masters Show - Season 2, now streaming on Spotify, Google Podcasts, & Apple Podcasts.
