The Year in RevOps
Today, let’s take a quick look back at some of those conversations. How do our guests define RevOps? Why is RevOps important? And what do you need to know to make your RevOps team successful?
Welcome to Rise of RevOps, I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Gasping Studios.
Today we're taking a look back on our most recent season.
I've had the chance to speak with some incredible minds in the revenue
operation space.
One of my favorite parts is every conversation that we get to hear how guests
define revops.
Each definition is a little different, and each definition brings something new
to the
rev-ops tape.
So today let's take a quick look back at some of those conversations.
How do our guests define rev-ops?
Why is rev-ops important?
And what do you need to know to make your rev-ops team successful?
Let's get into it.
First we hear from Michelle, the Chief Revenue Officer, at Sixclicks.
Michelle leads the sales and marketing team and she is responsible for revenue
generation
strategy and execution.
In her episode, Michelle describes the importance of cross-functional teams.
She explained which structures and cadences work best for her and how she found
success
in rev-ops.
Rev-ops is really a cross-functional discipline that is designed to optimize
revenue, those
existing revenue in terms of protecting it as well as growing your revenue
stream.
And when I say cross-functional, I mean it really touches every portion of the
organization
from, well, the obvious sales and marketing, but also customer success.
Back office oftentimes has to be involved in rev-ops and as I said, I think
information
security should play a role in that as well.
Instinct without context is futile.
Instinct without data is futile.
So while it's important to follow your gut, I think having data is critical.
You can't operate without it.
Next, let's get to Todd Thomas.
He's the Chief Revenue Officer at Aiden Auto, which integrates third-party
digital services
directly into your vehicle.
Todd and I talked about how to organize your startup for success and how to
make rev-ops
reflect your go-to-market strategy.
Here's what he had to say about restructuring your rev-ops for success.
So I define it as everything that touches the generation of revenue for the
company.
So I have a pretty broad umbrella.
I definitely think it begins with PR and marketing.
Certainly sales, sales management, the BED team and customer success, I think
that's
all probably pretty standard.
But I also would include solutions engineering in there because it's really
part of the sales
process.
If you're moving into a POC and your solutions engineer is integral to that,
particularly
if the actual process of integration is part of your value proposition, if you
have a faster
integration or an easier integration or no code integration, those are keys to
your selling
and the solution engineer is key to it.
So I would include all of those different groups.
And I would say you really need to maximize revenue.
You need really good collaboration and cooperation across all of those
different teams.
But how you structure your revenue offs really can be one of the keys to
whether or not the
startup makes it or not.
Make sure that you're amplified and getting the most out of the resources you
have available.
I mean the rev-ops should be a reflection of your strategy and your go-to-
market plan.
And for Aiden in particular, we have a, I would say highly focused outreach.
We have a very small team but a very well connected team, a very strong network
And so we leverage that network of the members of our team as well as our
advisors and our
investors to try to compress the sales cycle by getting in front of decision
makers as soon
as possible.
And I know everybody says we want to compress the sales cycle.
I get that.
But the way that we do that is by using existing connections to reach out
directly.
So ideally our very first meeting is with a decision maker.
So we can move really quickly.
Well Todd described the rev-ops as a structured, strategic and plan part of his
company.
Scott Hoffman, our next guest, went in almost the opposite direction.
Scott is the Chief Revenue Officer at GFT USA.
And he doesn't want his revenue operations team to follow a pattern.
It's more about emotion empathy than you may think.
Here's Scott.
My hope here is that rev-ops doesn't follow that pattern.
That rev-ops is a cultural aspect.
It's an accountability aspect.
It's a driving empathy between these different unique areas of skill to
understand how we
each impact the other.
And it doesn't devolve into tools, just lots of tools and we can automate all
these things
and we know everything about a client and that's the end of it and there's a
dashboard
and you're done.
The human aspect and that accountability aspect I think is probably the most
interesting and
critical thing.
So there you have it.
The human aspect of rev-ops.
Now let's talk teamwork.
That's what Kiva Colstein, President and Chief Revenue Officer at AlphaSense
brought up.
AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform.
Kiva oversees rev-ops, renewals and referrals.
He says that rev-ops is all about bringing teams together, creating a common
goal for
everyone.
I think rev-ops is about bringing teams together.
It's about breaking down silos.
It's about aligning everyone toward a common goal, revenue growth.
And what rev-ops is responsible for to some extent is orchestrating this
seamless collaboration
between sales and marketing and customer success and all of that is fueled by
data.
And so providing all of those teams, all of those leaders, the data that we
need to inform
all the decisions that we make.
The other thing that rev-ops does for me is helps me use the data that I might
find in
Salesforce or Tableau or GONG and tell a story with that data.
I'm telling a story to an investor, to a candidate, to the board, to the
broader sales organization.
And so what they become a bit are storytellers, helping me tell stories with
the data that
they pull out.
Really, really important.
I think one thing I might add is it's important to understand how best to use,
not just as
a CRO, but the relationship that begins to exist between rev-ops and SDR and S
DR management
and AE and AM and marketing.
Those are relationships that don't form overnight.
And so each of them have to figure out how best to collaborate with each other
and use
the data that's being provided by rev-ops to inform the strategy in that
specific function.
And so we spend some time on that thinking about, "Okay, this is what rev-ops
is sharing
with the SDR leadership team.
What do I do with that information?
How do we get higher quality meetings?
How do we decrease the time between meeting and opportunity?
How do we identify the right targets?
What tools are we using to do that?"
You know, are things that the rev-ops team assists the SDR team with doing.
And of course, we can say the same kinds of things for AE, AM, et cetera.
Relationships between cross-functional teams don't just grow overnight.
Good leaders encourage good connections.
And our next guest has more to say on cross-team relationships.
Brian Tolle is the Chief Revenue Officer at GoldCast, a digital events platform
and measurement
system.
Brian says, "Good rev-ops strategy aligns with good business strategy and that
a rev-ops
team should always be on the same page as the board.
Once those things are aligned, they can work together for client success."
Rev-ops strategy aligns with the business strategy.
So I always start with what is the business goals?
What did the executive sign off with?
Once you have that, you say, "Okay, what do we currently have in place?
And then what do we need to add to get there?"
And I actually like to start with an Excel spreadsheet of just what is the
forecast of
traffic to our webpage, to the amount of leads we're going to get inbound, to
the conversion
of those leads, outbound prospecting, how many BDRs do we have, where are we
going, and
then from the initial first touchpoint all the way through scheduled demos to
closed demos,
meaning it actually happened to proposals all the way through.
And I like to start with the measurement because it first forces our team to
think it through
about what needs to happen.
It allows us to then take it up to the tower, the board, and the execs to say,
"Hey, this
is what we think we can accomplish to make sure we're aligned."
And then once it is, then you start enacting that whole process for your funnel
, for your
persona, or your different products.
So you're able to be effective and you're able to measure what's working and
not working
and why, and then adjust along the way.
Then you get information, make sure that that RevOps flow is documenting it and
making sure
that's in the right places for the right teams in the right systems.
And if you just do that, clients will at least feel you're listening to them.
Clients will feel like you care about them.
And that goes a long way before you even really start your journey.
Next, let's talk tools and trends.
Jamie Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer at Inverse, described how RevOps gives
his team visibility
into pipeline and important trends.
And that's critical for Inverse, which is a global leader in spend optimization
with expense,
travel management, and payment solutions.
He described how investing in your RevOps team will result in great ROI and how
to focus
on what really matters when building your bottom line.
If I go back to my days at Seabull Systems over 20 years ago now, and I look at
moving
from there to SAP, I saw two businesses which were very, very focused on
running the numbers
and had incredibly strong discipline installed and still rather than people to
pay attention
to those things.
Now the tools that we use to get to the numbers were a lot less sophisticated
today.
Certainly did not have artificial intelligence built into them.
But we did notice enough in trends that enabled us to accurately predict where
we thought
we would land as revenue teams.
So there's definitely been around a long time.
We probably just didn't call it RevOps.
And there certainly wasn't RevOps teams.
That's for sure.
I think just giving us that visibility into our pipeline trends.
So we have several different businesses.
We basically serve 18,000 customers globally as a company.
So being able to see the patterns where those customers, and particularly from
a customer
success perspective, where those customers are using the technology, where we
can actually
see how they're engaging with us.
If we're creating opportunities to support that engagement, so for things like
retention
and cross-cere and upsell, we have that visibility in the business.
Similarly, as we look at what constitutes our ideal customer profile, I think
the key
to it all is agreeing together what the priorities are.
And that is what the go-to-market priorities are, what the key messages that we
want you
to deliver are, making sure that the marketing and sales programs and campaigns
support the
go-to-market with the right content and the right execution.
And that way everybody's working towards a shared goal.
Up next is Charles Lou, VP of Operations at LexCheck.
LexCheck accelerates contract review and streamlines negotiations by delivering
redlines
and issues less in minutes while ensuring consistency across contracts.
Charles explained how he uses RevOps as a strategic tool not only for tracking
revenue,
but assessing performance and identifying areas for improvement.
Let's start with Charles' definition of RevOps, and then we'll hear how he
stays competitive
in the business.
It's a structure that my sales team needs to fit themselves into so I can help
them
be better at what they do.
That in a nutshell is the way that I look at it.
It's a tool for me to one, get information about how the revenue acquisition
aspect of
the business is working, evaluate whether it's doing well, whether it needs to
be improved
in certain areas.
But also it's a tool to help me experiment with different tactics, different
ideas to
be able to implement those things in an efficient way and get learnings out of
them that I
can implement and deploy and kind of get value out of.
We had a very comprehensive infrastructure set up, but it actually became a bit
of an
obstacle because it prevented folks from getting creative.
We've been around for a while and we've been fairly successful in a lot of ways
, but I
think that we are still, as far as I'm concerned, always experimenting to be
able to do things
better.
In the space where we're at, especially as one of the first movers in the AI
space, in
order to stay ahead, right, stay ahead of the competition, not only do we need
to be creative
from a product perspective and a delivery perspective, but also from a sales
perspective.
The biggest obstacle that I've had to face in this role so far has been
creating an infrastructure
of process points around our sellers that is flexible enough to let them be
creative
and let them do what they do well, which is help our customers identify pain
points
and get them on a tool that's going to provide them value, but at the same time
, I still
need to be able to get that insight around how they're doing their jobs and how
well
they're doing their jobs.
Being able to take that really complicated infrastructure and turning it into
something
powerful but manageable was probably the biggest overall challenge.
One of the movers that I live by, and this actually comes from our CEO, is the
time kills
all deals, right?
Inactivity kills all deals.
Open decision points will kill a deal.
So what the challenge that we saw coming in was taking those exit criteria and
boiling
them down to, can you write a proposal for this client, right?
Not a proposal that they need necessarily to sign, right?
But can you write a proposal that will basically set out something that we can
provide them
that will provide them value?
Next let's hear from SEMA Rashid, Senior Vice President of Revenue Analytics at
Sixth Sense.
In this special episode, Robert Zimmerman, the CEO of Qualified, interviewed S
EMA at
a live rise of RevOps event at Dreamforce earlier this year.
And SEMA gave her definition of RevOps.
Here it is.
When I hear RevOps, I think of two things.
I think of alignment and integration, right?
So really what the goal of RevOps is to accelerate business growth through the
alignment and integration
of your marketing sales and customer success functions.
It can look very different across different orgs, right?
It depends on the maturity of those ops functions within organizations.
It depends on the organizational readiness as well.
I think early on in the RevOps world, it was all about let's bring those teams
together
under one chief revenue officer and that was the only way.
But I've been in companies where the marketing operations team might have a
higher level of
maturity than some of the other functions or the metrics are so different or
maybe enablement
isn't pulled in.
In some cases, the annual planning process sits outside an corporate function
as opposed
to in a field strategy and planning organization.
So I think there's different flavors of it and it really depends on the company
, the
structure, what's in place and the organizational readiness.
But it all goes back to alignment and integration.
Whether it's all one team or whether there's just an interlock and a cadence
that those
teams work towards.
Nobody's data is perfect.
And I think as somebody who's built in the analytics teams for 17 years, nobody
will
achieve perfection.
I think consistency of measurement, single source of truth is number one, the
biggest
thing.
But there's always blind spots, right?
I would love to know exactly what, you know, have attribution down to, you know
, every single
touch point, I will never get it.
So it's about understanding that there is some ambiguity.
There's no silver bullet.
So when you are looking at the data that you have, you're putting it into that
context,
right?
Attribution tools, you know, can get you to a certain place, but they're not
going to
get you to that full view.
Similarly, you know, who is that full buying group?
I mentioned that, you know, we sell to accounts and people within those
accounts.
Our reps might not put every single contact on that deal, right?
But I know the data tells me that our win rates double when we have at least at
least
six people on a deal.
I know generally what those six personas are.
And so I do use that to inform where the sellers go, where the marketers focus
their
campaigns on.
But I'm sure there's more than that, right?
There's plenty of folks that might not see.
So there are gaps.
Everyone has gaps, but we really try and plug them where we can through
automation, through
using technology to fill those gaps, but always just understanding that the
data is
not perfect.
And so we will use what we have to drive the best informed decisions that we
can make.
Next, we heard from Jason Rushforth, the senior vice president and GM for the
Americas
at Sugar CRM.
Sugar is a CRM solution that provides automation, data, and intelligence
services.
When I talk to Jason, he said that you're doing your research and asking
questions, and
that's critical to setting yourself up for success.
That's your OJson drives revenue.
There's a lot of cogs in the wheel to drive revenue.
And those cogs in the wheel are from everything from marketing to sales to
service to product,
to delivery to customer experience.
So to me, it's about the alignment of the objectives and goals and driving the
operational
function that is cross functional to achieve growth and successful outcomes for
from a revenue
perspective.
But I will say something, as a go-to-market leader, I don't need to build fief
doms to build success.
And I have to work with my sales operations team, my marketing ops team.
If you're BDR organization or your SDR organization lives in marketing or sales
, it shouldn't matter
if you're driving the revenue engine where they report to, but rather aligning
them to
the goals and objectives of what the business is trying to accomplish is
probably paramount
to the place that they report to.
Customer success is non-negotiable as an employee of our company.
So we have to make sure our customers love us, they're happy with us, and that
we build
a working relationship with those customers.
But inside of that, my attention does pivot from point to point within a given
week, month,
quarter year, based on the KPIs that I'm looking at to facilitate success
within the
business.
So if I have a deficient pipeline, I'm going to be spending a lot of time with
the marketing
team and the BDR organization.
I'm going to be rallying the sales team around how do we build pipeline that
sustains itself
because pipeline is the fuel for the revenue engine in the business.
Customer success is non-negotiable.
Couldn't agree more.
Okay, folks, we have one more guest coming up, and that is John Fong, CRO of
Domain
Group.
Domain is one of the largest property marketplaces and portals in the Southern
Hemisphere, and
John told me how he uses RevOps to assist Domain and sales team.
Then he dove a little deeper and described revenue in three parts as he sees it
So I think RevOps to me is many different components.
Classically, RevOps has been about pricing and finding the right pricing value
and bundle
packages for our customers.
But what I think of the operations team in my organization is actually very
large.
It's about 300 people there in total.
Most of them are part of what we call customer experience, that is helping a
customer when
they have a problem, and ideally work with product to avoid the problem
happening in
the first place.
But we also have a neighborhood team.
We have a performance team, which sets quotas and incentives.
We have lots of other different teams that can really, all with the objective
of helping
our sales team be more effective, and our customers be well-served.
So the way I think of revenue is in three components.
There's what we can't control, which is how many houses are going to be sold by
the market
this year.
That number we can't control.
It's a function of interest rates, macroeconomic, whether a session is going
unemployment, etc.,
etc., that's one component.
We fundamentally control two things.
The average revenue per listing, which is a function of how much, how we price
and the
various pricing tiers and models we have, and then our market share.
Our market share is, what percentage of those 500,000 listings are going to pay
to be listed
on the main?
So at a high level, that's how I think about revenue.
I can't control that first one, which is how many houses that we have for sale
in any given
year of 500,000, but I can control what percentage would be on us and what
price we charged
it.
That's basically how I target my team.
I've divided my team into, I've got customer experience, which is a very large
and awesome
team.
But I have over 100 people who have a territory.
In their territory, they might have as few as 20, as many as a few 100 real
estate agents.
Their job is to show each of those real estate agents, "Hey, this is why you
should be
recommending to your sellers why they should be in our platform."
And so each of them have effectively a market share goal to get to as close to
100% as possible.
On top of that, they have a revenue goal, which is we just don't want them on
the cheapest
option.
We want to give them as much value as possible.
So we have classic basic silver, gold, platinum, platinum edge.
Each of those have more features, more exposure, bigger branding for the real
estate agency.
What we're constantly trying to do is train our salespeople to show the value
of the
higher tiers, but also work with our product team and the RevOps team to say, "
Hey, if we
develop these new products and these new features, can we charge more money at
all the tiers,
at some tiers?"
So we're constantly in that cycle of trying to bring more value.
We've got to charge more revenue as well as increase in the market share of how
many
people are actually using the paint product.
And there you have it.
One of the most brilliant RevOps minds all in one room, sort of a digital room.
It's been an awesome season.
We have heard a few different perspectives on how to define and approach RevOps
We've seen all different ways of thinking and looking at it.
And it's evolving.
It's changing every single day.
And that's what's so exciting about doing this series, is just hearing how
different
people are doing it at different companies and different types of companies.
Thanks so much for listening for the whole season.
If you need anything from me or anything from our team, you can email us at
Of course, thanks always to the amazing people who qualified, go to qualified.
com to learn
more.
They deserve to be in your tool shed for 2024.
Thanks again to Qualified.
We love them dearly.
I'm Ian Fazan, CEO of Cast Meensudios.
And I'll see you next time on Rise of RevOps.
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