The hard skills are table stakes: ability to analyze data and turn data into insights The most important soft skill, and the x-factor in my opinion, is having a thick skin. This is a thankless role at times, where you get blamed when things are wrong but get minimal or no credit when the sales team is on track. It takes a certain type of personality to be okay with that. Other important soft skills are around stakeholder management, cross-functional collaboration, and executive presence. You'll be working directly with VPs across sales and other functions so you need to be able to have a point of view and share it articulately and succinctly, while also displaying empathy and compassion with the sales team. 

I think the revenue operations career path is anything but typical. It's part of the reason why there's so little training and education around how to be a revenue operations leader, and why there is so much demand for good talent. The ways that I've seen people successfully enter and expand within the revenue operations space is: 1. Specialize at first: It's good to have an idea of where you want to focus your initial career development within RevOps. I would start with Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, or CS Ops and learn everything you can around that specific discipline. Try to start in that niche and grow your experience from there. 2. Lead to grow: For those of you who want to grow out of the specialized role and into a RevOps leader where you oversee multiple operations functional areas, I would try to get leadership experience in just your specialized area first (Marketing Operations Manager, Sales Operations Manager, etc). If you don't have sufficient leadership skills built up by the time you transition into managing multiple different functional areas, some that you will know better than others, you will likely struggle. 3. Take on new challenges: Everyone in RevOps knows that there are more asks than there will ever be time. To uplevel your career path, be selective in what you choose to take on. Every business will present opportunities that align with the core abilities that you can knock out of the park. Start with those, but grow into the things that are slightly outside of your comfort zone that will enable you to expand your experience and grow into a larger role.

When there are only one or two team members, I would have the team focus on mission-critical projects only. The three main areas would be 1: Sales process & forecasting, 2. Define and measure KPIs, 3. Sales Compensation design. Initially, individuals will cover broader responsibilities but will not have the capacity to go very deep in each area. All of these can evolve throughout the business, but I would clearly define and set the structure by working closely with your sales leader. * Sales Process & Forecasting: You can be simple with the process. In the beginning, set 2 - 3 action items and 1 - 2 exit criteria for each stage. Don't worry too much about getting the fields or validation rules right. The key is to train the sales team so that it becomes easy to remember and follow. In one of my roles, we used to print and laminate a 1-pager, and all reps had it on their desks. Also, investing in solid forecasting tools (Aviso, Clari) will be foundational. Making sure there is visibility and enforcement on forecast categories (pipeline/upside/commit) goes a long way. * Define and Measure KPIs: For SaaS businesses, there are ~10 metrics you should care about. (ARR (by region, business type, segment), Average Deal Size, # of Deals, Cycle Time, Conversion Rates, Win Rates, # of Customers, Retention Rate, Rep Productivity, Rep Attainment). You should define these metrics and build your SFDC data structure so that anyone can easily pull these numbers. It will save you time to focus more on strategy and insights if you get the fundamentals in place. * Sales Compensation Design: Again, comp plans can be simple. There are many standard comp plans out there. I would stick to those and not do anything crazy. As the business evolves and business goals change, you would want to add components, but in general, I will keep it to the basics.

I'd start by reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It's a great resource to truly understand the OKR system with actionable templates and examples. Buy copies for your leadership team and work on developing this muscle as a team. The trick is not so much the OKRs themselves, but it's behavior that it reinforces with your teams to ensure your revenue operations team is staying proactive and focused and doesn't get whipsaweed by the demands of the organizations they support.

The best way to think about a 30/60/90 day plan when you have never done one before is to break it out as follows: * Define what Revenue Operations is, what is the vision, responsibilities, etc. getting this alignment is critical when this is a new role/function in an organization * Outline the resources on the team (who does what) * Outline the current technology stack (cannot figure out what you all have, ask finance, someone pays the bill ;-)) * Determine how the business should work with RevOps (what is the operating cadence, how will work be prioritized, what is the communication plan, etc.) * Summarize the current state (where is the business today, what is missing/needed) * This turns into your roadmap - outline what resources and collaboration will be needed to properly deliver (set these expectations upfront) Here is a sample RevOps roadmap template: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RrROWL8uZYXJtobQi0FnvRP8oI7ifV9VE1aAmZsxY5g/edit?usp=sharing

Rev ops should be a Day 2 hire - the systems and tools a company are implementing from very early days (e.g. SFDC) would benefit from a dedicated operations person to ensure that things are being built for scale. I may be biased as an ops person myself, but I think it’s extremely important to invest in these resources early on. I’ve never talked to a leader who says ‘I hired my rev ops person too early,’ but have heard many people lament the opposite. Practically, I think that after a company has gone from founder-led selling and there is a sales leader with 1-2 sales reps on board, it is time to hire a rev ops manager.

Within the first few weeks I will meet with my immediate and extended stakeholders to understand: * Top of mind concerns/pain points * Existing processes, current state, and potential gaps in resources, tools etc This will then drive my list of: - Quick Wins/Goals (30 Days) - Mid-Term Wins/Goals (60/90 Days) & - Long-Term Wins/Goals (>90 Days) * Quick wins/goals ideally would be something that is top of mind for my stakeholders, visible and attainable within the 30-day timeframe. As an example, in one of my prior roles a pain point I kept hearing during early conversations was around lack access to actionable data. In that instance I was able to work with my team to create a Tableau dashboard that provided visibility to the relevant stakeholders. Although the solution was pretty straightforward in this case the impact was fairly visible and notched a quick win for me as well as my team. * For mid-term wins/goals I like to think of efficiencies in terms of team structure and alignment, tools that are underutilized and/or could be consolidated. * Finally, for the long-term I like to think of what my northstar should be to align with the overall company strategy. As an example if the company plans to go upmarket in the next 1-2 years I would want to think about the systems, processes and tools from that lense and make certain that the short and mid-term plans are not a bandaid fix but more of a longer term solution.

I'd consider a format that is easily accessible and that is easy to keep up to date. As such, I'd suggest something like a company wiki and/or link directly from your BI tool or whichever platform teams across your company access data and analytics. When creating this data dictionary, I'd spend the time upfront to get alignment from all the key stakeholders across the company that touch data that this will be the single source of truth and align on the process, timing and owners for updates to maintain the relevance of the content.

That's a tough one. A few ideas: * Thank your boss for the feedback and ask him/her for suggestions on how to improve. Ask for specific examples. Ask "what are others doing that I am not?". If I were your boss in this example, I would want to know that you are struggling with the feedback so I can help provide clarity. * Find a mentor within the company (or potentially outside the company) that you can go to for advice. Share that you are struggling with the feedback and ask for ideas. A good mentor will be able to help. * If you have a peer that reports to the same leader, and you have a good realtionship, you can speak with him/her to see if they are getting similar feedback. They may be able to help interpret the feedback. 

So I may get drummed out of the Sales Strategy business for this answer, but I would have to say "raw" Pipe Generation. Yes Yes I know thats crazy! I very specifically included the word raw because I am referring to pipe generation numbers that have not been scrutinized by strategy/sales leadership. I say this because sales people are SMART. They know all the tricks of the trade. If they know they need to have $750k of pipegen each quarter as an example, I have seen time and time again sales people submit opportunities (cough) often for next FY or several quarters away that are, frankly, not real. They will game the game to check the pipe gen box, and the pipe is full of garbage. This can throw off your coverage calculations and paint a rosy picture where there is not one. As a result, it is a MUST to regularly inspect your business' pipeline in order to maintain an accurate pulse of your business.