Revenue operations is an evolving field that has emerged from the convergence of traditionally siloed roles like sales, customer success and marketing operations. Many professionals in revenue operations do not start their careers with the intention of landing in this field; instead, they often transition from roles in sales, marketing, customer success, finance, business operations, or even technical positions. The appeal of revenue operations lies in its holistic approach to managing go-to-market strategies, which requires a blend of strategic insight and cross-functional coordination. The role is ideal for those who thrive on synthesizing complex operations and driving growth through data-driven strategies and collaboration across various business functions. If you are currently outside of revenue operations, consider how your unique skills can contribute to the multifaceted challenges of go-to-market strategies, and whether these challenges excite you.

AI is changing everything. I would argue that prior to AI in business intelligence, self service really didn't exist. At least not in the way business leaders really need. AI brings the gift of natural language and automated insights to allow non technical and business leaders the ability to get real-time answers to questions in a conversational environment - before AI, dashboards had to be created and filters made...and if your leader asked for one small change, it would have to be rebuilt by your analyst team - this is called the data backlog. With AI entering the scene and allowing for follow up questions in conversational formats, it solves for the the data backlog - which, honestly changes everything. When business leaders need data, it's usually for an urgent need - a meeting, a decision, a concern - and by the time the backlog clears, the moment as passed.

I don't have a recommendation for or against this type of detailed preparation, especially if it helps you structure verbal responses that also give a glimpse into how you think, problem solve and can be an asset to the company. But I wouldn't focus on developing unrequested collateral at the expense of having solid verbal responses. I would bring out supporting materials when they support your response to a particular question (ie if asked about what your 30-60-90 day plan would be in the role or what your organizational process is, show the prepared collateral as part of your response). Just be prepared for technical difficulties (internet bandwidth issues, screen sharing issues etc) that may impact how/if you can share these items in the interview itself. And remember, if what you prepared highlights a particular strength that you bring to the role, then you could also include it in a "thank you" email as a follow-up to your conversation.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that at the end of the day, we are all in revenue generation, and that everything must tie to that. So while I'm all for early indicator signals (MQLs, SALs, Opps Created, Demos) and anticipating/resolving problems before they exist, it is important to make sure you are tying those early indicator signals to closed won. It doesn't do anyone any good if your MQL is going through the roof but revenue is not.

Revenue Operations roles can be hard to quantify performance (especially compared to sales or demand gen marketing roles we work closely with which are highly quantified). There are four things I typically look back on as part of my self-assessment/reflection at the end of a year. 1. Business performance. Even though I don't have a quota, my team and I play a crucial role in helping our company grow. As a senior leader, I feel responsibility for hitting our financial plan (revenue and cost), growing at a target rate, and other performance-metrics (varying by company) that I think my team and I influence. 2. Employee Satisfaction. I want to know if the people I lead are engaged in their work and finding their employment experience rewarding. To do that, I look at results of the annual/semi-annual employee engagement or satisfaction surveys. It's helpful to see how my team compare to the company overall and any qualitative feedback is really valuable too. This can be harder on smaller teams where anonymity isn't possible, but you should still be able to informally gauge how your team feels (regrettable attrition the most front and center indicator). 3. Sense of accomplishment / delivery of key initiatives. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve in a period. I have my own vision for the team, org, and company and we set goals as a leadership team. We also are involved in company-wide initiatives, often being responsible for delivering entire programs or large parts of them. With this, I do an honest assessment of the work and a post-mortem exercise to learn from our mistakes. 4. General sense of professional well-being. It's also important to do a bigger picture temperature check on your job and life as a whole. At work, I want to know that I am learning new things and working on challenging problems, that I like the people I work with, that I feel I have a "seat at the table" for topics that matter to me. I also want to have time and energy for my family and personal interests and health. If those aren't in a good enough place, then no amount of 1-3 will make me feel fully successful in a year. The weighting of those changes over time, but is always present.

Stakeholders should be aligned to shared goals or priorities. I like to work together with my sales leaders to formulate and share those priorities and come up with success metrics for each goal. My team will ideally come up with the goals across their given sales teams so we all know what we are aiming for. Cross-functional partner team should also know how they are contributing to the goals, e.g. how many MQLs does it take to get to our sales target, as a marketing goal.

First of all, I don't believe that tension between functions is a bad thing. Although too much tension is toxic, too little tension leads to complacency. The key is to strike a balance, operating in a state of "healthy tension". In my experience, the most important factor to achieve a state of healthy tension is effective communications. Often, excessive tension emerges as a result of unmet expectations or wrong assumptions. Both can be mitigated through open and honest communication. If expectations are set and agreed upfront, it becomes a matter of accountability. If someone is curious about why a stakeholder took a certain action, instead of making an assumption they can simply ask the person an open-ended question. Here are a few tools that I find helpful to improve communications between functions: * Regular 1:1s: allow stakeholders to see eye-to-eye, realign expectations on an ongoing basis, and avoid small issues to snowball * Ways of working discovery: an intentional conversation solely aimed at understanding each other's preferred communication styles and ways of working * Clean escalation: at times, teams spend endless cycles trying to reach alignment at their level, without success, which can lead to frustration, tension and slow decisions. In those situations, the best path is to escalate the decision up the management chain

● Example OKRs: ○ Objective: Increase pipeline health by 15%. ○ Key Results: Reduce deal aging by 20%, increase qualified leads by 10%.

Quantifying RevOps leaders’ success criteria consists of setting clear, measurable results that directly connect operational improvements back to tangible business outcomes. here are some key metrics you can potentially address when talking to Rev Ops leaders about your products, and bear with me as I'm not an expert on that: 1. Increased operational efficiency: Gauge the time saved on manual tasks such as data entry, data cleaning and healing breaches at rack level. If, for example, Sonar could allow you to reduce the time you spend on these activities by 30%, every man hour you save can be translated into so many financial savings. Enhanced Data Accuracy and Integrity: Track improvements in data accuracy and the concomitant reduction in errors or discrepancies that crop up within Salesforce. This will help build confidence decision-making and improve forecast accuracy. For example, you can measure the impact on revenue adjustments due to more accurate forecasting. 2. Reduced Tech Debt: How much are you saving by reducing tech debt? For this, consider introductory data maintenance prevention against streamlined operation accessibility. Metrics to include the average length away from production due to downtime, the costs of faults that are corrected in real-time and times diverted from strategic projects to meet urgent, unplanned repairs. 3. Faster Problem Resolution: Quantify the reduced average resolution time for salesforce issues. This would help you show how Sonar helps to identify and resolve problems faster and more thoroughly. Also, analyze any improved system saved up-time from a sales productivity and monetary viewpoint. 4. Improved Adoption and Utilization: Show that Sonar promotes user adoption and mastery of Salesforce functionality. This links in increased sales performance metrics, such as more frequent logging in sales activities or the visibility of one's own sales pipeline. Now, in terms of what a great year would look like for me, these are the things I would normally consider: 1. Revenue Impact: Tangible impact on your revenue, whether it be a direct increase from improved sales processes or a better goal attainment by the sales team. 2. Reduced Operational Costs: A great improvement in operating efficiency leads to much lower operational costs. 3. Strategic Project Completion: More staff for strategic projects that have previously been shelved because of the burdens on operations which took up all our resources. 4. Enhanced Team Satisfaction: More satisfying work and less burnout among team members due to there being less in the way of low value-added, repetitive task-type work. This is leading to higher retention rates and morale all round. 5. Customer Satisfaction: A rosier picture than before includes greater satisfaction among stakeholders like sales teams as well as executive leadership. GTM activities have improved operation and there is clearer visibility into them. In selling to RevOps leaders, highlight how Sonar can affect each of these key areas. Use case studies and hard data to show similar tools have led to gains in efficiency and benefits that are financial. Understanding which metrics resonate with RevOps leaders, and aligning your product's features accordingly, would significantly help enhance your sales strategy.

If you are the first couple of hires in rev ops, it's highly likely you'll both need to be generalists to a certain extent. Ensuring alignment on roles and responsibilities will be critical to ensure you aren't overlapping or duplicating effort. Some general options to divide responsibilities could include: 1. What are all the jobs to be done and who is best suited to tackle them? 2. What stakeholders or teams are you mapped to? How can you divide and conquer those relationships? 3. What are the projects or priorities that fall on your team? Could you consider dividing work along those lines? Again, it is critical in those early days to ensure you and your colleague stay in sync, particularly on priorities and data foundations, and to look for leverage from each other whenever possible. For example, if one of you is building data foundations and reporting, can they include the fields the other may need? If you’re building out a process for forecasting your product, how can you both leverage the same process?