The most common career paths I've seen are for Rev Ops managers to move up the ranks within their orgs or move into Sales orgs, or less commonly, move into product orgs. The easiest transition is to take on more scope within the revenue Ops org, eg regional to global or taking on more sub functions. For managers looking for something a bit more different or wanting to start a CRO or COO career path, transitioning to sales manager / sales leader roles can also be possible. It's a good way to "own the number" and take on a larger team size and truly execute against the strategies you have been planning, albeit at a smaller scale. Another path that I've seen is to move into the product function. This is harder to do and dependent on forming strong relationships and project interactions while in Rev ops, but it's certainly doable!

Most of the time, you can find rev ops teams being the busiest teams. There is usually no downtime as in sales; there is a quarterly cycle, and planning happens every six months (or a year). As leading a rev ops team, I value the two metrics below that some teams tend to deprioritize. * % of time spent firefighting (or responding to ad-hoc tasks) vs. working on big rocks that help move the business forward. In many cases, I see teams at 80/20. Ideally, it should be the other way around, but if you can get this to 50/50, you are running a healthy team. You'll need to constantly look at this and align with your stakeholders and get their buy-in, but also be able to push back and say "no." And I see this as a leader's job to do. * The health of the team in terms of job satisfaction: Many companies run engagement surveys to measure, but the leaders often only sometimes get to focus and improve the gaps from these surveys. Rev Ops professionals generally have a high tolerance and have "helper" personalities, so it should be taken seriously if these scores are low. It will lead to burnout and high attrition. Make sure to take action and help team members feel they are learning, growing, balancing their work life, setting boundaries, and getting clear communication.

As a RevOps leader, a key capability that I rely on is conversational intelligence to complement a data-driven quantitive approach. The B2B SaaS market and buyer preferences are changing at such a rapid pace and it's super important to stay plugged into what is on the minds of your prospects, customers and partners. I regularly leverage conversational intelligence to listen into calls and get aggregated insights into market sentiment, emerging use cases and identify any friction points that may exist across our customer journey. Conversational intelligence allows us to get into the minds of our prospects, customers and partners and understand what problems they are looking to solve and how they want to solve them. When combined with a data-driven and analytical approach, these insights give me inspiration to proactively launch new plays and initiatives to drive continued customer value.

To be successful in revenue operations you must 1. have a data analysis foundation 2. be a strong problem solver and 3. be a good story teller. 1. Data foundation: the requirements will change depending on your company's tech stack (SQL, Tableau, SFDC, etc.), but you must have experience analyzing, visualizing and synthesize takeaways from data. Almost everything you do in rev ops must be data driven, and understanding how to pull actionable takeaways from large data sets is key. 2. Problem solving: Know different problem solving frameworks and apply them in your day to day to get experience with how they work. The most basic being 1. start with a hypothesis 2. test that hypothesis 3. debrief on results and iterate. It is also ok to test in an unscalable / manual / simple way. One of the biggest fallacies operators run into is trying to run the perfect test--use the 80/20 rule and be a scrappy problem solver 3. Story Telling: A large part of the rev ops role is aligning different teams (sales, marketing, product, finance, leadership, etc.) to work towards the same goal or on the same initiative--and story telling is a huge part of getting this cross-functional alignment. An operator needs to 1. get buy in (show the business impact and why the team should be excited to work on this) 2. clarify how the team is going to execute (demonstrate a well thought out plan with deadlines and DRIs) 3. assign ownership (identify who is responsible for each aspect of the plan).

My framework for prioritizing is pretty simple, I like to use a quadrant style prioritization framework and allocate requests into the following format and ensure that I have X% of time allocated to each quadrant: * Top Left: Do Now * High importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 50% of time allocated to this category) * Bottom Left: Delegate * Low importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 10% of time allocated to this category) - these are typically the distractions that comes up and delay strategic initiatives - sometimes they just need done, but really focus on how you streamline, reduce and delegate these items * Top Right: Do Next * High importance, low urgency (generally like to keep around 40% of time to this category) * These are the items that if you do not schedule and focus on getting these done, they will become high urgency and typically turn into fire drills, so trying to get ahead of scheduling these into workload * Bottom Right: Delete * Low importance, low urgency (0% allocation) * If the request does not align with strategy, needs deprioritized (these are your say no, or not right now)

Here are some of my favorites templates/resources 1. OpsCast Podcast (https://marketingops.com/podcasts/) 2. OpsStars Conference (https://www.ops-stars.com/) 3. Operations with Sean Lane (https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678) 4. RevOps Podcast (https://www.revenue.io/revops-podcast) 5. Marketing Ops Professionals Slack Group 6. Darrell Alfonso - Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellalfonso/) 7. Chief Martec (https://chiefmartec.com/)

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.

At a high level, there's generally two buckets of metrics that Sales/Rev Ops teams look at that are fundamental to understanding the health of the business: revenue generation and revenue retention. 1. Within revenue generation, the main three categories of KPIs are pipeline execution/progression, pipeline generation, and pipeline coverage. * Pipeline progression and execution is about how much of the existing pipeline the sales team has progressed (matured from one stage to the next) or closed (booked $'s). Focus is on current quarter. Typical KPIs are $'s booked, the amount of pipeline in various stages of maturity, and close ratios. For $'s booked, the two main levers we evaluate are $ attainment vs. target and Y/Y growth. Both are important because they measure different things. Targets measure expectations. Y/Y growth measures pace. You can have a product growing 100% Y/Y (fast pace) but it could still be short of targets because expectations are even higher. * Pipeline generation and creation is about how much pipeline is being created. Focus is on future quarters, with longer timeframe ranging from Q+1 to Q+4 or even Q+6 depending on length of the sales cycle. Typical dimensions that pipeline generation are tracked against are: * Creator type - who's sourcing the pipeline? Is it a BDR, an account executive, etc.? This matters because oftentimes, different sources of pipeline will have different rates of conversion. * Pipeline composition - what's the product mix of the pipeline? What's the deal type mix? Is it a lot of upsell? Cross-sell? Are we building enough pipeline across the portfolio? * Close quarter - when is this pipeline expected to close? Are we building a lot of pipeline for the near-term and medium-term future? * Pipeline coverage is the amount of pipeline in flight. Focus is typically on immediate next quarter. The KPIs ops and sales will focus on are coverage ratios - the ratio of pipeline in a given timeframe vs. the sales targets for that timeframe. E.g., if we have $100m of pipeline against a $25m target for Q2, then we'd have a 4x ratio. This is typically the main early indicator of future success, but there are many other ways you could investigate this, including looking at mature vs. total pipe coverage. Looking at historical conversion rates, and in-quarter create and close rates, etc. to understand what is "sufficient" coverage. 2. Within retention, the main categories of KPIs are attrition, renewals, and usage/adoption. 1. Attrition - this is a fun one. How much revenue did you lose from existing customers. Typically this is measured against targets. Very straightforward to understand and typically broken up into full attritions and down sells. 2. Renewal Rates - very similar but rather than absolute $'s lost you look at %'s. Two flavors of this that I've typically seen. Renewal rates against RBOB (renewal book of business) and Retention rates against BOB (book of business). 1. RBOB Renewal % - of the $'s that were up for renewal this year (or quarter), how much of it did you renew? 2. BOB Retention % - of your total annual recurring revenue, how much of it did you retain? 3. Product Usage/Adoption - are customers getting the most out of their existing products? What's their usage % (# licenses utilized, # activations, etc..)?

In a short sentence, in a fast-moving, complex, and inter-dependent revenue engine, whatever is not in the CRM does not exist. Creating an aligned case around this notion and building reinforcement via incentives and accountability is key. A few tactical tips and examples: * Strengthen the case: First, do you have full conviction on why are you doing it? Understand your pipeline and if your percentages properly predict commercial outcomes (i.e. is ex-ante pipeline by percentage a robust predictor for ex-post closed won?). Invest time on discussing the "why" with key sales leaders. * Drive Alignment: Communicate importance of updates to sales (in uncertain times, leaders fully appreciate how key revenue visibility is to make the right trade-offs). Familiarize yourself with the rep journey, provide visual guides and aim for simplicity: minimizing time spent not selling is also one of your goals. * Create Positive Reinforcement: Create programs supporting and incentivizing CRM freshness. Procure pre-sales support and executive deal sponsorship for key prospects, tying those to an accurate representation in the CRM. This encourages accuracy and timeliness. Emphasize a strong understanding of analytics is often essential for sales career progression, especially into management roles. * Create Accountability: Establish a hygiene score that considers update frequency and ex-post accuracy compared to commercial outcomes. Work with HR/People to tie some dimension of sales performance measurement to CRM accuracy to drive the desired behavior. 

Start with identifying what parts of the organization your RevOps team will be supporting. Then find the resources in each of these teams you will be supporting to either become your stakeholders and partners or if you do have the option to hire, bring them into your org. When you hire internally from the teams that you want to Support, these people can help you realize problems that your team needs to solve before someone else has to ask for them.