AMA: Clockwise Head of Revenue Operations, Ana Rottaro on Establishing the Revenue Ops Function

If you’re the first revenue operations manager, I recommend identifying key revenue operations initiatives the company needs, prioritizing them, and then organizing projects and measuring tasks against that. Here’s how I did it: Create a set of questions to ask the heads of all go-to-market teams focused on pain points, challenges, current goals, and which parts of the funnel they own Shadow employees across go-to-market functions to find inefficiencies and take notes Pattern match across your n ...Read More

Days 0-30: Discovery and Reporting Go through the process of understanding necessary RevOps initiatives as noted in the question “What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first revenue operations manager at a company establishing the function?” Identify urgent revenue leaks like slow responses to hand-raisers or low follow-through or renewals falling through the cracks. Understand where reporting lives and what reporting is missing in the funnel. While you’re doin ...Read More

Revenue operations demands a wide skill set that leads to a wide range of tasks as well as demanding career ladders. Additionally, revenue operations has the propensity to become low autonomy due to its nature in assisting numerous teams. Managing these challenges is essential to retaining top revenue operations talent. Here are some ideas to improve retention: Understand both what interests the employee, but also what disinterests them If you can do it genuinely, reframe work outside of the emp ...Read More

RevOps has a place early on because it can measure whether your attempts are working and save you resources spent going in the wrong direction. However, sometimes it’s good to let a sales team of 1-3 run a bit loose at first with a few simple processes for the documentation of contracts. People tend to look for the fastest way to do things and allowing a few team members to test and develop their own way of doing things can provide good insights for when you bring in revenue operations. To keep ...Read More

Aligning on the definitions in the awareness to revenue funnel and transparency are the most important factors in making sure shared KPIs are successful. If teams understand the definitions, they know what to expect from each other in terms of deliverables and they can share responsibility if changes are needed to be successful. Create shared definitions of what is a qualified account or lead, what is a buyer, what is a champion, etc. Make sure you are tracking KPIs, leading indicators, and disq ...Read More