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: 1. 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 2. Shadow employees across go-to-market functions to find inefficiencies and take notes 3. Pattern match across your notes to identify key areas for development and list potential projects that would fall within each 4. Prioritize these areas for development as initiatives based on their potential impact to revenue 5. Circulate these initiatives across the company, making sure to highlight which are the current top initiatives vs which are noted for the future 6. Tag all requests with which initiatives they fall into, including leaving blanks where requests don’t fall into any 7. Additionally, tag requests with an impact score of 1-10 and a resource consumption score of 1-10 8. Every quarter, choose 1-2 initiatives to focus on and go through the backlog of requests to find high-impact tasks to focus on or to string into a wider more impactful project. 9. Schedule at least half of your time dedicated to the quarterly initiatives. I use Wednesday as a no-meeting day as well as Friday mornings to set aside a minimum amount of time. 10. For the unscheduled time, evaluate requests based on impact, resource consumption, and urgency to see if there are tasks more high impact than dedicating more time to your current project 11. Revisit initiatives at least quarterly and remove those which are no longer relevant as well as add new initiatives based on patterns seen in requests, notes taken from cross-functional meetings, and notes taken from shadowing those in go-to-market roles 12. When requests fall outside of initiatives, it's often a sign it is not a high priority. 13. Don’t be afraid to leave tickets unaddressed. Set an SLA to review tickets and add initiatives, impact, and resource consumption scores, but not to complete the tasks.

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 employee’s interests by tying it to things that excite them more. * For example, let’s say there’s admin work to be done around Opportunities in Salesforce but the employee's interest lies in data management. Ask the employee to lean on their interests to ask if there is an opportunity to increase data integrity or collect new data points of interest to the business. Give them the opportunity to complete this project while adding to its value by using their interests. * Make sure to hire employees with varying interests, not just varying skill sets * Career ladders should not demand excellency in all areas of revenue operations. RevOps spans data management, data analysis, tooling, strategy, and project management. You can create a more general career ladder with all important RevOps competencies and work with the employee to identify which are the most relevant for their career advancement * For example, I have a career ladder with competencies in Data Insights, Project Management, Strategy, Tooling, and Leadership. The combination of any two leads to a powerful employee and as the team expands, their mastery will be more important than their generalist abilities. Reach out to me if you want to see this career ladder. * Projects and ideas sourced within revenue operations can fall by the wayside if there’s too much emphasis on supporting other teams. The best way to support other teams is to give them perspective on the gaps across all go-to-market teams and what projects revenue operations can own to accelerate revenue growth. The cherry on top is this creates more autonomy for employees and increases retention.

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 results top of mind, get the team together at least weekly to talk about what feels like it’s working vs not. If you’re running under a SaaS model, don’t wait to hire RevOps. Cross-functional systems and processes are crucial to retention.

Days 0-30: Discovery and Reporting 1. 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?” 2. Identify urgent revenue leaks like slow responses to hand-raisers or low follow-through or renewals falling through the cracks. 3. Understand where reporting lives and what reporting is missing in the funnel. While you’re doing this, create a list of reports and dashboards that can later be added to a section of your RevOps homepage to start creating a definitive list of where to get metrics that all departments can use. This should clearly display where RevOps has a stake and can help revenue. Days 31-60: Quick High-Impact Wins You should have an understanding of where revenue is currently coming from and where the org is losing business. Being the first revenue operations person should mean a lot of low-hanging fruit to impact the business. Focus on those low-hanging fruit and stand up some quick simple measures to boost revenue. A little should go a long way in these situations, don’t focus on standing up long-term processes if it’ll take a long time, just focus on quick gains that can hold things over while bigger initiatives get set into motion. Note what will need to be revisited later. This establishes the impact the function can have early on and creates buy-in from stakeholders. Days 60-90: Establish the Function 1. Define revenue operations at your org and put together a RevOps home page wherever go-to-market documentation lives. You will house your initiatives, mission, request process, and resources for other teams and leadership here like links to dashboards. Add a centralized list of reports collected on go-to-market metrics to start becoming a resource. 2. Refine what’s needed to ensure RevOps has a continued impact. Create a first draft of documentation on how RevOps will work and showcase the initiatives you’ve identified as the highest priority to bring scale and sustainability to go-to-market processes. 3. Kick-off work for what you’ve identified as the highest priority initiative to show what working with RevOps will look like for stakeholders.

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. 1. Create shared definitions of what is a qualified account or lead, what is a buyer, what is a champion, etc. 2. Make sure you are tracking KPIs, leading indicators, and disqualification reasons so that it is clear where strategy needs improvement. You should be able to see lead generation, whether accounts have buyers or not, the source of these, how they have been treated by sales including number of follow-ups and speed to lead, and if the lead is disqualified it should be noted why. 3. Create a dashboard tracking success to KPIs, leading indicators, number of qualified accounts generated, number of leads generated, the average time to respond to a new lead, the performance of sequences used on leads, the conversion rate of MQLs to SQLs, the conversion rate of SQLs to stage 2 opportunities, pipeline generated, the conversion rate of leads to closed revenue, median revenue generated. You should be able to see all of this by source/campaign. 4. Review the dashboard in a weekly review of how things are tracking, what’s working vs not, and shared ideas.