AMA: HubSpot Director, Data & Analytics, Revenue Operations, Josh Chang on Revenue Ops Skills

Honestly, I believe revenue operations leaders need soft skills more than hard skills. Hopefully they are coming from a background where hard skills like data analysis and visualization and Excel/SQL were needed, but broadening this question out to general skills - data analysis, storytelling, and communication and collaboration are the most important. Data analysis: Revenue operations leaders and teams are working with and responsible for the data that supports their stakeholders, so leaders sh ...Read More

There obviously is not a one-size-fits-all approach here, but the way I think about this boils down to a few things: Create and foster a culture of learning and collaboration amongst your team, and enable folx to solve interesting problems together without someone constantly looking over their shoulder. When your team is learning and growing together with autonomy, that can sometimes be a tough thing to recreate somewhere else. Expanding on that, top talent will always value autonomy and trust i ...Read More

One of the most important RevOps skills that could be applied across an organization would be familiarity and expertise with data specific to teams that are being supported (i.e. Marketing or Sales). Folx working on those teams are obviously experts in their field, but they don't know what they don't know, especially from a data perspective. RevOps professionals or perspectives can help to uncover new insights that teams didn't even know existed in their datasets or tech stack, or even just help ...Read More

After many years focused on demand generation from a Marketing perspective, I realized that I wanted to be part of a team that helped to drive decisions across the whole organization, rather than focused on a specific team or area like demand generation. I also had a data and strategy oriented skillset that helped me naturally gravitate towards revenue operations.  Coming from a demand generation background, felt I had enough knowledge of other functions where I could have a bigger impact on the ...Read More

This varies depending on the person, but here are some general ideas! Try to get a different perspective, if possible from someone who can be neutral, and is familiar with both you and your work and your boss. Depending on your relationship with your boss, sometimes it can be helpful to hear someone else give similar feedback to you so it doesn't seem like it is just coming from one place. If you're not getting this already, ask your boss to give you specific examples or things they would like t ...Read More

Sometimes going straight into revenue operations isn't necessarily the best path to be successful in the field. Not to say you CAN'T go straight into RevOps, but I think it can be extremely beneficial to become a subject matter expert in a particular area that you want to support from a RevOps perspective. Some of the best RevOps analysts/strategists I've worked with were experts in Marketing, Sales, etc. first, and then moved into an operations role after gaining experience in the function. Thi ...Read More

It can depend on where you're coming from, but I lean towards it being better to come in with the soft skills, although there will always be a baseline level of hard skills you need depending on the role. For example, for a data analyst or data engineer, SQL might be a baseline hard skill, but I don't necessarily care about what flavor of SQL they know. In that case, I'd value soft skills like data analysis and interpretation, stakeholder management, growth mindset, and distilling complexity mor ...Read More