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

This can take many forms, but most paths will require you to demonstrate an analytical and strategic mindset and the ability to translate business questions and needs to technical work, and vice versa. A successful path I've seen is if you have experience in a certain function (Marketing, Sales, Services, etc.) and move into more of a data role - be the technical expert for your team and help answer questions with data. That was my career path as I started my career as a marketer, specialized in ...Read More

Think about revenue operations as the glue that holds and connects the different parts of the business and aligns them all to the same strategic objectives. You might already have sales, services, and marketing teams, and maybe even operations people embedded within each, but it's likely that the connection points and collaboration between all these different functions is lacking. Sales might be so focused on closing deals and not providing feedback to Marketing on what types of demand are the m ...Read More

Work closely with your functional teams and leaders across the different go-to-market teams at your company to identify their primary needs and objectives. Within each of those, understand where the gaps are that can be filled by revenue operations. These might include deep data/analysis needs, reporting or attribution gaps, technical work, revenue attribution, etc. Once you have those, identify the KPIs associated with each objective and determine where you have strategic vs. technical needs on ...Read More

As the first revenue operations hire at a start-up, you own all of the KPIs across the functions you support, but at the same time, you don't necessarily have direct influence over any of them. Similar to my answer for another question, you are the glue that holds these functions together and your responsibility is making sure there is strong collaboration and connection between the people working in those functions and the KPIs that they are all supporting. How do your sales and marketing team ...Read More

This might be a little controversial, but I think a lot of the multi-touch media mix attribution models you'll see from vendors and companies are supremely over-hyped UNLESS they are actually helping you make different decisions about your Marketing mix and strategy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely people out there doing this right, but unless you have unbelievable cookie accept rates and tracking mechanisms across the web (or you're Google), a lot of it is, frankly, made up for the sak ...Read More

It should be a very close partnership, and the best revenue operations leaders have experience in demand generation or are deeply familiar with the KPIs, tactics, and levers to pull. The clearest line I can draw is that RevOps isn't necessarily responsible for execution, but the middle of the Venn diagram here includes tactical strategy, recommendations on campaign/Marketing decisions, and even Marketing resource allocation. For example, I have a deep background in paid media and top-of-funnel a ...Read More