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

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Once you have those, identify the KPIs associated with each objective and determine where you have strategic vs. technical needs on the revenue operations side. 4. Outline your revenue operations specific OKRs and clearly articulate how those tie back to GTM team objectives. 5. For every individual project that comes out of this planning process, tie that back to one of your OKRs so that your teams have clarity on how their work ties back to broader objectives.

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 most effective. Marketing might be driving a ton of volume but it's the wrong volume, and for example, RevOps can help these functions get on the same page where Marketing Ops is optimizing the demand channel mix based on more detailed from their teammates on Sales Ops. I've seen this at many different types of businesses, small and large, and RevOps has the ability to align functions, disparate KPIs, and people to make sure you're all working in sync to drive more revenue.

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 KPIs (the big ones and the secondary ones) lead to revenue? Make sure you map that out and communicate it clearly across the team to for example, understand how decisions that Marketing makes influence Sales KPIs. That being said, if you are also responsible for key systems like your CRM, Marketing software, etc., a key KPI for revenue operations needs to be around usage, adoption, and effectiveness of systems and processes that drive the business forward.

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 acquisition, so I work closely with our Marketing leaders to identify opportunities for optimization and investment on a week-to-week basis. From a RevOps perspective, our job is to tie Marketing performance to other orgs that rely on Marketing (Sales is a big one of course), and help drive Marketing strategy to ensure we're maximizing leverage across the business.

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 sake of pushing you to spend more on their platform or so that you have cool metrics to show your boss. I'm excited to see what AI is going to do for multi-touch attribution, with big companies like Google already doing awesome work here, but don't get sucked into "doing" multi-touch attribution and signing up with an expensive vendor just for the sake of doing it. Make sure you're doing it right with a clear sense of what you'll be able to change and optimize with the additional knowledge.

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 paid marketing, and then realized how much I loved Excel, SQL, etc., and pursued that. Another route is starting from the technical side with an analytics or data engineering role. The key to success here is obviously having strong technical skills, but more importantly, the ability and willingness to apply those technical skills in conjunction with a strategic mindset. Don't just focus on the technical work, rather, make sure you're always thinking about business context and cross-functional collaboration.