AMA: HubSpot Director, GTM Strategy & Revenue Operations, Josh Chang on Influencing the C-Suite

Revenue operations managers get several things wrong when trying to influence the C-Suite: * Trying to communicate too many or overly complex topics - these leaders have very little time and are constantly switching context. Pick one or two key takeaways and focus all your effort, content, and communications on those things. * Not answering questions accurately and succinctly. If you get a question from someone in the C-Suite in a meeting, it is always okay to say "I will get back to you on that" instead of trying to answer by rambling with too much detail or with an incomplete or ineffective thought. * Approaching meetings, conversations, or presentations with the C-Suite without a concrete ask or a sense of "what do we want to achieve here?". Every one of these conversations should be focused on making sure a key point or concept is communicated in order to get buy-in or approval for an initiative, or at the very least to get aligned that the more "in the weeds" work you and your team is doing is right for the business.

My early exposure was around projects where I was working to directly tie work we were doing in the Marketing org to company revenue and lifetime value. It was important to help the company quantify marketing efforts and calculate a true ROI view to help the C-Suite understand how we were optimizing and spending budget efficiently and how we could tie that back to the bottom line. I was given exposure to the C-Suite through this work, gradually learning how to take very technical or complex concepts and distill them into 1 or 2 bullet or key points to make sure that the key points I wanted to make were the primary focus.