AMA: Intercom Director, Sales Operations, Won Choi on Scaling a Revenue Ops Team

Most of the time, you can find rev ops teams being the busiest teams. There is usually no downtime as in sales; there is a quarterly cycle, and planning happens every six months (or a year). As leading a rev ops team, I value the two metrics below that some teams tend to deprioritize. * % of time spent firefighting (or responding to ad-hoc tasks) vs. working on big rocks that help move the business forward. In many cases, I see teams at 80/20. Ideally, it should be the other way around, but if you can get this to 50/50, you are running a healthy team. You'll need to constantly look at this and align with your stakeholders and get their buy-in, but also be able to push back and say "no." And I see this as a leader's job to do. * The health of the team in terms of job satisfaction: Many companies run engagement surveys to measure, but the leaders often only sometimes get to focus and improve the gaps from these surveys. Rev Ops professionals generally have a high tolerance and have "helper" personalities, so it should be taken seriously if these scores are low. It will lead to burnout and high attrition. Make sure to take action and help team members feel they are learning, growing, balancing their work life, setting boundaries, and getting clear communication.

Common traits are resilience, collaboration, and the ability to communicate effectively. I am sure these can apply to other roles as well. Also, I see all these as learnable skills that can come with practice and experience. * Resilience: Rev Ops is a job where there is never a dull day. Priorities will shift quickly, and fires will happen frequently. There will be times when you are dealing with emotional stakeholders and receiving complaints, or things did not turn out the way that was planned. A good trait is an ability to recover and bounce back from hard days, not take things personally, and move on to the next right thing. * Collaboration: Rev Ops is a cross-functional role where you cannot do everything independently. You will have to work with your operations team members but also outside of your team, including Sales, Finance, Business Systems, Marketing, Legal, etc. Team members who support cross-functional partners fully when they can but can set boundaries the right way to protect your team's energy will always be a delicate dance you need to do. * Communicating Effectively: Every role in Rev Ops will need to be understood well by your stakeholders, whether it's getting a decision made with the Sales team or submitting a requirement to the Business Systems team. When a team member can communicate well, it reduces misunderstanding and the need to run multiple cycles. Communicating includes everything from talking in a meeting to sending an email and slacking a message to someone. The more concise and clear the communication, the more influential the work can be.

When there are only one or two team members, I would have the team focus on mission-critical projects only. The three main areas would be 1: Sales process & forecasting, 2. Define and measure KPIs, 3. Sales Compensation design. Initially, individuals will cover broader responsibilities but will not have the capacity to go very deep in each area. All of these can evolve throughout the business, but I would clearly define and set the structure by working closely with your sales leader. * Sales Process & Forecasting: You can be simple with the process. In the beginning, set 2 - 3 action items and 1 - 2 exit criteria for each stage. Don't worry too much about getting the fields or validation rules right. The key is to train the sales team so that it becomes easy to remember and follow. In one of my roles, we used to print and laminate a 1-pager, and all reps had it on their desks. Also, investing in solid forecasting tools (Aviso, Clari) will be foundational. Making sure there is visibility and enforcement on forecast categories (pipeline/upside/commit) goes a long way. * Define and Measure KPIs: For SaaS businesses, there are ~10 metrics you should care about. (ARR (by region, business type, segment), Average Deal Size, # of Deals, Cycle Time, Conversion Rates, Win Rates, # of Customers, Retention Rate, Rep Productivity, Rep Attainment). You should define these metrics and build your SFDC data structure so that anyone can easily pull these numbers. It will save you time to focus more on strategy and insights if you get the fundamentals in place. * Sales Compensation Design: Again, comp plans can be simple. There are many standard comp plans out there. I would stick to those and not do anything crazy. As the business evolves and business goals change, you would want to add components, but in general, I will keep it to the basics.

I view projects and priorities as "Big Rocks" and "Small Projects." The big rocks are foundational work streams for the business and will help drive the business forward. The small projects are also important but will be more of a "one and done" type of work. Big rocks should have one driver, and one person should be driving at most two big rocks a quarter. Big rocks also should not be rushed. I have seen many mistakes where if a big rock is not done well, the members need to go back and rip/replace it, which takes much more time and resources. Make sure you have the right stakeholders involved and timelines built for these. I also recommend you have experienced members driving big rocks. * Big Rock projects can be: setting up SFDC to measure bookings, territory planning, sales methodology, forecasting, standard metrics dashboards, annual planning, sales comp design, account hierarchies, etc. * Small Projects can be: deal approval matrix, ROE (rules of engagement) updates, SPIFF design, QBR templates, Sales playbooks, etc. Most of these can be quickly revised and updated as the business evolves. You should have a running list of small projects and prioritize every quarter. 

The sales ops team is organized by a "Global" team and a "Regional" team. We have three global teams: 1. sales strategy & planning, 2. sales analytics & insights, and 3. sales process & tools. There are two teams within the regional team covering EMEA, NAMER, and APAC. I'll go into more detail on each team. * Sales strategy & planning team: Responsible for org/role design, market segmentation, TAM analysis, headcount and productivity analysis, quota planning, sales comp plan designs, etc. * Sales analytics & insights team: Responsible for managing and building data foundations, building dashboards & reports, and analyzing trends and health of the business to help drive decisions. * Sales process & tools team: Responsible for defining sales processes, rules of engagement, and sales methodologies. Manages and builds a strategy for sales tools, gathers systems requirements from stakeholders, and collaborates with business systems teams to roll out system updates. * Regional operations team: Responsible for supporting sales leaders and sellers in each region. Helps with headcount planning, territory planning, account planning, forecasting, reporting, regional strategy, etc.