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Alexa D'Sa

AMA: LinkedIn Director, Sales Operations & Strategy, Alexa D'Sa on Sales/Revenue Ops Alignment

April 9 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What role does forecasting play in aligning Sales and Revenue Ops objectives?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    Both should be targeting forecast accuracy in addition to hitting the number.

    A sales leader’s primary goal is to hit the number and secondary goal is to forecast accurately within a certain variance. I’d say this is true for rev ops as well - working with sales on the plays and strategies to hit the number while developing models and infrastructure with a high degree of accuracy and early warning systems

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  2. What processes have you implemented to improve communication between Sales and Revenue Ops teams?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    I would think about processes as aligned to different audiences.

    For reps and managers, scaled comms such as integrating into existing newsletters tend to work in my experience, with important updates cascaded through sales leaders.

    For directors, staff meetings or office hours tend to work.

    For VPs, 1-1s and Slacks are critical - this is where you want there to be no surprises. The VP should help you set the right communication system for their org.

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  3. What challenges have you faced when trying to align Sales and Revenue Ops, and how did you overcome them?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    The top challenges I’ve seen come down to trust and prioritization. With trust, you have to get to the root cause of why there’s a lack of trust before you can fix it. I like the trust equation framework (trust = credibility + reliability + intimacy divided by the level of self interest one shows in the partnership) to hold as a mirror in these cases. Ask yourself - do I feel safe expressing my perspectives and vice versa with my stakeholder? If not, then I might need to cultivate intimacy with ...Read More

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  4. How do you ensure that Revenue Ops is staying ahead of Sales needs and market trends?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    Rev Ops should be balancing internal and external perspectives to stay ahead of trends.

    For external, think:

    What’s going on in my industry?

    What’s going on in my function?

    For internal this should be fluency in the business, strategy, and customer landscape.

    Spending mindshare on both will equip you to spot trends that may be applicable to your business or resonate in what you’re observing or what problems you / the sales team may face in the future.

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  5. How do you balance short-term Sales goals with long-term Revenue Operations strategies?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    Agile prioritization and scoping are the key. For example next week we have a review for two product lines that will bring up long term strategic implications for our GTM to the C-suite. We also had short term asks related to sales success this month/ quarter. We descoped this upfront so that we got to the root of what the sales leader needed vs something open-ended and were able to thus timebox this, spending 80% of our time this week on the strategy review. However not every week will look lik ...Read More

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  6. How do you handle conflicting priorities between Sales and Revenue Ops teams?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    Cultivating sales ownership is critical here. An example I’ve seen is a Sales VP wanting to push an operational improvement that the Ops team didn’t think was urgent / important. In this case, publishing the roadmap and tradeoffs to all parties (including the CRO) equipped the CRO to make the decision on where to spend the time. The key here on this type of escalation is that it’s ‘clean’ - everyone has a chance to state their perspective, there is a clear decision-maker, and the parties commit ...Read More

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  7. What key metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of Sales and Revenue Ops alignment?

    Alexa D'Sa
    Alexa D'Sa

    HubSpot Senior Director, Sales Operations & Strategy • 1mo

    This is a great question and hard to measure well.

    I would say minimizing number of escalations would tell you alignment is working well - that would mean sales and Rev Ops are anticipating and actioning the right way.

    Beyond that I would go with an NPS (and do when I do my team’s annual reviews), asking the question from stakeholders on how they’d rate my team members on a scale of 1-10 (among other questions). High levels of alignment should have high mutual scores here.

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