AMA: LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS, Zeina Marcotte on Building a Revenue Ops Team

LinkedIn is large and complex with many business lines that have slight nuances to their org structure. Rather than share my company’s org chart, I’ll share what an optimal org chart looks like for an established team. I am a fan of centralized rev ops teams where Sales Ops, CS Ops, Marketing Ops, Enablement and our Tech stack leader all report into a VP of Rev Ops. This isn’t always the case, many times the Sales Ops leader may report into the CRO or the CS Ops leader may report into the head o ...Read More

One area we could invest more in is understanding and measuring customer value. It’s often difficult to align on a measure of value that’s not only agreed upon between the customer and the service provider but easy to access and report on.   Being able to report on value could make it easier to predict customer health and retention. Additionally, in a world where AI will likely make us all more efficient, I can see where even how we price our products would be much more driven by the value provi ...Read More

How you scale will depend on the growth trajectory and needs of the business. Typically, many organizations will start with generalists and then specialize and add layers as the business grows. Early Day Generalists: Talent Profile: Generalists with a fair amount of data competency and strategy and operations experience. You’re looking for a true jack of all trades that you can plug in wherever needed be it building a complex query, project managing a new technology tool or launching a new go-to ...Read More

If your team is brand new or unfamiliar to many stakeholders, a good starting point would be to document your team's mission, vision, scope, and key objectives for the fiscal period. This could be a power point deck or SharePoint site. You could also start with a road show that entails meeting stakeholders to share that team charter. Whether your team is well established or new, another best practice is to spend time every quarter aligning on your priorities, including specific objectives and me ...Read More

Typically, responsibilities for these teams are aligned to where they fall in the customer funnel. Demand Gen tends to focus on the top of funnel metrics, processes and reporting while other rev ops teams fall further down funnel. For example, Demand Gen could measure leads while rev ops teams could be looking at things like opportunity conversion, ASP and then even further down funnel, retention. When building your team charter, it will be important to clarify roles and responsibilities to avoi ...Read More

As the team grows, you want to ensure alignment and consistent communication while also finding points of leverage and efficiency. Ensure Alignment & Consistent Communications Create a team charter and priorities that is shared broadly Create quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)  that each team member drafts for themselves and shares with the rev ops team and relevant steakholders and cross functional partners Host weekly team meetings to recap goals and remove roadblocks for the team ...Read More

My number one piece of advice is to ask a lot of questions. Some questions to get you started could be: What is your scope? For example, will you be primarily focused on sales operations? Or are Customer Success and Enablement also in your scope? What are your immediate priorities? Are you there to solve an immediate problem for the company? Or does sales leadership need help in creating those priorities and focus areas? What do your tech stack and data foundations look like? Who manages them? H ...Read More

If you are the first couple of hires in rev ops, it's highly likely you'll both need to be generalists to a certain extent. Ensuring alignment on roles and responsibilities will be critical to ensure you aren't overlapping or duplicating effort. Some general options to divide responsibilities could include: What are all the jobs to be done and who is best suited to tackle them? What stakeholders or teams are you mapped to? How can you divide and conquer those relationships? What are the projects ...Read More