
AMA: LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS, Zeina Marcotte on Building a Revenue Ops Team
February 4 @ 10:00AM PST
View AMA Answers
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
My number one piece of advice is to ask a lot of questions. Some questions to get you started could be: 1. What is your scope? For example, will you be primarily focused on sales operations? Or are Customer Success and Enablement also in your scope? 2. 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? 3. What do your tech stack and data foundations look like? Who manages them? How do you go about implementing changes? My second piece of advice would be to learn your business quickly. 1. Learn your key products and competitors. 2. Understand all of your customer facing roles and their corresponding responsibilities. 3. Define your key performance indicators and understand what metrics matter most to your business. 4. Get to know your tech stack and data sources. My third piece of advice would be to establish an operating rhythm. 1. Determine your frequency and content for business reviews to better assess the business health. 2. Kick off regular structured forecasting meetings and monthly or quarterly business reviews. Lastly, in my previous AMA, I included a template to help you exceed in your first 30/60/90 days in role. It focuses on planning across Strategy, Operations, Data & Systems and Team and Talent. You can find the link here to the framework. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOCTEDa_ezcSW0lUOgvQCt4csqunc7gg7n5VyAHb3Hw/edit?usp=sharing
...Read More380 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5

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: 1. What are all the jobs to be done and who is best suited to tackle them? 2. What stakeholders or teams are you mapped to? How can you divide and conquer those relationships? 3. What are the projects or priorities that fall on your team? Could you consider dividing work along those lines? Again, it is critical in those early days to ensure you and your colleague stay in sync, particularly on priorities and data foundations, and to look for leverage from each other whenever possible. For example, if one of you is building data foundations and reporting, can they include the fields the other may need? If you’re building out a process for forecasting your product, how can you both leverage the same process?
...Read More383 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5

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 measurable results and sharing those priorities with key stakeholders. You then have an opportunity to check back in with your stakeholders at the end of the fiscal period to showcase your team’s wins or areas where you may need more support. It also provides a lot more structure to guide your team’s efforts and stay aligned with your stakeholders.
...Read More387 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
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 of CS. However, I find the central structure allows the teams to share tech stacks, data foundations and best practices that can be leveraged by all the customer facing teams. This central structure prevents teams from becoming too siloed and makes it easier for marketing, sales and CS to collaborate optimally. The org structure could look something like this: VP of Rev Ops * Data & Tech Stack Leader with teams under them that oversee the CRM, data foundations and other sales, marketing and CS tools. * Sales Strategy & Operations Leader with regional leaders reporting to them that map to your business regions. * Marketing Strategy & Operations Leader that focuses on top of funnel metrics and processes. * Customer Succes Strategy & Operations Leader that collaborates with CS and Support on post sales metrics, planning and processes. * Enablement Leader that focuses on sales training and effectiveness and may also have program management under them to help launch global initiatives. * Central planning and GTM leader who drives recommendations on global strategic Initiatives and top-down planning.
...Read More352 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5

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-market initiative. I’ve had great luck with former strategy and operations consultants in roles like this. * Work Organization: Align on quarterly objectives and key results. Invest in guardrails that enable the team to run independently while avoiding duplication of effort. Later Stage Hires: * Talent Profile: Specialist who can go deep on specific business need. For example, you may be looking for a data foundation leader, a regional strategy leader or an enablement expert. Many times you are hiring someone who has had this specific job title in the past. * Work Organization: Align on clear roles and responsibilities of the teams and seek areas of leverage. For example, your data foundations hire should be able to build and support the reporting infrastructure for every region globally. Your regional leaders should be focused on driving growth and efficiency in region and not need to worry about building custom reporting.
...Read More365 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
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 provided.
...Read More411 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
In addition to what I included above in my answer to the question about being your company’s first rev ops hire, if you’re junior, I would also focus heavily on learning. Consider joining industry groups like Modern Sales Professionals. Network with others in your industry and ideally try to find a mentor. Look for resources and books. The Revenue Operations Manual by Sean Lane and Laura Adint is a great starting point.
...Read More359 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
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 avoid any duplication of effort.
...Read More367 Views
1 request
LinkedIn Director Sales Strategy and Operations, North America, LTS • February 5
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 Find Points of Leverage & Efficiency * Define metrics and data sources centrally * Create repositories of templates that the team can leverage for QBRs, MBRs, business cases and any other repeatable asks * Look for opportunities to scale processes from one region or team to the entire organization
...Read More351 Views
1 request