AMA: Zapier Director, Revenue Operations, Lindsay Rothlisberger on Stakeholder Management

It’s important to understand the goals and challenges of the teams you’re working with. I’ve found that by considering their priorities and their communication styles you can improve your partnership tremendously. I am going to give some examples, however this is not meant to overgeneralize because teams differ at different companies. Here is how it works for me now: Go to Marketing Leadership (Sales, Marketing, CS): It’s important to communicate how your work aids in achieving these team’s goal ...Read More

It helps that I used to do Demand Generation and have a deep understanding for how challenging and fast paced it can be. One of the best things you can do to improve your relationship with Demand Generation is to partner with them to improve their alignment and connection with Sales. As a “neutral” party, RevOps can be the glue between Sales and Marketing – help champion Demand Gen programs with Sales and help bridge miscommunications or misperceptions about Demand Gen programs. Another effectiv ...Read More

It's important to nip tension across functions quickly and don't let it fester, here are some of my strategies: First, take time to understand the root of the tension. For example, what kind of challenges are they facing, are their goals in conflict with others, are their contributions not valued?  Create a shared vision or shared objectives across functions. Are there even just one or two goals that you can partner together to achieve versus trying to bring dependent teams or stakeholders along ...Read More

When there are multiple functions involved in key goals or initiatives, try to make it as easy as possible to share learnings and facilitate connections. Here are three key principles I’ve used: Be a connector: Look for opportunities to pair cross-functional folks together on a project. Or highlight opportunities where multiple teams may be addressing the same problem in different ways so they can orient around the same goal and reduce duplicative efforts.  Continuous learning: Orgs with strong ...Read More

Zapier has always been a remote workplace, so I appreciate how intentional teams are about building culture, relationships and trust. Some of the strategies I’ve found most successful in maintaining cross-functional alignment: Call out misalignment promptly: it’s important to be vocal when you notice folks aren’t on the same page. In RevOps, we are sometimes the first to notice this because we have line of sight across multiple functions. Open communication: We use shared channels like slack and ...Read More