AMA: Zapier Director, Revenue Operations, Lindsay Rothlisberger on Establishing the Revenue Ops Function

Here are some goals I’d consider for a new RevOps function: First 30 days: 1. Meet with key stakeholders in sales, marketing, customer success, and finance to understand the current processes, tools, and technology being used. 2. Use the information gathered to identify areas where revenue operations can make the most impact, such as improving the sales process, implementing new technology, or optimizing the revenue model. 3. Develop a roadmap for revenue operations. Based on the gaps and opportunities identified, develop a plan for the next 3 months that outlines the initiatives, goals, and expected outcomes. 60 days: 1. Begin implementing the initiatives outlined in the roadmap, starting with the highest-priority items. Focus on the things that provide impact quickly, versus large long-term investments -- this will help gain momentum while you ramp and develop a deeper understanding of the business. 2. Develop processes and standard operating procedures. Such as standing meetings with sales and marketing leaders, revenue reporting cadences, project management norms, etc. 3. Review and optimize the tech stack. Review the company's technology stack and identify opportunities to optimize or replace tools that are not meeting the needs of the revenue operations function. 90 days: 1. Align the org around common language and definitions, such as lead and deal stage definitions and important conversion metrics. 2. Plan for future growth. Develop a plan for scaling revenue operations as the company grows, including hiring additional staff, implementing new tools, and refining processes. It’s really important to understand the needs of the business versus assuming that the systems, processes and tools should look similar to what you’ve seen in previous roles. So make sure to invest time up front learning from other folks in the org.

The Revenue Operations team at Zapier consists of four sub-teams focused on making sure that Zapier prospects and customers receive a seamless experience across marketing, sales and customer success interactions. To be more specific, we work to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of go-to-market programs with technology (like our email platforms and CRM tools), data (like sales forecasting and reporting) and process (like lead and deal management). We identify, implement, and manage GTM tooling, we bridge data and system gaps, and we deliver insights to inform strategic decision-making for GTM leadership. We have four small teams: Operations: They are the automation heroes behind all GTM programs. Operations is the team that builds and maintains the Marketing, Sales and CS workflows and processes in our CRM tools. Tooling and Technology: The systems experts who develop technical solutions in partnership with data and engineering teams. They implement the underlying tools and system improvements that drive alignment between GTM stakeholders (marketing, sales, and success.) Planning and Analytics: This team enables GTM leaders to focus on the teams and tactics that need attention to hit revenue goals. This includes highlighting trends through analysis and feedback loops, areas of misalignment, and opportunities to explore. Sales and Success Enablement: They develop structured onboarding and coaching programs for customer-facing teams plus evaluate and optimize the sales process.

To set yourself up for success when establishing a Revenue Operations function, I recommend starting with an exercise to map out and benchmark the revenue process. You can use this to create a roadmap and then prioritize tasks using a framework such as the Value vs Effort Matrix. When RevOps is new at a company, a good way to determine the value of different tasks is to map out the revenue process and begin to benchmark conversion rates at different stages. This is a good way to familiarize yourself with the customer journey and how it maps to internal processes for your sales, marketing and customer success teams. For example, you may notice that the conversion rate from lead to opportunity is low, which might mean you need to improve product-market fit. If your sales team is taking too long to close deals, you should probably focus on sales process efficiency. And if your win rate is low, you may want to prioritize sales enablement. As I mentioned in a previous question, having a roadmap tied to business outcomes is extremely important, and I like to group roadmap items by both value and effort. The prioritization framework that I've found works well for RevOps teams is the Value vs Effort Matrix: This matrix helps you prioritize work based on the value it delivers and the effort required to complete it. Work that delivers high value with low effort is given the highest priority, while work that delivers low value with high effort is given the lowest priority.

To retain good RevOps talent: 1. Ensure that you support them in balancing foundational work, such as addressing tech debt, creating documentation, and building scalable infrastructure alongside reactive, execution-focused work. RevOps teams run the risk of spending most of their time completing one-off tasks, such as implementing new automation within the sales process or launching marketing campaigns. While these tasks are a big part of the job, if RevOps team members cannot dedicate some time to foundational, less visible areas, it can result in "fires" and issues that become frustrating distractions for them later on. 2. Trust RevOps professionals to help make tooling decisions. They excel at selecting and procuring tools that solve business needs. However, Marketing and Sales leaders sometimes prefer tools they have used in the past. Lean on RevOps to help make these key business decisions. 3. Involve them early in new program ideation. RevOps professionals are excellent partners in helping to shape new go-to-market programs and initiatives(like trying new marketing tactics or new sales campaigns), but can sometimes be left out of the process until it's time to execute. This makes it difficult for them to gather the context they need to build the best process or solution. These are some suggestions that will help your RevOps team be successful -- and feel both empowered and supported.

Marketing Ops teams are typically focused on executing and optimizing marketing campaigns. This includes marketing technology system management, data analysis, and campaign planning. Revenue Ops teams are focused on optimizing revenue generation and the customer experience across all go-to-market teams and channels – including sales, marketing, and customer success. Revenue Ops, without marketing housed within it, is more similar to a Sales Ops team than the concept of a RevOps team, which is meant to unify ops across the org. Whether to structure them into one team or separate teams depends on the organization and the needs of the business. I wrote a blog article about this recently: https://zapier.com/blog/revops-best-practices/ Marketing Ops and Revenue Ops professionals have similar skill sets, and in my experience, I’ve seen a lot of benefits of centralizing them onto one team. Here are some reasons why it’s worked well at Zapier: * Our RevOps team is able to facilitate alignment across marketing, sales and customer success. For example, we record “deal reviews” where we walk through the details of a deal and share them with marketing and product teams. * Having a centralized RevOps function allows us to pinpoint areas of opportunity across both acquisition and expansion as well as gaps in the customer experience. This helps leaders weigh investments on things ranging from lead performance to sales rep performance. * Operations professionals have a wide range of specializations—analytics, technology, automation, the list goes on. Having them in one function allows you to utilize the best of all those specializations to build a high-performing team. A RevOps structure fosters more opportunities to learn from each other and collaborate on solutions. If they are separate teams, the key to success is to ensure that both Marketing Ops and Rev Ops have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and are aligned with the broader goals of the organization.