As a RevOps leader, what is the tool you can't live without?

I love this question.

The one tool that I can't live without right now is Clari. We run our entire business out of it at the executive level. Q4 is a critical one for any SaaS company at our scale and we rely on Clari to power our weekly forecast cadence, evaluate trends in the pipeline and click into the details of deal health for all of our opportunities, both new and expansion.

I first got introduced to Clari in 2016 while at the TOPO conference in San Francisco and immediately saw the value. It wass 5 years later before I finally became a customer and now it's a tool that is always open on my MacBook and is typically the first thing I look at in the mornings.

Any tool that allows you to analyze large sets of data.

When dealing with hundreds of millions in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of customers, data is your only true guide and best friend. You can 10x your potential as a RevOps leader as you become better at being able to analyze large sets of data. 

As a RevOps leader, a key capability that I rely on is conversational intelligence to complement a data-driven quantitive approach. The B2B SaaS market and buyer preferences are changing at such a rapid pace and it's super important to stay plugged into what is on the minds of your prospects, customers and partners. I regularly leverage conversational intelligence to listen into calls and get aggregated insights into market sentiment, emerging use cases and identify any friction points that may exist across our customer journey. Conversational intelligence allows us to get into the minds of our prospects, customers and partners and understand what problems they are looking to solve and how they want to solve them. When combined with a data-driven and analytical approach, these insights give me inspiration to proactively launch new plays and initiatives to drive continued customer value.

Salesforce would be my number one answer but probably the answer of everyone. Outside of that you really need a robust and well built analytics tool. At HIghspot we are leveraging Tableau but I have seen various tools throughout my career. I think the key to having a good analytics tool is it helps drive your decision making. The biggest complaint I get from key Revenue stakeholders is RevOps is not proactive enough. I do agree with them as we are originally built to "keep the lights on" but as you grow you need insights early and often. Analytics is a key piece to that and if you don't have a good tool and smart people to stand it up you will probably not provide the value to a company that you should.

For me, the indispensable tool I rely on is a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This centralises customer data, streamlines processes, and enhances collaboration across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. That's the absolute foundation for any tech stack and it should be looked carefully.

A pen and paper. That is honestly probably my most used tool for taking notes, prioritizing actions and follow-ups, and keeping myself organized.

Outside of that, I think the tool that is the core of the stack is CRM. This is where the majority of the business operationalization happens.

Regardless of what type of CRM you have, I think having centralized customer data, activity, and actions is critical for business predictability and scalability.