Where do you see the future of revenue operations heading? What skills will a future revenue operations manager need that he/she doesn't have today?

Here are my predictions for the future of Revenue Operations:

• Integration of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success: Revenue operations will involve breaking down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success departments. A unified approach will ensure seamless collaboration and consistent messaging throughout the customer lifecycle.

• Advanced Analytics and Predictive Modeling: RevOps will leverage advanced analytics and predictive modeling to forecast revenue, identify trends, and optimize pricing strategies. AI-driven tools will help businesses make data-driven decisions to maximize profitability.

• Customer-Centric Revenue Strategies: Businesses will focus on understanding customer needs and preferences to tailor their revenue strategies. This includes personalized pricing models, subscription-based services, and add-on offerings that enhance the customer experience and increase revenue streams.

• Focus on Customer Retention: While acquiring new customers is essential, retaining existing customers will be equally crucial. RevOps will work on strategies to enhance customer loyalty, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value through personalized retention initiatives.

• Agile and Adaptive Strategies: RevOps teams will adopt agile methodologies to quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands. Flexibility and the ability to pivot strategies rapidly will be essential in the dynamic business landscape.

Regarding the skills needed, my hope is most Revenue Operations leaders have these soft skills (they just get applied differently) around adaptability, problem-solving, process optimization, etc.). But I think we will see the need for stronger hard skills around data analytics/modeling and financial analysis - getting into the FP&A data and planning to properly model and plan (and adjust the plan) is going to be critical. I think FP&A and RevOps are going to become even closer partners in the future.

The future of revenue operations is leveraging AI (predictive & generative) to accelerate organizational growth by making reps more efficient and effective with AI powered insights, automation and scale ! With AI today, revops is best positioned to Automate/eliminate the repetitive, orchestrate the customer's journey with real-time insights and execute organizational strategy with engaging experiences both for customers and reps! 

With this lens, educating self on AI and understanding how to leverage AI to design powerful experiences for the organization ,to drive revenue growth will be a valuable skill to have! With the pace of innovation, having a mindset to continuously invest in learning is also important!

Here's a few trends I've observed for revenue operations:

1. Rev ops is becoming an umbrella org for operations teams supporting other business functions

2. Rev ops is fast adopting AI, but AI is still in its infancy

Rev Ops Umbrella Org - historically departments like marketing, sales, sales enablement and customer success operate separately and have their own operations team. However, given how inter-connected these functions are to help acquire, retain, and up-sell customers, companies are starting to move the operations team for each function under an overall rev operations org.

Take Action - As a rev ops practitioner, regardless of your current org structure, set-up operational cadences and joint KPIs with other operations teams to promote better collaboration and drive revenue growth. Use the cadences to review performance against joint KPIs and provide a feedback loop on your functions (e.g. what types of customers does Cust Success successfully retain or upsell that we can inform Marketing to target as an ICP) to create a flywheel for revenue acceleration.

AI is Table Stakes - GTM SaaS vendors have been quick to embrace and incorporate AI into their offerings. The majority of vendor's AI use cases help increase GTM productivity (e.g. use GenAI to compose an email or conduct research on an account). What AI doesn't do well right now are to provide proactive insights to Rev Ops team (i.e. recommend what account to work on, what specific tasks to complete and in what sequence in order to maximize revenue).

Take Action - Increase seller productivity by enabling them on the latest AI functionality in your tool stack, and incorporating them into your playbooks.

At the same time, no vendor will have more knowledge about your company's data and sales playbook than your company to determine what proactive insights can be raised. Work with your IT team to gauge what AI technologies are needed to surface actionable insights, and evaluate whether to buy vs build the tools taking into consideration needed resources, cost and time.