Revenue Ops Career Path

That's a tough one. A few ideas: * Thank your boss for the feedback and ask him/her for suggestions on how to improve. Ask for specific examples. Ask "what are others doing that I am not?". If I were your boss in this example, I would want to know that you are struggling with the feedback so I can help provide clarity. * Find a mentor within the company (or potentially outside the company) that you can go to for advice. Share that you are struggling with the feedback and ask for ideas. A good mentor will be able to help. * If you have a peer that reports to the same leader, and you have a good realtionship, you can speak with him/her to see if they are getting similar feedback. They may be able to help interpret the feedback. 

This varies depending on the person, but here are some general ideas! * Try to get a different perspective, if possible from someone who can be neutral, and is familiar with both you and your work and your boss. Depending on your relationship with your boss, sometimes it can be helpful to hear someone else give similar feedback to you so it doesn't seem like it is just coming from one place. * If you're not getting this already, ask your boss to give you specific examples or things they would like to see as a result of their feedback. And, try to identify what type of support you need in order to do those things. For example, maybe scheduling a regular async check-in so that you can get more real-time feedback so you know if you're moving in the right direction or not. 

In my opinion, soft skills are more imporatnt than hard in this role; however, there are a few hard skills that are important: * Practical sales and/or marketing experience. It's important that you can resonate and empathize with the teams you are supporting.  This also provides credibility.  * Strong experience with CRM and related technologies. My deep knowledge and expreience of Salesforce, Marketo, and other sales/marketing tools is a big reason I've been successful in this role. * Experience with budgeting and data analysis. RevOps leaders need practical experience telling stories through data to enable the org to make better business decisions.

Honestly, I believe revenue operations leaders need soft skills more than hard skills. Hopefully they are coming from a background where hard skills like data analysis and visualization and Excel/SQL were needed, but broadening this question out to general skills - data analysis, storytelling, and communication and collaboration are the most important. * Data analysis: Revenue operations leaders and teams are working with and responsible for the data that supports their stakeholders, so leaders should have a strong skillset in taking that data and using it to answer questions and solve problems so they can support stakeholders as well as help their teams do the same. * Storytelling: This is kind of an extension of data analysis, but all the best data analysts are also outstanding storytellers. The CEO of your company is often not going to want the nitty gritty details of an analysis project, and so revenue operations leaders and professionals need to be able to distill complex topics into simple stories and narratives that someone who is not in the weeds will understand and take action on.  * Collaboration: This is obviously important in MOST jobs, but revenue operations leaders are constantly working to align different teams and stakeholders across business functions, as well as help their own teams make the right strategy decisions. For example, Sales and Marketing are so reliant on each other, but oftentimes aren't collaborating nearly as much as they should be. A RevOps leader needs to be able to quickly identify those gaps and drive action based on aligned data, priorities, and initiatives. 

RevOps professionals have a lot to offer other parts of the business. They have valuable experience driving GoToMarket strategies, improving processes, leveraging technology to improve productivity, using data to tell stories, and much more. These are valuable skills that are easily transferrable to other parts of the business.   In high-growth SaaS companies, bookings are king. As a result, sales/marketing typically gets the majotiry of budget for tools & tech. RevOps professionals can take the great experience they get in sales/marketing and apply it to other parts of the business that typically don't have similar resources. In fact, I am in the process of taking many of the best-practices we've implemented in sales/marketing and applying them to our customer implementation team.

One of the most important RevOps skills that could be applied across an organization would be familiarity and expertise with data specific to teams that are being supported (i.e. Marketing or Sales). Folx working on those teams are obviously experts in their field, but they don't know what they don't know, especially from a data perspective. RevOps professionals or perspectives can help to uncover new insights that teams didn't even know existed in their datasets or tech stack, or even just help identify new problems to solve and opportunities to grow the business. I'm constantly trying to work with stakeholders to identify new "What about..." questions that my team can help them solve, that would make their day-to-day easier and most importantly, their work more impactful.

* Ensure that associates are working on challenging projects * Recognize the positive impact they are having on the business * Provide meaningful feedback on a regular basis. We have quarterly "Connects" to share accomplishments, areas for improvement, goals for the next quarter, and development opportunities. * With a virtual team, it's extra important to communicate what's going on in the business and provide the opportunity to ask questions. I have weekly team meetings and individual 1:1s. * Invest in continuing education -- conferences, online training, or whatever is appealing to the associate * Have some fun! Happy hours, team outings, etc.

This is a great question - so many things about talent retention have to do with the company as a whole vs. things that I have control over on the operations team. So the first thing is to join a company that aligns with your values and where you believe in the mission and leadership; retention is much easier if it’s a great place to work! On the ops team in particular - make sure your team is working on projects that interest them, that they have a voice in setting their roadmap and OKRs and that you share context from other business units with your team to highlight the importance and impact of the work they’re doing. Also, if there are parts of the job that someone is particularly averse to (e.g. software procurement/negotiations) step in or offer support so they can do more impactful work. Unless it’s a key responsibility of their role, doing some lifting on those ‘less exciting’ tasks can go a long way. Finally, run defense for your team whenever possible so they have less thrash and can focus on their work and not on bureaucracy or fire drills.

Revenue operations demands a wide skill set that leads to a wide range of tasks as well as demanding career ladders. Additionally, revenue operations has the propensity to become low autonomy due to its nature in assisting numerous teams. Managing these challenges is essential to retaining top revenue operations talent. Here are some ideas to improve retention: * Understand both what interests the employee, but also what disinterests them * If you can do it genuinely, reframe work outside of the employee’s interests by tying it to things that excite them more. * For example, let’s say there’s admin work to be done around Opportunities in Salesforce but the employee's interest lies in data management. Ask the employee to lean on their interests to ask if there is an opportunity to increase data integrity or collect new data points of interest to the business. Give them the opportunity to complete this project while adding to its value by using their interests. * Make sure to hire employees with varying interests, not just varying skill sets * Career ladders should not demand excellency in all areas of revenue operations. RevOps spans data management, data analysis, tooling, strategy, and project management. You can create a more general career ladder with all important RevOps competencies and work with the employee to identify which are the most relevant for their career advancement * For example, I have a career ladder with competencies in Data Insights, Project Management, Strategy, Tooling, and Leadership. The combination of any two leads to a powerful employee and as the team expands, their mastery will be more important than their generalist abilities. Reach out to me if you want to see this career ladder. * Projects and ideas sourced within revenue operations can fall by the wayside if there’s too much emphasis on supporting other teams. The best way to support other teams is to give them perspective on the gaps across all go-to-market teams and what projects revenue operations can own to accelerate revenue growth. The cherry on top is this creates more autonomy for employees and increases retention.

There obviously is not a one-size-fits-all approach here, but the way I think about this boils down to a few things: * Create and foster a culture of learning and collaboration amongst your team, and enable folx to solve interesting problems together without someone constantly looking over their shoulder. When your team is learning and growing together with autonomy, that can sometimes be a tough thing to recreate somewhere else. * Expanding on that, top talent will always value autonomy and trust in their work. I lean towards giving my team almost too much autonomy - the best way for them to learn is to learn from mistakes and figuring things out on their own, but it's also an important skill to know when to ask for help. * Advocate tirelessly for your team and your top talent - that can apply to comp/promotions, visibility and exposure at a big company, or giving frequent positive and constructive feedback. I've been really lucky to have worked for managers who have advocated tirelessly for me and as an employee I really valued that. Working with a manager who knows your skillset and body of work well is super valuable so make it clear to your team how much you value them and then execute on that.

I actually did both! Earlier in my career I was a marketing leader and was resonsible for demand generation. I was always passionate about leveraging technology and measuring the impact that marketing has on the business. I was an early adopter of Salesforce and Marketo, and leveraged these tools to show an ROI on our marketing campaigns. This experience made be a better RevOps leader because I understand how the marketing machine works and can support them through process, technology, and analytics. If you're in sales or marketing today, and love working with tech/data, consider a move to RevOps!

After many years focused on demand generation from a Marketing perspective, I realized that I wanted to be part of a team that helped to drive decisions across the whole organization, rather than focused on a specific team or area like demand generation. I also had a data and strategy oriented skillset that helped me naturally gravitate towards revenue operations.  Coming from a demand generation background, felt I had enough knowledge of other functions where I could have a bigger impact on the business helping to connect siloed teams instead of continuing to just focus on one area, and really advocate for connection across teams to align individual KPIs to the north star KPI of revenue. 

It's tough to get hired into RevOps straight out of school. The best path to go straight into RevOps is to get an internship. We've had some amazing interns that joined us as full-time associates upon graduation. As an intern, you'll get valuable exposure to the organzation and can determine if RevOps is right for you. Other things I look for in recent graduates: * Business analytics courses * Strong Excel experience * Internship or other work experience that is data-driven and analytical * A demonstrated strong work ethic throughout school

Sometimes going straight into revenue operations isn't necessarily the best path to be successful in the field. Not to say you CAN'T go straight into RevOps, but I think it can be extremely beneficial to become a subject matter expert in a particular area that you want to support from a RevOps perspective. Some of the best RevOps analysts/strategists I've worked with were experts in Marketing, Sales, etc. first, and then moved into an operations role after gaining experience in the function. This gives you a ton of perspective and most importantly, empathy for the folx and business functions you will be supporting from a RevOps position.  Personally, I first worked as a Marketing generalist, and then in Acquisition and Demand Generation for 5+ years before moving into revenue operations full time, so I feel pretty strongly that this is a great path towards being successful in RevOps!

Soft skills are most important. Hard skills can be learned. The majority of my team did not have RevOps experience prior to joining Paycor. We have some amazing Salesforce and Marketo admins that had not used these apps in the past. Hire smart people that are quick learners and teach them what they need to know.

It can depend on where you're coming from, but I lean towards it being better to come in with the soft skills, although there will always be a baseline level of hard skills you need depending on the role. For example, for a data analyst or data engineer, SQL might be a baseline hard skill, but I don't necessarily care about what flavor of SQL they know. In that case, I'd value soft skills like data analysis and interpretation, stakeholder management, growth mindset, and distilling complexity more. 

I always ask questions related to a business problem that I am trying to solve, in order to assess hypothesis-driven, structured problem solving and quantitative reasoning / analysis. An example would be "How would you determine the cause for increased churn in the business?". I want to see how candidates think through the various drivers and how they would test their hypotheses to come up with an answer. Bonus points if it's an actionable driver that can actually reduce churn (as an example). 

I love questions that demonstrate curiosity, scrappiness, operational excellence and enthusiasm for the business. One of my favorite Q/As below Q: Walk me through an example of how you impacted the business? how did you discover the opportunity, execute on it, and ultimately how did it impact the business? A: I want to hear several things in this answer 1. Curiosity for the business and how to make it better--digging into data, talking to stakeholders, etc. 2. Scrappiness on execution--you didn't have all the resources you wanted, but you found a scrappy workaround to test your hypothesis or get something done.  3. Strong operating process--you were able to get buy in from a cross functional team, align them to this initiative and you grounded your results in data. 4. You were proud of the outcome and inspired to execute more.

To justify a promotion you want to be able to show impact, followership and consistency. You want to be able to say 1. this is what I did 2. this is how I did it 3. I'm operating at this level consistently.  1. Impact: show with numbers the impact that your initiatives had on the business, and point to your leadership / actions that enabled it. Quantifying your impact to the business, and leading these types of initiatives is key. 2. Followership: Build a strong followership of teammates and cross functional partners who would pound the table for your promotion. Operate in a way that you are an effective collaborator, make room for other people's ideas, and people enjoy working with you.  3. Consistency: Show consistency (6-12 months) of operating at this high level, driving impact and building your followership. You must show that you have truly upleveled your skills across several initiatives vs. a one off big win.

The most common career paths I've seen are for Rev Ops managers to move up the ranks within their orgs or move into Sales orgs, or less commonly, move into product orgs.  The easiest transition is to take on more scope within the revenue Ops org, eg regional to global or taking on more sub functions.  For managers looking for something a bit more different or wanting to start a CRO or COO career path, transitioning to sales manager / sales leader roles can also be possible. It's a good way to "own the number" and take on a larger team size and truly execute against the strategies you have been planning, albeit at a smaller scale.  Another path that I've seen is to move into the product function. This is harder to do and dependent on forming strong relationships and project interactions while in Rev ops, but it's certainly doable!

I believe the "typical" revenue operations career path varies based on the person. But I typically see team members breaking into Revenue Operations a few different ways: * Entry level: Coming into an organization at the start of their career in an analyst/system admin role and learning about the different roles in Revenue Operations and determining if want to generalize or specialize * Transitioning from Specialization: Moving from a speciality such a Marketing Operations into more of a generalized Revenue Operations strategic role where work cross functionally * Transitioning from Revenue Organization: Working as BDR, SDR, AE and enjoying the operationalize side of the business and making a transition into RevOps Generally, I think you are starting as a specialist (either in a function: sales, marketing, customer success) or by domain (systems, analytics, etc.) and working to build understanding of other functions and specialities through cross-functional alignment and coordination and moving from execution to strategic delivery.

Depends on what parts of the organization your RevOps team Support. When you hire internally from the teams that you want to Support, these people can help you realize problems that your team needs to solve before someone else has to ask for them. If I wanted to go on to join the RevOps team, I'd start by looking at items that the team is operationalizing for my specific function (it could be Marketing, Sales, Support, anything) and learn the ins and out of it. 

Career path will vary widely depending on the person. I'll answer this question with the view of "how do I progress my career path in rev ops": 1. Be consistent in your day to day: Build a reputation as a dependable teammate that will get the job done. Do this by hitting timelines, taking ownership of your work, and delivering high quality products. 2. Practice and tailor your communication skills: Be able to inspire confidence from your stakeholders in both verbal and written communications. Do this  a. by concisely articulating your point, use fewer words and use numbers to illustrate b. focus on a single point you want to get across, the details or ancillary items will take focus away from the main thing c. tailor you communication to the audience. Put yourself in the shoes of who you're presenting to and consider what they are looking for. Your chief revenue officer is looking for a different message than your peer. 3. Uncover opportunities on your own and have a plan to execute: Finding an opportunity to make the business better, and having a plan to execute on it is one of the biggest differentiators. Chances are, you know your business or scope better than your manager--and you should be thinking about ways to improve it. The difference between "what else can I do?" vs. "this is an opportunity I want to test" is a differentiator.