Revenue Ops Team

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. 

A few KPIs that make a lot of sense to me in this economic environment: 1. Push Counter - take a look at how many times opportunities are slippling. 2. Time Since Discovery Meeting - how long has it been since you've had engagement with your prospetive buyer? 3. % of Accounts in Territory that are Touched - are your AEs and SDRs diligently outreaching all the accounts in their territory?

Most of the time, you can find rev ops teams being the busiest teams. There is usually no downtime as in sales; there is a quarterly cycle, and planning happens every six months (or a year). As leading a rev ops team, I value the two metrics below that some teams tend to deprioritize. * % of time spent firefighting (or responding to ad-hoc tasks) vs. working on big rocks that help move the business forward. In many cases, I see teams at 80/20. Ideally, it should be the other way around, but if you can get this to 50/50, you are running a healthy team. You'll need to constantly look at this and align with your stakeholders and get their buy-in, but also be able to push back and say "no." And I see this as a leader's job to do. * The health of the team in terms of job satisfaction: Many companies run engagement surveys to measure, but the leaders often only sometimes get to focus and improve the gaps from these surveys. Rev Ops professionals generally have a high tolerance and have "helper" personalities, so it should be taken seriously if these scores are low. It will lead to burnout and high attrition. Make sure to take action and help team members feel they are learning, growing, balancing their work life, setting boundaries, and getting clear communication.

Identifying preventable churn from the non-preventable churn and focusing on second-order revenue.  Everyone is going to see churn trend up this year while things normalize, which is going to make a lot of Rev Ops teams panic and try to solve everyone’s concerns with the same level of urgency. Rev Ops teams and specifically Customer success teams need to go into triage mode and determine which customers are really worth trying to save. Not every customer is worth saving and that will be a hard pill for many customer success professionals to swallow. Customer success teams can gracefully let customers churn and keep good relationships. While companies will lose their ARR and potential expansion ARR, they will hopefully keep more future second-order revenue intact. Second-order revenue potential can be massive, so making sure not to screw that up is critical.

* 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.

Aligning on definitions in the awareness to revenue funnel and transparency are the most important factors in making sure shared KPIs are successful. If teams understand the definitions, they know what to expect from each other in terms of deliverables and they can share responsibility if changes are needed to be successful. 1. Create shared definitions of what is a qualified account or lead, what is a buyer, what is a champion, etc. 2. Make sure you are tracking track KPIs, leading indicators, and disqualification reasons so that it is clear where strategy needs improvement. You should be able to see lead generation, whether accounts have buyers or not, the source of these, how they have been treated by sales including number of follow-ups and speed to lead, and if the lead is disqualified it should be noted why. 3. Create a dashboard tracking success to KPIs, leading indicators, number of qualified accounts generated, number of leads generated, the average time to respond to a new lead, the performance of sequences used on leads, the conversion rate of MQLs to SQLs, the conversion rate of SQLs to stage 2 opportunities, pipeline generated, the conversion rate of leads to closed revenue, median revenue generated. You should be able to see all of this by source/campaign. 4. Review the dashboard in a weekly review of how things are tracking, what’s working vs not, and shared ideas.

Days 0-30: Discovery and Reporting 1. Go through the process of understanding necessary RevOps initiatives as noted in the question “What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first revenue operations manager at a company establishing the function?” 2. Identify urgent revenue leaks like slow responses to hand-raisers or low follow-through or renewals falling through the cracks. 3. Understand where reporting lives and what reporting is missing in the funnel. While you’re doing this, create a list of reports and dashboards that can later be added to a section of your RevOps homepage to start creating a definitive list of where to get metrics that all departments can use. This should clearly display where RevOps has a stake and can help revenue. Days 31-60: Quick High-Impact Wins You should have an understanding of where revenue is currently coming from and where the org is losing business. Being the first revenue operations person should mean a lot of low-hanging fruit to impact the business. Focus on those low-hanging fruit and stand up some quick simple measures to boost revenue. A little should go a long way in these situations, don’t focus on standing up long-term processes if it’ll take a long time, just focus on quick gains that can hold things over while bigger initiatives get set into motion. Note what will need to be revisited later. This establishes the impact the function can have early on and creates buy-in from stakeholders. Days 60-90: Establish the Function 1. Define revenue operations at your org and put together a RevOps home page wherever go-to-market documentation lives. You will house your initiatives, mission, request process, and resources for other teams and leadership here like links to dashboards. Add a centralized list of reports collected on go-to-market metrics to start becoming a resource. 2. Refine what’s needed to ensure RevOps has a continued impact. Create a first draft of documentation on how RevOps will work and showcase the initiatives you’ve identified as the highest priority to bring scale and sustainability to go-to-market processes. 3. Kick-off work for what you’ve identified as the highest priority initiative to show what working with RevOps will look like for stakeholders.

Rev ops should be a Day 2 hire - the systems and tools a company are implementing from very early days (e.g. SFDC) would benefit from a dedicated operations person to ensure that things are being built for scale. I may be biased as an ops person myself, but I think it’s extremely important to invest in these resources early on. I’ve never talked to a leader who says ‘I hired my rev ops person too early,’ but have heard many people lament the opposite. Practically, I think that after a company has gone from founder-led selling and there is a sales leader with 1-2 sales reps on board, it is time to hire a rev ops manager.

RevOps has a place early on because it can measure whether your attempts are working and save you resources spent going in the wrong direction. However, sometimes it’s good to let a sales team of 1-3 run a bit loose at first with a few simple processes for the documentation of contracts. People tend to look for the fastest way to do things and allowing a few team members to test and develop their own way of doing things can provide good insights for when you bring in revenue operations. To keep results top of mind, get the team together at least weekly to talk about what feels like it’s working vs not. If you’re running under a SaaS model, don’t wait to hire RevOps. Cross-functional systems and processes are crucial to retention.

I view projects and priorities as "Big Rocks" and "Small Projects." The big rocks are foundational work streams for the business and will help drive the business forward. The small projects are also important but will be more of a "one and done" type of work. Big rocks should have one driver, and one person should be driving at most two big rocks a quarter. Big rocks also should not be rushed. I have seen many mistakes where if a big rock is not done well, the members need to go back and rip/replace it, which takes much more time and resources. Make sure you have the right stakeholders involved and timelines built for these. I also recommend you have experienced members driving big rocks. * Big Rock projects can be: setting up SFDC to measure bookings, territory planning, sales methodology, forecasting, standard metrics dashboards, annual planning, sales comp design, account hierarchies, etc. * Small Projects can be: deal approval matrix, ROE (rules of engagement) updates, SPIFF design, QBR templates, Sales playbooks, etc. Most of these can be quickly revised and updated as the business evolves. You should have a running list of small projects and prioritize every quarter. 

My framework for prioritizing is pretty simple, I like to use a quadrant style prioritization framework and allocate requests into the following format and ensure that I have X% of time allocated to each quadrant: * Top Left: Do Now * High importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 50% of time allocated to this category) * Bottom Left: Delegate * Low importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 10% of time allocated to this category) - these are typically the distractions that comes up and delay strategic initiatives - sometimes they just need done, but really focus on how you streamline, reduce and delegate these items * Top Right: Do Next * High importance, low urgency (generally like to keep around 40% of time to this category) * These are the items that if you do not schedule and focus on getting these done, they will become high urgency and typically turn into fire drills, so trying to get ahead of scheduling these into workload * Bottom Right: Delete * Low importance, low urgency (0% allocation) * If the request does not align with strategy, needs deprioritized (these are your say no, or not right now)

P0: it starts with how Performance Evaluation or Yearly Performance review is done at the org. I'd prioritize based on whatever goal I am going to be rated against in my annual review. P1: What my Line Manager expects from this role and team? "Making my boss successful" is everyone's primary job. If every person in the organization works towards making their boss/line manager successful, the entire organization thrives. It is a simple yet effective way to align for success.   P2: Northstar metrics for the Org. That is one main business goals that execs speak about in their board meetings. I'd definitely want to contribute to that goal in every way possible. 

If you’re the first revenue operations manager, I recommend identifying key revenue operations initiatives the company needs, prioritizing them, and then organizing projects and measuring tasks against that. Here’s how I did it: 1. Create a set of questions to ask the heads of all go-to-market teams focused on pain points, challenges, current goals, and which parts of the funnel they own 2. Shadow employees across go-to-market functions to find inefficiencies and take notes 3. Pattern match across your notes to identify key areas for development and list potential projects that would fall within each 4. Prioritize these areas for development as initiatives based on their potential impact to revenue 5. Circulate these initiatives across the company, making sure to highlight which are the current top initiatives vs which are noted for the future 6. Tag all requests with which initiatives they fall into, including leaving blanks where requests don’t fall into any 7. Additionally, tag requests with an impact score of 1-10 and a resource consumption score of 1-10 8. Every quarter, choose 1-2 initiatives to focus on and go through the backlog of requests to find high-impact tasks to focus on or to string into a wider more impactful project. 9. Schedule at least half of your time dedicated to the quarterly initiatives. I use Wednesday as a no-meeting day as well as Friday mornings to set aside a minimum amount of time. 10. For the unscheduled time, evaluate requests based on impact, resource consumption, and urgency to see if there are tasks more high impact than dedicating more time to your current project 11. Revisit initiatives at least quarterly and remove those which are no longer relevant as well as add new initiatives based on patterns seen in requests, notes taken from cross-functional meetings, and notes taken from shadowing those in go-to-market roles 12. When requests fall outside of initiatives, it's often a sign it is not a high priority. 13. Don’t be afraid to leave tickets unaddressed. Set an SLA to review tickets and add initiatives, impact, and resource consumption scores, but not to complete the tasks.

My first piece of advice would be to learn. Learn as much as you can about the total addressable market, the product market fit and the buyer's journey for the product or service that your new company is selling. Spend time in the field with sales and SDRs. Read online reviews about your company. Take a sales leader out for dinner/drinks and ask them how they get deals done at your company. Take the AE onboarding courses for new sellers joining your company. Read old board decks and study the metrics. What have been the trends over time? What appear to the the strengths and weaknesses of the revenue engine?   Once you've made good progress in your learning tour, start compiling a list of opportunities - divided between quick wins that can be implemented now and longer term initiative that will require more lift and more change management. On the hiring front, fight hard for your rev ops budget. You only have one shot to get this right and you need to make a compelling business case for investments in enablement, tools and hiring top notch talent. 

Start with identifying what parts of the organization your RevOps team will be supporting. Then find the resources in each of these teams you will be supporting to either become your stakeholders and partners or if you do have the option to hire, bring them into your org. 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. 

When there are only one or two team members, I would have the team focus on mission-critical projects only. The three main areas would be 1: Sales process & forecasting, 2. Define and measure KPIs, 3. Sales Compensation design. Initially, individuals will cover broader responsibilities but will not have the capacity to go very deep in each area. All of these can evolve throughout the business, but I would clearly define and set the structure by working closely with your sales leader. * Sales Process & Forecasting: You can be simple with the process. In the beginning, set 2 - 3 action items and 1 - 2 exit criteria for each stage. Don't worry too much about getting the fields or validation rules right. The key is to train the sales team so that it becomes easy to remember and follow. In one of my roles, we used to print and laminate a 1-pager, and all reps had it on their desks. Also, investing in solid forecasting tools (Aviso, Clari) will be foundational. Making sure there is visibility and enforcement on forecast categories (pipeline/upside/commit) goes a long way. * Define and Measure KPIs: For SaaS businesses, there are ~10 metrics you should care about. (ARR (by region, business type, segment), Average Deal Size, # of Deals, Cycle Time, Conversion Rates, Win Rates, # of Customers, Retention Rate, Rep Productivity, Rep Attainment). You should define these metrics and build your SFDC data structure so that anyone can easily pull these numbers. It will save you time to focus more on strategy and insights if you get the fundamentals in place. * Sales Compensation Design: Again, comp plans can be simple. There are many standard comp plans out there. I would stick to those and not do anything crazy. As the business evolves and business goals change, you would want to add components, but in general, I will keep it to the basics.

With the economic downturn, we can anticipate a ton of teams reducing or limiting headcount this year, which is going to make a lot of the teams panic and try to solve everyone’s concerns with the same level of urgency. This is a recipe for disaster. If you are supporting another function, product, or team - you should prioritize what they want to prioritize. However, a very important principle to remember for any team that is shorthanded or has limited bandwidth is that 'Not all Problems are created equal'. If you are helping your stakeholders and partners meet their most important goal or finish the most important project, whatever was not done or completed becomes a lot less of a concern.   Separately, I talked about prioritizing deliverables in a response to another question. I am posting it below for reference.  P0: it starts with how Performance Evaluation or Yearly Performance review is done at the org. I'd prioritize based on whatever goal I am going to be rated against in my annual review. P1: What my Line Manager expects from this role and team? "Making my boss successful" is everyone's primary job. If every person in the organization works towards making their boss/line manager successful, the entire organization thrives. It is a simple yet effective way to align for success. P2: Northstar metrics for the Org. That is one main business goals that execs speak about in their board meetings. I'd definitely want to contribute to that goal in every way possible.

For me, at any organization and in any role, the most important alignment is the one with the overall Organization's goals.  The strategy should be dynamic and it should continue to evolve. The tasks your team performs on day to day will change as your strategy evolves. However, it is important that all you are doing is serving those org-level goals. In my previous life, we had YoY growth as a north star metric. Lately, I have seen mature orgs putting Net Revenue Retention (NRR) on top of their scorecards. I try and tie all the tactics that my team is implementing with that north-star metric to stay aligned with the business goals.