Ana Rottaro

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.

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.

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.

Aligning on the 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 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.

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.

To ensure everyone is on the same page Revenue Operations should facilitate mapping out user communications including ownership, the goals of the messaging, and the information needed to make the messaging meaningful. 1. Don't fixate on exactly what is going to be said when, because teams need room to experiment and improve. Give general time windows, triggers for emails, and goals so that sales and marketing have a reference of what's going out. 2. Revenue operations should facilitate meetings between marketing and sales leadership to cease opportunities for new campaigns and sequences while ensuring messaging remains consistent in each time window and users don't get too many emails. 3. Revenue operations should ensure messaging is first tested before it is scaled out. Testing doesn't mean just seeing if the new emails perform well, it also should compare them to the emails across sales and marketing that were cut to allow for the experiment.

First, it is important to ensure clear primary ownership on what team needs to make sure something is communicated to a user. Other teams can supplement that messaging, but one team should take the lead on each goal to ensure critical pieces like value communication and account strengthening live in under the team that can impact the metric the most. The following bullet points are based around a PLG motion. * Marketing * Messaging should be clear to users about what value they get from the product, how they can get more value from the product, and how to reach resources when they want to take their own path outside of the regular customer journey (whether that be connecting with their CSM as a paid user or connecting with sales). * Marketing should leverage product signals and content engagement to adjust to what the user is signaling their next step should be. Some signals to consider: * clicks on paywalls * knowledge center articles visited * blog posts visited * utm parameters from signup * product onboarding behavior * take enrichment data on job roles, industry, and company size with a grain of salt. It’s best to index on behavior. * Marketing should also own feeding the self-serve motion and stragthening the account as whole to make it sales viable or healthier for Customer Success. Goals should center around: * Gaining quick user growth in an account * Gaining a large portion of the company as free or low plan tier users * Communicating gains from using the product (individual and for whole plans to admins) * Communicating what is lost at the end of trials * User-specific recommendations to help them improve where it aligns with the product * Reminding users of trials ending and how to self-serve or contact sales * Giving users options to extend their trial by inviting users * Sales * While marketing nurtures users and funnels the ready ones to inbound, sales can be more proactive but should still ground their outreach on signals and personas. Revenue operations should make sure we are set up to track: * What users are using (depth and frequency) * What paywalls they are hitting (including timing) * Enrichment on who the user is and where they work * Case studies relevant to this user * Sales should reach out with urgency as the strength of these signals decreases with time. Sequences should be specific to the signals and use case for this users job role. * Example: Signals show a user has viewed knowledge articles about a paid feature and the security page. A sequence can reach out focusing on how this feature has helped others in similar positions and how you can help answer questions, help get a broader trial going with their team, and help answer security questions. * Revenue operations can facilitate signal specific sequencing by tying signals to sequences while providing sales a prioritized list based on signals and a way to see all the signals the user has given off. Sales should have room in the sequences to layer other signal information into the sequence to strengthen it. * Note this means sales needs to be encouraged to spend more time sending emails and not just sending the same email to many users. This should yield better results. Sales management should be encouraged to not just look at activity volume, but also the emails being sent to coach their team on making a more impactful email given the data available to them. * Customer Success * Customer Success should aim to form champions and strong admin relationships. * First and foremost CS should be available to answer customer questions quickly and provide recommendations and workarounds as needed specific to the use case of the account. * This is both through email and through offering trainings and consultations to admins, but also to team leads and groups to help answer questions, show users features they might have missed, and tailor recommendations. * Revenue operations should help decide what plan tiers should offer customer success to improve utilization and reduce risk. This should decide the amount of resources needed. Certain plan tiers or user types often don't require CS engagement so spending resources here should be limited to scaled marketing. * Revenue operations should work to figure out what signals a user as being a good fit for CS to reach out. This will help CS prioritize all paid users they work with across accounts. Similar to the signal-based lists made for sales, CS should have some as well although the signals might be more based on product adoption, admin functionality, paywalls being hit for higher plan tiers, etc. * Revenue operations should help Customer Success track user roles and feature requests. * From there, CS can strengthen relationships further as product launches related to feature requests occur and continue to maintain champion relationships by offering early access to features in beta and chances to participate in user research. Value communications should just be owned by all teams including product and should not just be for administrators. * While admins may be wary of budget and license management, love of the product across the paid users is what makes a plan sticky. Proving value to every paid user is important. The last note is on expansion and renewal. CS should always have an ear out for whether expansion might be the right more for their accounts. * Revenue operations can hand-off signals of needing higher plan tiers or more paid seats that CS can explore and then generate into leads for sales and make and introduction. * For accounts without CSMs, sales should be handed these similarly to the bullet point that starts with "Sales should reach out with urgency" * For renewals without a CSM, these contracts should be on auto-renew or managed by an Account Manager. Warning emails around renewal should go out and the account should enter a renewal phase in the customer journey. For renewals with a CSM, they should work together with the Account Manager to ensure warnings are happening in a timely manner and with context on the account's health and priorities.

Marketing should be focused on campaign performance by checking qualification rates of leads by campaign, cost of acquisition per lead, average revenue brought in from qualified leads, and growth of leads by source. There should be a focus on driving more leads with high ROI while maintaining qualification rates. Sales should be focused on speed to lead and improving sequence performance to drive higher qualification rates. Marketing and sales should report and talk about these metrics openly to see what campaigns are worth investing further or which should be deprecated.