Ken Liu

Revenue operations provides utility to the C-suite in various capacities, ranging from revenue forecasting, to process optimization to data and analytics. These are all core functions of rev ops that drive value to CXOs. Regardless of core rev ops function, I've found these best practices to always hold true for my career: 1. Identify the problem statement - never jump head first into the next big project until you align with stakeholders and management on what exactly is the problem or challenge you're solving. Many execs are drawn by a shiny star project that is flashy, interesting, or just a cool thought exercise. But any cycles spent on a project means time taken away from another potentially higher value project. Just taking a few minutes to ask what exactly is the problem statement for a task or project you're asked to drive can literally save you months of work that becomes shelfware because it wasn't addressing a core problem. 2. Align on KPIs and stick to them - invest time upfront to define a concise and clear list of KPIs/ OKRs for your org. Once defined, make every effort to stick to them. I've been in many orgs where KPIs were created quickly in the interest of rapidly pushing out anchor metrics. However, insufficient time was invested in ensuring they were the right KPIs, were easily measurable, or had sufficient operational rigor to support their inspection. This in turn caused churn on the KPIs, which greatly impaired organizational focus by moving around the cheese for the KPIs. Do the right thing by taking time to define the right KPIs; it will save you and your org much time and expedite achievement of OKRs. 3. Vet your ideas with the field - ensure you socialize your Rev Ops' key strategies, ideas or workstreams with the field for feedback. In the interest of time, rev ops teams often inadvertently operate in any ivory tower by coming up with recommendations and ideas without running them by actual sales teams that are impacted. Doing so risks jeopardizing the idea's success by ignoring valuable field feedback from sales team and reducing trust in the solution from the field since their input was not solicited. Do the right thing by running Rev Ops' proposals against trusted members of the sales field, and you'll greatly increase the success of the solution within the field.

Having access to the C-suite can be helpful for your career from a learning, career growth and networking experience. Some ways to gain access to the C-suite include: 1. Working on projects that have visibility to the C-suite 2. Assisting with events that have C-suite attendance or sponsorship 3. Attending all-hands, fireside chats or skip level meetings w/the C-suite Projects w/C-Suite Visibility - you can have exposure to the C-suite through a myriad of ways, either directly in meetings or via offline channels. The key to having this exposure is to work on opportunities and projects that are on the C-suites' radar. Examples of potential opportunities include 1. Engage on top priority projects - work with your manager to staff yourself on a company priority project that is reported to the C-suite. Through this project you may unlock opportunities to attend C-suite meetings where the project is discussed, or at least be included on comms where the C-suite opine on the project and have exposure on their thoughts. 2. Opining on threads that have the attention of the C-suite - the C-suite may occasionally ask direct feedback from entire departments, functions or even the company. For example at Databricks the CEO sometimes sends an email to the entire company asking for input on various top-of-mind topics. Use this opportunity to provide your perspective, become viewed as a thought-leader among the C-suite, and increase your exposure to the C-suite and rest of the company Volunteer on C-Suite Events - you can insert yourself into forums where C-suite are present by assisting in events and meetings that they're attending 1. Volunteer at Events - the C-suite often are sponsors for various company initiatives (e.g. veterans network function, Employee Resource Group champion). See if you can help volunteer at one of these events, and this often gives you exposure to the sponsoring C-suite. 2. Help with Exec Meetings - Additionally, you can sometimes join C-suite meetings if you help with organizing or prepping their meetings. For example, by helping with organizing the meeta agenda or content, or helping capture meetings notes, you may be able to earn a seat in the meeting. Even if you're not in the meeting, you may still be involved in email threads/slack discussions related to the meeting which gives you exposure. Attend Forums w/the C-suite - many companies, especially those that are mid-size or smaller, often hold all-hands with the C-suite where they open up the floor or message boards to the company for Q&A. There are also occasional fireside chats or skip level meetings with members of the C-suite. Take advantage of these 'free' opportunities to engage w/the C-suite. Some additional thoughts re: C-Suite Exposure 1. Non CXO exposure - you can often learn just as much by having access to non CXO leadership. Ask your mentor, manager and others who you trust for the names of leaders from which you can learn. Additionally, these employees may have more bandwidth and/or opportunities and projects where you can have exposure to them. Employ the same strategies noted above to gain access to them. 2. CXO debriefs - even if you can't have direct exposure to the C-suite, you can learn a great deal indirectly from the C-suite by regularly asking for key take-aways and general notes from C-suite meetings that your manager or their managers may have attended.

I was fortunate enough to have access to client C-suite early in my career at Google when I was part of their ad sales teams. Within the sales team, I specialized in marketing analytics, where my job was to help calculate and present to clients the digital media ROI they would receive from investing with Google ad products. While in this role, I used some best practices that helped grant me access to the client C-suite, including: 1. Understand what keeps the CXO up at night, and have an innovative solution to solve it 2. Once you have the CXO's attention, use every opportunity to learn more about their business challenges, and continue offering unique insights to help them address these challenges 3. Adopt a customer first mentality for the CXO when proposing solutions, even if it won't directly benefit you, and you'll earn their trust Understand the CXO's Business Challenges - you need to earn the right to access the C-suite. Spend extra time up front researching what are the CXO's business priorities and challenges. Once you understand their priorities, employ all your resources to create a unique POV or solution to address the solution. For example, my Google sales team managed health insurance clients in our book of business. I learned a health insurance client's CEO wanted to understand how to pivot their marketing strategy when Obamacare upended their industry. Using proprietary Google search data, I created and presented to the CEO a digital media strategy showing how the company could use different digital media at different parts of the insurance purchase journey to maximize sales while meeting ROI targets. Grow the CXO Relationship - once you've caught the CXO's attention (see step 1), build upon that relational momentum and continue asking what are other challenges they face and providing unique data or POVs that help address them. Referring back to the previous Google example, the CEO embraced my strategy, which gave me confidence and permission to ask the CEO and his team follow-up questions around their business strategy and challenges. Armed with this information, I continued to come back with additional insights to help inform their marketing strategy. This relationship eventually led me to becoming the head account executive on the account while also being the analytics lead. Adopt a Customer First Mentality - you gain access to senior leadership when you gain their trust. Gaining trust is dependent upon various factors, including your minimizing your self-orientation. To help minimize self-orientation, adopt a customer first principle. When problem solving for CXOs, think about what solutions would be best for their company in light of the different business dynamics they company faces and what challenges they're facing, even if the solution may not necessarily be optimal for yourself. At Google sales, I had a quarterly sales quota. Despite my desire to optimize to against the quarterly quota, I would try to apply a customer first mentality when defining digital media strategies for my clients. This often meant proposing solutions that would net less digital spend initially. But by demonstrating that my solution was optimized to the customer's interest, I gained their trust, and was able to propose and ask for more aggressive solutions that drove greater long term media spend.

When you're facing this unenviable position, I recommend adopting these best practices: 1. Ensure both execs' strategy is trying to solve the same problem statement 2. Help the execs review how well their strategy aligns against a company and customer first principle 3. Ensure there is a holistic evaluation of the pros and cons of each strategy 4. Flesh out what needs to be true from a time, money and people requirement for each strategy, as well as what are the risks Align on problem statement - this might seem obvious, but it's surprising how often I've seen executives interpret have different interpretations of the problem statement. If all parties are not aligned on the exact problem statement they're addressing, then any comparisons are a non-starter. Operate from Company & Customer First Principles - disagreements in solutions often arise from strategies that have an element of politics. People may have ulterior motives for a strategy (e.g. strategy may benefit his/her department and/or is easier for his/her group to implement) that is difficult to debate around. However, if all parties can define a strategy that clearly articulates how it puts the customer (end user or internal customer first), the strategy is more defensible from a first principles perspective in that it should maximize company and shareholder value. Holistic Evaluation of Pros/Cons - it's easy for stakeholders to become focused on the merits of the solution, especially when they become entrenched in justifying the strategy. However, rarely is a strategy perfect, and a proper comparison of strategies requires a balanced scorecard. Help define a scorecard (or checklist of criteria) that both parties can agree upon to review the merits of their strategies. Populating the scorecard enables a more fair and comparable comparison of the strategies. You can also consider having an unbiased 3rd party help review the scorecard for both execs to vet both solutions. Define Resources Requirements and Risks - related to defining a balanced scorecard, both parties should clearly articulate what are the resources (time, money, people) required to execute each strategy. You can also provide a level of effort (LOE) analysis where on one axis you help map out the relative effort/difficulty of deploying the solution and on the other axis you define the impact (L/M/H as a proxy for expected rev, cost savings, etc.). Additionally, you should articulate all the key risks and trade-offs associated to each strategy to help enable a holistic comparison of each strategy.

In my experience, the most successful way to convince leadership for more HC is by adopting one or more of the following best practices when submitting the ask: 1. Show how the request will directly/indirectly improve the bottom line 2. Quantify the impact of the incremental HC 3. Demonstrate how the HC will positively impact your department or company's OKRs or priorities Improve the bottom line - you can frame most requests in terms of how it can either grow the top line or reduce savings. If your department is tasked with ways of growing revenue, model out how much incremental revenue the HC will drive in year 1, year 2 or whatever investment ROI timeframe your team uses. Similarly, if the HC will result in outsized savings (a penny saved is a penny earned), model out how much in savings the company can expect from the additional HC. Quantify the impact - do your best to model out the dollar impact (incremental revenue and/or cost savings) of the HC request. Having a quantified impact helps leadership better compare and stack rank the HC requests against that of others 1. Find a balance between accuracy and complexity, and avoid over engineering the model 2. Find sound assumptions to base your model upon 3. Partner with your friends in Finance to review your model and test its assumptions Align with company OKRs - you will gain more interest and favor from HC decision makers if you can show how your HC ask will help leadership meet or exceed their KPIs and OKRs. For example if the company OKR is focused on: 1. Reducing turnaround time for qualifying leads - show how the additional HC will decrease the backlog of leads, improve conversion rates through improved vetting of qualified leads, and/or drive more revenue through more conversions per month 2. Improving customer satisfaction within the renewals team - show how HC can conduct more activities per month that directly/indirectly lead to CSAT scores, which in turn lead to x pts in renewal rates or y months in increased subscription tenure, which in turn drives z dollars per customer per year Additional Best Practices 1. Ideally have a committee, like a center of excellence, that meets regularly to review HC requests. This COE should have representation from a diverse set of stakeholders and functions to help ensure fair and regular review of HC requests. 2. Develop and use a standardized template for submitting HC requests. This helps expedite HC reviews by ensuring that the necessary info is needed and structured in a consistent fashion for easier review of HC requests 3. As noted above, loop in your friends in Finance to help test your HC modeling requests, and consider including them in your HC request COE to help evaluate the ROI and merits of the HC requests

Since what constitutes a good OKR is contextual by org, I'll share guiding principles I use to develop strong rev ops OKRs: 1. Align OKRS directly/indirectly to the company's top priorities 2. Vet OKRs with key stakeholders in the org 3. Define OKRs with key results that are easily understood and measurable Company Alignment - you define OKRs to ultimately help your org/team achieve your company's top priorities. If you can't easily articulate how your OKR helps achieve a top company goals, consider revisiting its definition so that it does. Otherwise you'll misdirect valuable resources that are focused on progressing the wrong priorities. Vet OKRs w/Stakeholders - you risk undermining OKR adoption and achievement of targets if you don't get buy in from the parties that will own the OKR. I've seen too many times where rev ops defines OKRs in isolation without obtaining feedback from the sellers that own it. Sellers then make little to no effort taking action against the OKR. Make sure you involve the parties responsible for owning the OKR early on in the definition process to maximize OKR success. Define Measurable and Straightforward OKRs- while this sounds pretty obvious, I've regularly seen key results - especially in teams with highly technical and analytical staff - that are too generic or difficult to measure (e.g. >X% of new opportunities use consistent software deployment configurations). If you find your audience struggling to understand the OKR definition or how to take action and/or have no idea how to actually measure the key result attainment, chances are you need to redefine the OKR. Remember, the simpler the OKR, the higher likelihood of its adoption.

To enter the tech industry as revenue operations manager, you're potentially trying to make 2 moves at once: 1. Entering the tech industry from another industry 2. Taking on a revenue operations manager role from another non rev ops role If you are trying to make both moves at once, you may want to consider making one change at a time. The benefits of doing so are: 1. Easier to market yourself to the hiring manager by only making one transition (e.g. you already have rev ops experience in non-tech industry or you're already in tech and are trying to transition in to rev ops) 2. The learning curve may be flatter with one move, better setting up you for success Additionally, when entering rev ops in tech, you'll want understand if the tech company is a hardware vs software or hybrid. The GTM operations for SW vs HW can be quite different and you'll want to be familiar with their differences. Also, even within software companies, whether their revenue model is subscription vs consumption based (i.e. pay only for what you use) impacts their GTM motion.

When developing successful OKRs that maximize impact and have greatest impact, I recommend two rules: 1. Develop OKRs that directly or indirectly align with your company's topmost business priorities 2. Keep the same OKRs throughout the year and have quarterly targets rather Align OKRs to Company Prios - you set and track OKRs ultimately to help your company achieve its key priorities (e.g. grow revenue, increase margin, increase market share, etc.). If you aren't able to articulate how your OKRs directly or indirectly align to your company's top priorities for the year, then you're creating objectives that are taking valuable resources (people, time and money) from helping the company reach its priorities. Thus define your rev ops OKRs after your company top level priorities are developed. And as you define each OKR, pressure test that they each align to and can be categorized under a company OKR. Maintain the Same OKRs Year Round - it takes time to develop OKRs, educate the team on them, drive their adoption and make progress against them. Swapping out OKRs midway through the year will undermine your team's momentum and progress against OKRs and undercut your impact on the company's top priorities. Assuming you set reasonably aggressive targets for OKRs, you will need to give your team time to develop and execute against plans for reaching OKR targets as well as identify and surmount blockers/headwinds that arise. Thus spend more time up front defining and aligning against a shortlist of OKRs, commmit to tracking them for the whole year, and set quarterized targets that stretch your teams.

Here are some red flags for KPis that you are asked to own: * There is not support for the KPI * The KPI definition is not clear and well defined * The levers for achieving the KPI are unclear 1. Lack of Support - adoption of KPIs and achieving their targets is extremely difficult if you don't have buy-in from the parties responsible for doing the work required to meet the KPI. Say you're tasked with a KPI to drive AE adoption of a new account planning SaaS software, but the AEs weren't consulted on the selection of the tool and largely prefer another tool. Without buy-in from the AEs on the tool itself, you're set-up for a large uphill battle. 2. Unclear KPI Definition - do not ever agree to owning a KPI which is ambiguously worded or does not have a clear way to measure. Doing so is like signing a contract for which the terms of agreement are like a black box. For example, if the KPI is defined as "Improving customer sentiment of feature X", obtain exact clarity on what customer sentiment means and what is used to measure it. How would you measure customer sentiment (e.g. customer survey, feature usage, feature purchase rate, etc). You need to fully understand the KPI definition and how it will be measured to understand how feasible it is, whether you have enough data points to measure the KPI, and whether it aligns to a company priority. 3. Unclear Levers for Success - if the parties responsible for driving attainment of the KPI don't know what are the mechanisms for achieving the KPI, you are not set-up for success. For example, say you're asked to own a KPI related to driving the inclusion of delivery partners on contracts (% of total closed contracts w/delivery partners). If your AEs don't know the rules of engaging delivery partners (e.g. which contracts are eligible for delivery partners, when and how delivery partners can be engaged and sold into the contract) then setting reasonable KPI targets and reaching them will be a challenge. If you take on KPIs that avoid the red flags above, you'll have KPIs that have greater impact on the business and a greater likelihood of achieving their targets.

Here are some pitfalls I've seen when defining rev ops KPIs: 1. Focusing on just lagging indicators 2. Missing KPIs that cover the entire GTM market team 3. Focusing on generic leading indicators Lagging Indicators - in rev ops its natural to think about the number of contracts sold and their dollar amount. However, more sophisticated rev ops teams build out a portfolio of leading indicators they regularly analyze to drive contract conversions. Hypothesize all the key activities of your pre-sales and sales teams that you believe are critical for moving along the opportunity. Regularly track and analyze these activities to determine * Which activities have strongest causal effect on winning the deal * What combinations and sequences of these activities maximize deal win GTM Coverage - ensure that you have KPis that cover all the GTM teams. For example, if your GTM ops team supports the professional services or enablement team. make sure you have top-level OKRs that are related to each of these teams. Doing so will help 1. Drive accountability from these teams by assigning OKRs 2. Ensure they have a plan to help progress against the company's top priorities 3. Help foster an inclusive culture across the broader team Generic Indicators - chances are you may have had a metric along the lines of 'have X meetings w/clients each week' or 'create x pitches per month'. The pitfall of such metrics are that they assume all meetings and pitches are equal and focus on quantity over quality. Use data to help refine your KPIs to become more targeted. Work with your analytics team to determine what specific types of leading activities (e.g. # of meetings w/ client data scientists, # cost-savings narrative pitches to CXOs) have the strongest attribution to closing deals. Then define more tailored OKRs using these insights, inspect progression against these KPIs, and use the data to expand upon and/or refine your KPIs.