Over the past 15 years, I have seen the RevOps function come to life from its early iterations as BizOps and Sales Ops to its current status as the connective tissue across all go-to-market teams.
Reflecting on my time at Simon-Kucher, I was privileged to get an early peek into the data-driven, methodical strategies that are pivotal for profitable growth while advising GTM leaders. My subsequent roles at companies like Atlassian, Intercom, and now Klaviyo, have afforded me the opportunity to lead RevOps teams through various stages of company growth and the evolution of GTM motions. These vantage points allowed me to initially observe and then participate in the transformation of RevOps into a significant movement.
Through this blog series, I aim to delve into the challenges and opportunities I've encountered while steering RevOps teams. I'm eager to foster a dialogue and hear your perspectives.
Stretched Too Thin to Make Impact
The necessity for a robust RevOps function is undeniable and widely recognized by GTM leaders. Yet, RevOps teams often find themselves stretched thin, struggling to deliver their full potential due to being perennially under-resourced. Unlike the revenue teams, which grow linearly, RevOps must amplify its impact through strategic prioritization, crafting repeatable processes, and concentrating on initiatives that genuinely move the needle forward. The most profound impacts are often felt on the front lines, where sales reps and managers grapple with daily challenges. Merely churning out another dashboard for them, which demands interpretation and swift decision-making, barely scratches the surface of adding real value.
A Tale of Two Competing Priorities
RevOps often gets stretched in 2 directions: important projects which have a long-term impact on the business vs. urgent projects which are critical for day-to-day success. What I have learned through my fair share of mistakes is that RevOps teams do not set the right trade-off framework; it can easily get oversubscribed with the urgent things missing the opportunity to drive long-term impact working on the important things. This can lead the RevOps team to be perceived as tactical, missing out on opportunities to drive bigger impact to the business, and often burnout. RevOps teams need to balance across these projects to become a strategic and valued partner to the Revenue organization.
To address these challenges, I've relied on an extended version of the renowned Eisenhower matrix, which has significantly aided in prioritizing tasks effectively.
Prioritization Matrix to the Rescue
As leaders, we've become adept at identifying important tasks, but mastering the nuances within this area is an ongoing journey. Within the realm of important tasks, I categorize them further into "Run of the Business" versus "Strategic" initiatives, balanced against the urgency perceived by stakeholders.
The four quadrants of important projects/initiatives:
- Urgent to the stakeholders + Run of the business: these are the projects which are critical for the business to function - day-to-day operations. RevOps and Revenue leaders are usually aligned on what these entail. Examples of these projects are: some text
- Weekly and monthly reporting cadences, operating rhythms like forecasting and pipe councils - While KPIs and cadences do differ depending on businesses, there are a limited set of options. I highly recommend RevOps leaders to align on KPIs and cadence with GTM leaders and templatize as much as possible. This should become muscle memory and over time you want to reduce the lift on it.
- Customer escalations - creating a process for handling customer escalation and a defined routing matrix with defined roles, responsibilities, rules of engagement, and guidelines makes this a very repeatable process reducing stress across the organization. As the organization grows, reserving a dedicated person/team for strategic deals or deal ops makes a lot of sense.
- Critical systems downtime - Of course, investing in good system architecture and periodic data clean-up is a must for running healthy GTM systems. Irrespective of that systems will go down and there will be occasional issues. To avoid fire drills and panic, create early signal warning systems (including using tools like StatusPage) and a defined communications plan to help keep the impacted teams in the loop.
- Urgent to the stakeholders + Strategic: these are projects and initiatives which help near-term success and productivity. It is good to get explicit alignment across GTM stakeholders on what projects, timelines, resourcing (including time from few folks in the field who can provide early feedback), and communication plan. Examples of these projects are: some text
- Account assignments, compensation design, top of the funnel and ARR attribution across sources of demand, rules of engagement, etc. Different GTM stakeholders often have strong and at times conflicting opinions on these topics. I have found success in running these projects with a well-defined project structure using tools like DACI and having an assigned project/program manager as the RevOps team scales.
- Not urgent + Strategic: While these projects are the most critical for the long-term success of the organization, these are ones that often get neglected and go unfunded. Not proactively carving out time and resources for these projects leads stakeholder teams to make ad-hoc and sometimes not the most informed decisions eventually leading to strategy debt and reflecting on the RevOps team perceived as not strategic. Examples of these projects include:some text
- Long-range planning - while annual planning gets the most attention, it is really important for the RevOps team to carve out time to do the research and analysis on long-range planning which helps work back to key strategic decisions and feeds into annual plans. I have found success in kicking this off earlier in the year (3-4 months before the annual planning cycle) by partnering closely with finance and R&D organizations.
- Other strategic projects - these surface either as issues identified by the business (everyone knows of the issue but there is no clear owner of it) or ideas emerging from long-range planning like - the evolution of pricing/packaging, and ICP design. Typically RevOps teams do not have the bandwidth or know how to execute on these. RevOps can accelerate some of these initiatives by partnering with external firms and industry experts to get a fast start and build on it.
- Not urgent + Run of the business: These are projects that are crucial for scaling the company but are often mistakenly deemed not urgent for stakeholders. Pushing these out leads to debt which surfaces as fire drills. In my experience, fire drills are the root cause of RevOps team burnout and throw off best-laid plans for strategic projects. Examples of these projects are: some text
- Pro-active insights and process for deal inspection
- Retro-active teardowns of win/loss
- Contextual and tailored coaching based on deal intelligence
Let's take an example of one of the classic fire drills and how to avoid it.
An issue surfaces late in aggregate level reporting (e.g. forecast trending towards a miss) but there is no clearly isolated root cause.
RevOps must dissect issues in aggregate reporting, identifying root causes by region, customer segment, and funnel stage (new logos, selling price, win rates, pipeline created, slipped deals, etc.). This is a methodical and very repeatable process, giving much clearer signals, and can be proactive if done at a granular level in an always-on fashion. The secret weapon here is leveraging front-line managers. According to a Forrester study, 78% of front-line managers agree that having the right intel and data can drive the change they need to be successful, but only 59% feel that they are getting the support they need. This is a huge opportunity for RevOps and sales enablement. In the past, as revenue organizations got larger, RevOps could not scale to support and coach front-line managers. With the rise of AI capabilities, RevOps leaders can help scale the impact by equipping frontline managers with AI tools that empower them to act as CROs. This can be a major win for RevOps unlocking bandwidth to focus on long-term strategic projects and initiatives. In fact, the Sales Management Association (SMA) notes that companies providing optimal sales coaching and support realize annual revenue growth rates 16.7% greater than those that don’t.
In my next blog post, I will be discussing the explosion of sales dashboards (Gartner reports that managers have 4.2 dashboards for managers to look at!) and what is the antidote for this “swamped with data but starved for insights” situation and how AI can help.
