Measuring the success of RevOps is notoriously difficult since the work spans many departments, making it hard to attribute metric improvements to just the changes RevOps makes. It can also be tricky to establish quantitative metrics for the overall department and not just metrics for individual projects. Measuring more qualitative factors, such as reducing friction, is possible but not as easy and straightforward as measuring success in the neighboring departments, such as sales key performance indicators (KPIs). And the projects in RevOps are often long-term, so it can take a while to realize and measure the full results.
This blog featured the answers to the research question: How do you personally measure RevOps success?
Why is it important to be able to measure success?
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
Here are some of the shared common answers to this question, grouped into similar categories. Each answer is followed by the number of people who included the information in their answer, out of a total of about 35 interviews.
Employee satisfaction was the clear top answer, and most of the other answers were fairly evenly split. You may notice a trend in the answers -- many are about people!
One thing to note about only using employee satisfaction to measure RevOps is that it can put RevOps in the task-taker mindset if they are not careful to choose strategic projects that make people’s jobs easier compared to saying 'yes' to random things requested by other teams in the interest of 'making them happy.' A way to prevent the task-taker trap is to ensure employee satisfaction is not the only internal metric used to determine success, but one of several metrics related to larger company goals.
Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO of Remotish, discussed another reason why common metrics for RevOps success at every company are uncommon: it’s hard to consistently measure success in RevOps right now since different companies think RevOps is a different thing. This may also explain why many of the answers after employee satisfaction are fairly evenly split.
Despite the ambiguous state of RevOps, below are a few of the possibly measurable indicators that RevOps is successful.
Employee satisfaction can also be discussed as “happy teams,” as Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, talked about in his previous answer that related RevOps success to people in the company being happy to talk to each other. This mindset can lead to more satisfaction with their daily work, job, and company. Though metrics for measuring employee satisfaction can vary, narrowing a success metric down to a category such as “employee satisfaction” is a great place to start.
Mallory Lee, Senior Director of Operations at Terminus, said, “I measure our success in the feedback we receive from our internal customer teams. I want our team to have a high customer satisfaction rating internally and help our teams move faster. If we can grow faster and scale, while remaining predictable with great CSAT (customer satisfaction score), then we’ve won.”
The satisfaction of RevOps employees also falls under this type of metric. Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, said, “Some of those things are a little bit intangible… there's metrics and obviously data to be able to support, ‘Hey, did I improve the sales cycle, are your reps spending less time in the system? Am I providing better reporting and insights to the leadership team?’ So you have all of those things that you can definitely measure to track the impact and the value... from a personal perspective, are the stakeholders…looking at me as their business partner and somebody who's a trusted adviser? To me, that's really important. I'm on my soapbox all the time [about] not being tactical…You have data and metrics to prove the fact that you are being strategic, but at the same time, I think it's also a perception within the organization that people look at you as the leader, as the RevOps leader, as somebody that that's the go-to person if I have a question."
Rosalyn continued, "I actually did an interview this morning, and that was one of the questions. ‘What's the one thing, if you could change the RevOps function, that you would?’ …what came top of mind for me was trying to help elevate the function to be viewed as more strategic and viewed as the strategic function that it is, as well as for the individuals. And to continue to help them elevate and just up-level their skill set so that they can be strategic.”
Strategic work could not only help RevOps employees feel more satisfied, but the revenue team members may also enjoy their jobs more (increasing satisfaction scores) once RevOps is able to complete larger strategic projects with more of an impact on their goals and day-to-day work. The related topic of reducing friction for both customers and internal teams will be discussed in a later section.
Employee satisfaction also relates to the amount of enablement RevOps can provide to other employees to make their jobs better. Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, said, “If you don't have enablement, that's a bit of an iceberg beneath the surface, the inefficiencies that will come to bite you in about six months, 12 months time, and then you'll be playing big-time catch-up. Alternatively, if your people, pipelines, and configuration of the team are not suited for the business, again, you're going to know about it in, probably in more of the medium term with dissatisfaction with commissions.” This quote also points out the employee satisfaction factors related to compensation plans, which RevOps is often involved in creating.
The category of answers related to RevOps success hinging on reducing the time spent not selling, the time doing administrative work instead of core job duties. This relates to employee satisfaction as well as relating to the next category or revenue growth (due to more time for revenue-impacting activities).
Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, said, “Another measure I think of is sales rep time spent selling. We want to make sure that sales executives spend the most time actually doing tasks that are related to sales. So making phone calls, talking to clients, answering emails, rather time spent waging internal battles.”
Though revenue growth may be difficult to attribute 100% to only the work of RevOps, it is a good indicator that RevOps may be on track to be successful.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2, talked about revenue numbers moving up and to the right. Crissy said, “We all need to remember that we're a revenue team; as long as we're hitting our revenue goals, that should be the first place we look. I think some other things can get in the way of us making our revenue goals because of the wrong metrics. And that could be across all different teams.”
Showing how interconnected all these potential metrics are, customer satisfaction and retention can create revenue growth (or at least prevent decreasing revenue), just like employee satisfaction can create happy customers, which also creates revenue growth. The growth of customer's revenue can also lead to their satisfaction and retention with your company.
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, talked about both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. “I feel like you'd measure RevOps success on customer growth. Acquisition cost, negative net churn, some of those really holistic values that reconfirm that you're headed [to and] have the same North Star as an organization. You’re all on the rocket ship, and everyone knows where you're going… Customer satisfaction is massive. And having a healthy referral network, I think is a great indicator of employee satisfaction. The amount of employee referrals and attrition is really important, because it's a holistic organizational machine that people are having fun and fulfilled in their own roles in delivering a delightful empathetic experience,” Alana said.
Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations at HubSpot, also discussed both employee and customer satisfaction as indicators of RevOps success. “I think one way that really works well for us is our system usability score. So, just the same way that your customers give you an NPS score, internally, we asked our operations teams to give our operations an NPS score to figure out some of the processes, tools, templates, and models that work really well for us. And what are some that are causing pain points? [This is] just like the NPS for our customers that goes out quarterly. It is something that our RevOps team specifically markets and that our go-to-market strategy team thinks about very heavily. It's one of their main responsibilities. And I think that defining what would be measured of your internal systems is a really good place to start. It is one thing to ask your customers about the NPS, the customer experience, but if you know that they are just connected through layers of other work. You should come at it from both fronts,” Maggie said.
An anonymous tech executive said that in the future, “most venture capitalists will be more interested in net revenue retention (NRR) growth than they necessarily will be an annual recurring revenue growth. We're not there yet. I think NRR is becoming a talking point.”
Michael Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, said, “Revenue retention is the key metric there. It's a lagging indicator, [so you’d need to be] patient to be able to see see the results, but that to me is the one metric that you would want all the teams to be aligned on.”
Though it is not on the list of answers that multiple experts mentioned, Melissa McCready, GrowthOps Advisor, Founder, and CEO at Navigate Consulting, had a very interesting answer to share.
“It's also what kind of relationships you have with your vendors. Because I'll tell you that one thing in every company I go into, when I am in front of people and am working with the vendors, your vendors are gold; they are your best friends. So you must treat them that way. Even though you're paying them money, you need to be treating them as well as possible because they will be so amazing and supportive. And if you don't do that, they'll just leave you out to dry, and your investments will not carry the way that they need to… I think that it's probably different than what you're hearing from other people because of years of experience and seeing what works and doesn't, and then also having a different perspective because I've worked with over 300 different companies,” Melissa said.
Your vendors and partners may include software companies…but success isn’t about the software itself; it's about the relationships with the people at the companies. It is the people side of work, once again.
Completing projects on time and completing goals were related indicators of RevOps that several experts discussed, though it is a metric that should probably not be used by itself since it does not take into account the impact those projects or goals each had.
Julia Herman talked about this factor of success. “One is always: are we doing well in terms of hitting our goals? Because I think of sales operations as an extension of sales in terms of goals, and I believe that my team can be as impactful in terms of getting sales to their numbers. So they're not selling, but they're supporting in terms of the infrastructure, the sales process, the tools they're using, and also, the budget setting. So if we didn't do a good job on setting the goals, then that's also our fault in terms of sales not hitting their goals,” Julia said.
Many respondents discussed time-related metrics such as deal velocity, time to ramp up reps, implementation time for projects, and more. Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, said, “I think time spent is so important to me, the human aspect of revenue operations. I think it is often overlooked. And you've got a really diverse and interesting group, so if you find a way to open up their time and spend it on problem-solving, as opposed to just pushing data from one place to another, you can get really valuable feedback. So time spent is absolutely my goal.”
Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO of Remotish, discussed removing friction as an indicator of success. “Obviously, friction can be reduced, and that team can support the revenue-generating individuals better. That's also success. But I think that's the hard part of where we're at right now. No one has this number or KPI, no one has a single thing that you can say, ‘Hey, this is what revenue operation does,’ other than reduce the friction, but how do you measure a reduction in friction?” Nicole said.
Spencer Parikh, founder of ioAudio, also discussed removing blockers or friction. “[If] sales is getting a blocker in terms of contract turnaround that's really affecting close rates, these customers or prospects are going somewhere else. So that's a blocker. How do we facilitate improvement there? …It's critical to making the sales cycles better. In marketing, for example, the difference between leads coming in from paid versus organic [sources], [may lead to] a push for more content, because we need higher quality leads coming from organic, to reduce our dependence on paid…Removing those blockers, and tracking wins, [such as] we removed five blockers, and we accelerated the organization by X number of days… I think that's a big part of it,” Spencer said.
Sylvain Guiliani also discussed friction in his answer. “Can RevOps remove those frictions? Using the classic [example] that I see all the time, that MQL SQL difference in the commercial team. Usually, the VP of marketing says, ‘We're gonna provide you 1000 leads.’ The sales team says, ‘Cool, and we promise that we're gonna qualify 80% of them.’ And then, at the end of the quarter, they look at the numbers, and the numbers don't match. And sales [says it's] because marketing didn't do it. And marketing points the finger… I think this problem, the friction problem, as RevOps, we're going to fix this as a neutral party; we're going to make sure the reporting is transparent. You can click on the lead, and you can go all the way back up to the first visit to the website or the first touch you ever had. That is a success, right? If you can remove that friction? Definitely,” Sylvain said.
While employee satisfaction was the agreed-upon clear winner for how to measure RevOps success, the exact metrics were not agreed on yet, similar to the answers to 'What Is Revops?'
Many answers of “it depends” on size, stage, industry, and the northstar metrics of the company itself. With the name of Revenue Operations, increasing revenue seems like it would have gotten a higher place on the list, though we’ve learned that increasing efficiency and employee satisfaction can increase profitability which may be the more important metric to a company, even if a department is not directly helping bring in more revenue.
Crissy Saunders also discussed having minimal technical debt as a sign of RevOps success. “I think everyone's been doing all of this long enough, had their market automation platform long enough or Salesforce long enough that things change and best practices change [with that] legacy stuff. Trying to minimize the technical debt as much as possible will help make anything the RevOps team does more effective. And then [having] processes at scale, the documentation to support them, and the roadmap delivers on the OKRs each quarter so you're actually hitting your goals.”
Jeff Igancio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said, “I'm sure a lot of folks will point to revenue targets, but to me, it's going to be value-based or ratio-based metrics that matter the most. So, the cost of acquisition and the customer acquisition cost are going to be useful. How quickly do we ramp up our sales reps [is another].”
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, spoke about using guardrails not really metrics. “Having this model and goals that are what I call more guardrails. It's not an exact [number] but there are definitely guardrails, that if we stay within the guardrails, we will hit our targets. And so by keeping a pulse on that, on a weekly basis, we can make adjustments as needed.”
In conclusion, though RevOps may not be mature enough yet to have agreed-upon metrics across the industry, the first step is to define what RevOps is and consider the metrics and measures above to prove success in your company’s RevOps department or function, slowly moving towards more consistent definitions and measures across similar types, sizes, and stages of companies.
If you don’t have any measurement in place to track yet, above are some good examples to start with and tailor to align with your company’s overall goals. Using a combination of the above metrics may be the best strategy.
Other questions that will be answered in this department success chapter (and in blogs) include:
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