Another factor for the RevOps industry/discipline/community success is overcoming common barriers to starting RevOps at companies that could benefit from it. Though you could say that not all companies need formal RevOps, especially if their operations are already combined business-wide, many companies with siloed operations people and teams could benefit from incorporating many aspects of RevOps into their organization.
The questions analyzed for this industry/overall/community success chapter:
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
When asked about why people decide not to start RevOps at their company, the answers included:
Fear of change
Misunderstanding or awareness of the value of RevOps or all operations
Budget reasons
Size, stage, or maturity of the company or perception related to size
Other reasons
Once again, some people listed a few answers or possibilities, so you may see these experts appear in multiple categories. The topics are also intertwined and overlap, with fear of change and misunderstanding the value influencing each other, for example.
Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy, explained the internal political situations that could lead companies to not want to start RevOps in the previous research question answer. The change management challenges of bringing silos together include when “people feel like they're losing responsibility or power, so I think internal alignment is the biggest hurdle for companies,” Karen said. Karen explained how a new CEO suggested consolidating and centralizing the 25 or so ops people across the company, and while that sounded like a good idea to everyone, “at the end of the day, we didn't make any changes, we kept it all siloed. Because, at a larger company that has established people and protocol, you're breaking things to fix things. And so I think it's the people, politics, the organizational angst around change [that prevent people from starting RevOps in a company].”
Fear of change, or fear of the huge effort of the change needed to a consolidated RevOps organizational model, was a big factor in the experts' answers about why a company wouldn’t introduce RevOps.
Similarly, the misunderstanding of the value of RevOps (will the change be worth it?) and the resources or budget needed to make this change are connected issues discussed later.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, said it was easy to quickly answer this question. “I think: change fear. Your fear of breaking funnels, fear of breaking processes, or the infamous ‘things still work the same way. We used to do them five or 10 years ago; why would we change anything?’ There are companies that are in love with their silos, and they think they are working, and they are not willing to break them because they think it's functional. You're not going to convince people [to change] from one day to the next. So why do they decide not to [start] RevOps? I think it's when something is this new, and when it impacts your business in such a big manner, it is fear [that] stops people from trying new things,” Lorena said.
Change management and fear of change was a concept that Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, also discussed. Jenna said, “If a company is already established with mature operations functions within sales, marketing, and client success, the change management of consolidation may be considered too much of a burden to move into a centralized model. Additionally, leadership may not buy into the concept or want additional resources interfering in their areas.”
Fear of consolidating ops and fear of not having the right leader, or the changes needed to get that revenue-wide leader in place, are other points discussed by the experts. Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, spoke about the challenges of the changes needed in the organizational structure, such as appointing one common leader for revenue, as well as other concerns about centralizing and consolidating. “I think if you don't have the right leader for that leader to report into, [that] can be one [reason]. Maybe you don't want to put all of your operations chips in one bucket,” Hilary said.
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, also discussed the fear of change, when the current leadership may think they work better as-is and/or fear consolidating into RevOps. “I think they might feel threatened. They don't want to work with other teams; they feel they do better [alone]...I've heard of companies where sales and marketing literally have no relationship at all or a very contentious relationship. And I could see those organizations not wanting or even understanding the benefit of aligning this way…[Blackline] had a management team who had gone through [RevOps] already [at past jobs]. And when they came in, that was the structure, and that was the culture that they wanted to instill,” Lauren said.
The fear of change or fear of the unknown and being more comfortable doing things ‘like they are used to’ is the related topic that Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, discussed. “I think that individuals or teams may not launch a RevOps function because they're used to a traditional organization hierarchy where a Chief Marketing Officer would have their own marketing operations fine-tuning their own work, their machine, and funnel. Likewise, in the sales function or customer success function. So RevOps as a cross-functional business unit doesn't fit. It depends on a more fluid functional role or matrix sort of organization. I think that may be why organizations may be reluctant to consider a revenue operations function within their organization,” Alana said.
Fear or unwillingness to put in the effort of navigating this internal political minefield was what Jeremey Donovan, SVP of Sales Strategy at SalesLoft, spoke about. “Everyone has RevOps. The question is whether or not to centralize. Often that is more political than anything else,” Jeremy said. This story echoes what we heard earlier in the book from Dana Therrien about the political resistance to RevOps from a fear of marketing ending up reporting to sales again, fear it will make the CMO obsolete, or fear of marketing ‘losing’ their ops people.
The fear of change can also compound with the reasons related to leadership not understanding how RevOps can add value to a company, or even what RevOps is. Will the change be worth the effort?
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, spoke about these topics “I think there's a general misconception or misunderstanding sometimes of what is RevOps, even among RevOps people... And so I think that lack of understanding of the benefits and the value or even what RevOps does is probably the biggest reason why companies aren't hiring for that role,” Rosalyn said.
Briana Okyere, Community Lead at AdaptivOps community and Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, spoke about the lack of awareness surrounding RevOps as a potential reason why it’s not adopted at a company. “I don't know if it's ever decision to not do it, it's more of [when] they're not understanding its relevance, so they're just not focusing on it at all... it's more like they just don't even think about it until it's too late. And so it's about timing and implementing that role a lot earlier on than you probably think that you should.” Several other experts mentioned the lack of awareness that RevOps is even a possibility as a reason companies wouldn’t adopt it.
On this topic, Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations at HubSpot, said, “When I describe RevOps as the mindset, the practice, and the structure, when you think about it from the customer experience standpoint, [RevOps] kind of seems like a no brainer. Why wouldn't you want to use the strategy that gives you the best customer experience and the best internal setup that you can have? I think that it's possible that…businesses may have a different set of goals. It's possible that based on what they sell, who they sell it to, what they do, and how they need to make money, optimizing revenue through this operational strategy is not the right way. I feel like I don't know who those people are. And it's probably just because of where I sit right now … we're in the echo chamber of, ‘it's amazing.’ And it is amazing.”
This response overlaps with the topic of leadership not thinking they need any kind of operations unless or until something is broken when they misunderstand the role and value of operations.
As Gianluca Pucacco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, said, ”People appreciate Ops more when there is a short-term need, for example, if revenue is not going in the right direction, need for efficiencies and so on. So when things are going in the right direction, folks are more reluctant to make changes. So what I heard in many cases is ‘why do i need to change something that's working.’ Again, it goes back to the fact that folks mix up the scope of Ops and only think of Ops as repetitive tasks and forget about the importance of having a thought partner and a function always willing to challenge the status quo.”
Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack’s response was similar. “I think people see operations in general, at times, as a nice to have. And sometimes, if they're the ones doing the work, they feel as if they are [not] the best people to drive it forward, and sometimes they are. But usually, those are people that are operationally minded,” Melanie said.
The lack of standardization of operations across companies, leading to the misunderstanding of the value of ops, is something Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, spoke about. Alison said the reason a company may not adopt RevOps is “because operations as an industry doesn’t have a playbook like marketing or sales. There’s not a lot of clarity and standardization to operations to begin with, and it can feel like a huge lift to ‘adopt’ a new strategy when you’re still figuring out the old one. But you don’t need much to launch a RevOps department, really -- only the belief that in order to build the best customer experience, you need to invest in and create a frictionless internal operating system that puts the customer above everything else.”
Creating a RevOps department or function can often require hiring people or be seen by leadership as a need or request to hire, and not just seen as centralizing and consolidating the existing ops people and ops work happening in a company. This means budgets are involved, and budgeting for a new department is different and can be more complex than using existing budgets for hiring siloed ops team members within each existing department.
Hilary Headlee brought up this point about budget, when siloed teams may have budget to hire their own ops people first, which may be an easier first step to build up operations talent compared to one leader trying to get a budget to hire a new centralized ops team. “I think if you have a business that doesn't want to run a more healthy ratio of operations to other quota carriers, you might want to separate [operations people] out. I did that consciously this year at Zoom. Luckily before everything had started [referring to COVID and increased video chat demands]. I told marketing you need to staff for your BDR and your online function; I won't be able to get your headcount; just build your own. And we did the same thing in channel ops and we were able to get more ops people in general. So I think sometimes you have to take a look at that,” Hilary.
Rosalyn Santa Elena also spoke about the additional resources or budget to allot to this area of work, related to the misunderstanding of the value of RevOps. “I think the only reason that companies will [not start RevOps is] … because they don't prioritize the budget [to do it]. But I think that comes more from …a lack of understanding about what revenue operations does,” Rosalyn said.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, also spoke about budgetary reasons why RevOps would not be adopted. ”Because any client interfacing department or client relationship department is considered as more important than us. I can understand it, by the way, but I don't agree with it. But I do understand why they want to invest in the revenue units instead of the operation function,” Leore said. This reason also ties into the misunderstanding of the value of RevOps.
The size or stage of the company, being too small or too early in maturity, are reasons companies may not launch RevOps. This explanation ties closely with the misunderstanding of RevOps value, budget, having the right leader in place, and other reasons.
One unique and interesting reason one expert discussed is that if the benefits of RevOps won’t be able to be measured yet, such as if that data collection can’t be put into place yet or the increase in metrics would be small, it may be too soon to successfully start and continue RevOps. You won’t be able to prove its value ongoing.
In the previous questions about problems in RevOps, Nicole Pereira, founder and CEO of Remotish, discussed the perception that only big companies need RevOps, so small companies may not adopt it. When small companies could actually benefit the most from introducing RevOps.
Similarly, this perception or avoidance of being seen as doing ‘big company’ or ‘corporate’ tactics is something startups and companies with certain ‘scrappy’ pride cultures may claim as their reason to avoid RevOps.
Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community, said, “I’ve seen some people who hate the idea of anything being centralized - they view it as too bureaucratic or ‘big company’ like, which means they just give ownership to each department. These are the same people then who complain about their teams not being aligned or on the same page and tell them all to start working together to get things done.”
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2, spoke about the order of operations of getting the right leader in place first for RevOps to report to, which could relate to the maturity of the company or the fear of changing org structure. She described some of the reasons companies wouldn’t start RevOps as when companies aren't ready for it, when there's not a defined reporting structure that makes sense so that RevOps doesn’t end up reporting into sales or another biased leader (discussed in previous chapters).
Melanie Foreman also talked about RevOps being the most needed at the scaling stage of a company, which means companies at other stages may not think they need it. “I think that operations as a profession is so critical to a scaling business. So if your business isn't scaling, if it's at a nice even level, then you might not care for it. But if you're scaling quickly as SaaS often is, it's absolutely critical,” Melanie said.
Regarding the stage or maturity of the company, Spencer Parikh, founder of ioAudio, said companies may not adopt RevOps “if you haven't truly found product market fit, you can't say with certainty [about] what's acquisition, retention, and loyalty engagement, as for basic metrics, and then you have some sort of understanding as far as your customer acquisition. Well, if you haven't done that, I don't think you've really found that product market fit because you can't optimize anything yet.”
Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, talked about how companies at a certain stage really get the maximum value out of RevOps and also spoke about budget and resources. “Depending on its size, depending on its resources, depending on what it wants to do, [leadership] may think that there's sufficient duplication with what the RevOps function is providing. [The] capabilities within the business are a very normal decision process that the company needs to make, and it's I think it's perfectly acceptable as well. In some cases, it may be duplication, you may be too small for this, you may be too big for this, or maybe the function doesn't work that way for how you perceive your customers, how you’re delivering on that number, which is ultimately what I think RevOps should be seeking to to move the needle on. So, these are the reasons why a company may not launch it,” Jonathan said.
Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, said, “If you're small, or … if you're very sales outbound… because marking ops [then] doesn't really exist, like nurturing campaigns, is an afterthought. Customer success might be enough to force you [to start RevOps] because [it’s] highly transactional: the process works, you deploy, and that's it. There's also the risk when you're too small, to be overwhelmed with the work of RevOps, because of big responsibilities…set up the sales tool, and you set up the sales process, set up the customer success process. And you have 20 plates to spin and nothing [gets] done. I think this goes back to having good leadership there to be able to process this work, but it might not happen. So usually, when you're small, that leadership [is] so difficult. And, regarding data, which is something I'm very passionate about, sometimes [there’s] not much data to move around. If you're a small company, and you have 10 customers, you don't need to send billions of emails or things like that, not much system or process [is] required. I think that's true, probably until like 50 [employees]...maybe you shouldn't be doing RevOps right now. Maybe you just need someone who does marketing and does a bit of coding on the side; that's probably enough for you right now.”
Adam Tesan, CRO of Chargebee, spoke about the mindset that it’s never too early to start ops, which many companies don’t believe, but also talked about how starting departmental ops is better than not having any operations-focused roles. “They think they're too small [to start RevOps], which I think if you've got one salesperson, you should start thinking about having an ops person within the revenue or the sales [department], or however you think about it. I think you start building that in earlier rather than later because there's still a ton of data that starts getting generated as soon as you have just a couple of sales folks. So I think that's one of the first reasons would be they think their organization is too small, they're not quite ready for it,” Adam said.
Matthew Soloman, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, combined the size and political/fear of change reasons and said, “Companies with less than 20 employees are likely fine managing technology between a few ops members and a company's COO without an overarching RevOps team. Some leaders might not be bought into centralizing ops and instead separate the functions by department.”
The misunderstanding of RevOps, combined with the maturity of the company, and how starting with siloed operations is a more familiar and established first step was something discussed by Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design. “I think for a lot of people, the concept of RevOps is still fairly new and really still being defined, and I think it’s a little different everywhere you go. There are a lot of organizations that will hire Sales Ops and think that’s enough. Sales Ops is a great first step, but now we’re seeing (especially in the SaaS industry) that retaining business is just as important as acquiring it, and those processes really need to be in lockstep. I think companies may start small at first but eventually evolve into a RevOps organization, especially when they’re a startup or newer company. That said, the earlier a RevOps team is established with the proper skillset, the better," Nicole said.
In conclusion, understanding the reasons a company may not want a RevOps department or function is critical to the industry or field-wide success of RevOps. Removing or overcoming the fear and misunderstanding reasons and understanding the potentially more valid budget and size reasons will help make RevOps become adopted in more companies and help leadership make an informed decision about when to adopt it well.
If more companies conquer the fear and misunderstanding preventing the adoption of RevOps, when their company could actually benefit from it, then RevOps will start to become more widespread and understood. This leads to better career paths for the individuals working in it. The successes caused by running good RevOps will also fuel the perception and value of RevOps as companies talk with each other about success, leading to more case studies, more training, and a larger sample size for researching and establishing best practices.
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