Much like the word RevOps, the word success can mean different things to different people.
There are entire books on how to make sure you can clearly define and measure what is considered success in your life or at your company. The overall lesson in many of those books is that you cannot achieve something you don’t have clarity or alignment about. Getting people to agree on what RevOps should be doing at your company, providing visibility to what RevOps is working on, and proving it is successful at those things… This is the main theme of this chapter of the book about department success.
This blog featured the answers to the research question: What do you think is the most important factor in determining RevOps success?
Other questions that will be answered in this chapter (and in future blogs) include:
Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
Here are some of the shared common answers to this question related to factors of success, 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.
What is not mentioned: software. This may be surprising if you’re in any networking groups related to RevOps, where most discussions are about tools. Or if you do any Google searches of RevOps and find most of the content is from software companies talking about how RevOps focuses on software administration. Software knowledge and use are not what will ultimately make you successful in RevOps, according to the experts. Software skills can be a good starting point for entry-level RevOps roles as people work on learning and improving the above skills, but the software is not the focus of a successful department.
Let’s take a closer look at the most common of these answers about success.
Though we dove deeper into the topic of alignment in the 'People' chapter, there were a few excellent answers to this question about why alignment from leadership drives RevOps success. This involves aligning everyone about what RevOps is and what it should be doing. It also relates to alignment about what success in RevOps means for the department and for the company.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said it most clearly, “I think that how you measure success is one: aligning expectations, and two: determining what the critical path is going to look like.”
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, spoke about how “success is very much aligning so there's job clarity, job alignment, functional alignment within people, that systems are built for scale and optimized for the organization itself. And there's very clear work streams, there's very clear alignment in the actual processes that are built to support that.”
Leadership buy-in and having champions of RevOps in leadership were also discussed as important factors for success.
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, said, “The most important factor to the success of RevOps is buy-in across the organization. Having executive or leadership members who are advocates of RevOps and can help champion and socialize the concept is key. At its nature, RevOps requires you to insert yourself into a lot of processes across various functions, so making sure that your team members understand your purpose and the value you can bring to the table will be essential to their cooperation and your success. For that same reason, good internal relationships are also key.”
Besides company-wide alignment on the work and the job roles, the measures of success for the RevOps department also need to be agreed upon.
Richard Dunkel, Global Head of Field Enablement at Celonis, said that RevOps needs to be aligned with leadership “on performance measures and targeted areas of process improvement. And then [they] have to execute a plan that combines training content, processes, tools, operating rhythms, and reporting that allow us to collectively drive towards our targeted areas of improvement to achieve business results.”
If the measures of success are not agreed-upon, no one will be able to agree that RevOps success was achieved.
Michael Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, tied the above thoughts together about what is important to achieve RevOps success. “Executive strategy needs to determine the core KPIs (key performance indicators) that are going to be shared. I see RevOps as the way to get a company to be successful in aligning those departments together... looking at rules and responsibilities, process definition, and metric alignment. You do those three things, and then you can align the system around it... So it's kind of that marriage of people collaboration and system collaboration... a lot of it comes from the top, you need to have that the sea-level direction, and when the sea level says ‘we're going to have each department have these shared goals, these shared metrics that drive performance and behavior…’ then they'll start collaborating, they'll start caring. But if you skip that bit and you say, ‘Oh my systems are all messed up, just help me fix my systems’ [then] you're ultimately not going to be successful,” Michael said.
Without agreement on what RevOps should be doing, and alignment with leadership on goals and measures of success, RevOps people are going to end up in the dreaded reactive state all the time instead of strategically moving the company forward.
Some operations professionals like to talk about their fellow employees, the teams RevOps works with, as the ‘users’ or ‘customers’ of operations. The thought process may be by helping the employee ‘users’ of operations do their jobs better, the customer-facing teams can make the company’s customer experience better.
There are debates on both sides of that opinion. Improving the customer experience is indeed a shared end goal for all revenue teams. However, a risk of this mindset is positioning operations as a help desk or support desk instead of a strategic advisor to the business.
Whatever your thoughts are about who the end users or customers of RevOps are, you’ll likely agree that it is easier to accomplish goals when everyone involved agrees on the goal, agrees on the plan to achieve the goal, and agrees on who is responsible for each part of the plan.
For example, Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, had a succinct answer to what makes RevOps successful: “A good partnership with sales leadership and finance.”
Communication and relationship building are core elements of gaining alignment and buy-in from leadership and alignment between teams.
Mike Rizzo, Manager of Community and Loyalty Programs at Mavenlink and founder of the MO Pros community, had a one-word answer to this question: “communication.” He explained how marketing ops and customer success ops were not part of RevOps at one company he worked for. The customer success (CS) ops and RevOps functions talked to each other a lot since deal renewal and other shared topics were constantly arising. But the marketing ops person didn't interact with CS ops [or] RevOps. When the company brought on a really big client, many people in the company knew they were pumping all their users into the product. Mike gave a heads-up to the marketing ops team about the incoming contacts, and they were unaware of it. “I was glad I said something, but I think that shouldn't happen. I did the job of communicating, but that wasn't my responsibility; if I hadn't [previously] been in that marketing role who owned HubSpot [then], I wouldn't even have thought of it; nobody else thought of it. To have RevOps success, you need to have communication, even if all of the other operational functions don't roll into you,” Mike said.
Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, also talked about collaboration and building relationships. “The thing about revenue operations is it’s not just about one piece of the business; it’s essentially about all pieces of the business and making sure everyone and everything is working in sync. It’s difficult to do that when people are working in silos and there aren’t shared ideas and metrics. Building relationships results in building trust, which allows for better collaboration and alignment,” Nicole said.
Alignment and communication are more successful when you have data you can trust so you can measure your success, you know where you are starting from, and you have end-to-end visibility of your customer journey.
Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, called this the infrastructure of the team or company. “Making sure that you have the infrastructure to get it done. I can't be an air traffic controller and help all the systems if the systems are off. [I] I have no data, I don't know where to look, I'm not sure what's going on, and it doesn't make sense. Whereas if I was to look at all this data, then as long as it's there and we have support for getting it in there, then we're good to go. Then it actually works for us quite well,” Virinchi said.
Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, combined several points about aligning teams and also talked about the infrastructure to make this alignment happen. He said what determines RevOps success is “happy teams, everyone talking to each other. How can we make sure everybody's working towards the same goal?... Usually [RevOps is introduced when] you have all those painful data consistency problems or process problems. And normally, after you have RevOps [for] six months, you should have none of those problems, or less [of them]. I think that's very much what makes people happy to talk to each other, [which] is usually a great sign for me that RevOps is working, when marketing and sales people are happy to talk to each other...you need to really build your social capital inside the company. And also, you are that glue function because you are going to be the one talking to different commercial stakeholders and making sure everybody's happy. And again, [making sure] everybody's going in the same direction, so you need to be able to work the human factor.”
Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, discussed how “putting that data structure in place and having end-to-end visibility is tied to me being able to provide the insights, which is tied to us, eventually, putting our resources down to get to that [revenue] figure. And the faster we do that, the better, the clearer that can happen, the better.”
As we discussed in previous chapters about the importance of thinking of customers, this mindset and alignment around the customer experience is also a factor that will make the department successful. Two of HubSpot’s operations experts talked about this in their answers to the research question.
Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations at HubSpot, said, “If you're implementing revenue operations for the good of the customer experience, for the good of the growth of your company, [you are] tracking the customer experience, feedback, and what your customers are thinking.”
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, said, “A successful RevOps team delivers strategy from a ‘customer-in’ perspective at scale. Too often, our internal misalignment and siloed systems show up externally (‘function-out’) in the form of a disjointed, sub-optimal customer experience. RevOps success is a frictionless internal experience that solves for the customer, even as a company scales. Traditionally, Ops has had a hard time showing and then measuring success and impact, but RevOps is the driving force behind your company’s ability to scale; how you get more out of your investments by creating efficiencies within the resources you have. That’s a sign of RevOps at work -- when your business starts to solve for the customer at scale."
Being seen as a strategic partner to the business by using roadmaps and other visible strategy methods was also discussed in several answers about RevOps success.
For example, Matthew Solomon, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, said that the most important factor that determines RevOps success is “A leadership team that values revenue ops as a strategic role and not a jack of all ops.”
Similarly, Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community, said success is “being looked at as a strategic resource that reports up to someone in the C-suite. This ensures their focus will be on what’s best for the business, not what’s best for one particular department or division.”
But how do you be seen as strategic? Some of this will be covered in the next chapter about individual success, though several experts included advice in their answers to this overall success question.
Gianluca Pucacco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, talked about a factor of success as “running a business that’s efficient and hitting all the business priorities. Ultimately, our role is to impact and influence senior stakeholders to do what we believe is the right thing, being a critical and “neutral” business partner willing to have hard conversations.” This mindset can help you be and be seen as more strategic to the leadership team.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, said that for RevOps to be successful, “We have to be strategists. We have to understand process. We have to understand and look at the full process from the top of the funnel to the end of the funnel, and then afterward for everything that is related [such as] expansions and retention. And we have to think of all the departments, we have to defend all of them. … And we cannot sit and wait for them to come to us; we have to come to them, and we have to plan with them. We have to to initiate processes, we have to raise red flags. And we have to be good cop and bad cop in order to make this process or this communication work.”
Adam Tesan, CRO at Chargebee, talked about making sure that RevOps is more strategic and how to do that. He said when operations teams were siloed in their functions, they were more reactive and only related to a regular cadence of reporting that was needed. “I think the success of a RevOps organization is when you operationalize all that reactive stuff you have to do. So you've built systems and processes where you're naturally delivering those reports or analytics on a regular cadence, weekly, monthly, whatever they need. But I think the real success …is somebody that can turn the organization into something that's strategic and proactive… they have two strategic initiatives that they want to uncover and act on [per quarter]. What they're essentially trying to do is ensure that the revenue organization is running as efficiently and as productively as possible. And so you can proactively start looking around the organization as a whole and look for those optimizations and proactively come up with them. And then I think the other part of it is RevOps and enablement are fairly closely tied together because you can identify opportunities for efficiency gains and productivity, but then you have to enable them. I think the enablement function of the operations is somewhat overlooked, and they go hand in glove, so to speak,” Adam said.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2 Marketing started her answer about the factors for RevOps success by talking about how “they have a defined roadmap, with goals lined up to the business and are measuring on it. It's because the other factor in determining success is if you are actually executing on that roadmap.”
As we saw in the first responses in this section, several other experts included determining a critical path and executing the plan, which is also related to road mapping.
In conclusion, the people-related skills and people-related mindset are what will make your RevOps department or function successful. Concentrate on communication and alignment with leadership, teams you work with, and customer needs. Make sure you have the infrastructure to make this alignment happen, such as clean and visible customer journey data, clear strategies, and roadmaps. Work on positioning yourself and your department as strategic advisors to the business.
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