Here is another excerpt from my in-progress 'What is RevOps?' book, the first part of the chapter about the tools principle in RevOps, related to software and related topics for success. It's currently chapter 5 in the book, after chapters about the definition(s) of RevOps, and the more important principles of people and process.
This blog focuses on the first research question in this portion of the chapter, asked to 35+ experts:
Do you think RevOps owns the tech stack?
The next blogs will cover the later parts of the chapter, which asks:
- If so, what is your favorite stack?
- Does RevOps own project management tools?
Click to scroll down to read:
Do you think RevOps owns the tech stack?
- Yes: Budget and expense tracking
- Yes: Strategy
- Yes: Silos, data, and customer experience
- Yes: The overarching view RevOps has
- It depends: Partnering with other teams
- It depends: Teams need some autonomy for speed and customization
- It depends: Company size
- It depends: Company structure, if there are other technical teams or company-wide tools
Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
- This is a draft, which is not exceptionally clean, clear, and concise writing yet.
- Everything may change between now and publishing.
- The job titles are from the time the experts were interviewed
- If you were interviewed and your quote feels out of context, please contact me so I can correct it.
- To have any hope of finishing editing and publishing, I am not adding new research or new quotes to the book.
Do you think RevOps owns the tech stack?
The count of expert answers:
- Yes: 22 people
- No: 1 person
- It depends: 11 people
A few of the common themes in the responses:
- It’s mostly dependent on company size and stage
- Sometimes there’s a partnership with engineering or other teams
- There are budget considerations, the benefits of having one budget, or when other departments have more budget for tools
- There are ‘fixing things’ considerations, for the teams using the tools who may need or request more changes to the tools
Only one person said a definite ‘no’ in response to this question, an executive who wished to remain anonymous. Their reasoning related to the new environment where tools are chosen by users and not executives, because it is difficult for other teams to choose the tools users will need, use, and enjoy rather than fight against the tools. Also, they discussed a common trap with owning the tech stack. “The trap means that you have to have the budget. And the trap means that you therefore have to have the administration and maintenance. And if you're funded well enough, meaning there's an IT administrator budget like a Salesforce admin or vendor, that's a pretty big number…my opinion [is RevOps] should be supporting output of all these teams [that] use all these different systems and all these data points to understand the customer journey or the customer experience. If the RevOps team is trying to cook up the best tech stack to do that, and the rest of the organization doesn’t embrace it… I think you're going to end up with a revolt and you're going to end up with a dead tech stack,” they said.
These are all excellent points, some of which are described as caveats to watch out for or account for in the following ‘yes’ or 'it depends' answers as well.
Let’s get into more of the responses related to the topics of budgets, strategy, silos, data, customer experience, partnering, company size, company structure, and more.
Yes: Budget and expense tracking
Julia Herman, VP, Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, agreed that RevOps should own the tech stack for budget reasons. “When that budget sits within one department, they can be a lot more flexible, rather than saying, ‘Okay, I want this, this team wants this, this [other] team wants that.' When you have something in one shared resource, one shared place, it's much better and then also your team is supporting them on it. So we're helping them with LinkedIn Navigator, we're helping them with ZoomInfo. We're the admins, we're adding the users. So then again, if the budget doesn't sit with us, then it makes things a lot more challenging. Like, hey, we know there's five new salespeople starting, let's make sure we have enough tool licenses for everyone,” Julia said.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, talked about how it would be ideal to have a single budget and single approver (such as the head of RevOps) to approve tech purchases and stack instead of each team buying whatever they want from separate budgets and not communicating. “That way you can eliminate pointing fingers when things break because things are going to break… And not only that, but you have one revenue operations leader. That also means that there's a solid source of truth for everyone else. Ideally there would also be a single budget, for example for the revenue flows, instead of having a budget for sales... marketing… everyone ends up buying whatever they want. Ideally, this leader is the one that says, ‘What's best for the organization, not for sales, not for marketing,'” Lorena said.
Karen Steele, Founder, and Advisor at Alloy, also said the overall tech stack and budget for the tech stack should live in RevOps, though it's definitely shared ownership with some of the other teams.
Yes: Strategy
The need to own the tech stack in order to best inform strategy was one of the reasons that experts said RevOps should own the tech stack.
Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, said, “RevOps should be responsible because they are regularly aware (if not helping to facilitate) the strategic direction and should be proactive in putting any changes necessary in place and ensuring tools are optimized based on the current or future workflow.”
Related to having the view of the information needed to create and facilitate strategy, Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community, said, ”Yes, 100%. You need a complete end-to-end view of the tech stack in order to determine the upstream or downstream impacts of any new system implementation.”
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, said that in addition to ownership of the tech stack RevOps should also own the data strategy or flow of information through the tech stack, the rollout of and/or subtractions from it.
Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, acknowledged that answering ‘yes’ to the question may be controversial. “But I think when it comes to tech stack, when it comes to strategies like that, the more that you can build a narrative for your data and tell you what you know about what isn't isn't working, I think that strategy needs to come from a little far up and move down.” This sounds like a way to help ensure RevOps is included in strategy and not just a tool support desk.
Yes: Silos, data, and customer experience
Another reason why experts said RevOps should own the tech stack is to prevent silos between marketing, sales, and customer success and prevent the problems with customer experiences caused by these silos.
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, said, “Yes. It’s important to centralize tech stack ownership so you don’t create or reinforce silos that slow you down. Traditionally, marketing or sales each have their own ops teams who are in charge of their own systems. A fragmented tech stack like this leads to key customer data and history becoming spread across multiple systems, leading to disjointed handoffs between teams -- a terrible customer experience. With RevOps as the owner, you can better centralize the customer experience with one owner of the tech stack and a one system strategy.”
Another HubSpot team member, Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations, said, “Part of delivering on the customer experience is the technology ...it's part of the heart of RevOps, it's part of creating that really smooth, friction-free runway for your operations teams.”
Sylvain Giuliani, Head of Growth at Census, talked about how one of the causes of silos was each team owning their own tools, which made it hard to integrate them well to create a complete picture of the customer experience. This means that one team, RevOps, owning the revenue tech stack for multiple revenue teams could prevent or break down the silos. “It used to be [that single] tools did lots of things, now there are lots of specialized tools that need to talk to each other...with great power comes great responsibility,” Sylvain said. He also said, "Yes. Especially if you want to have an impact and deliver more value to your (internal) customers.”
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte. said yes, because of integrations and data loss that would occur if each individual team was in charge of their own tools. “[When] RevOps is not responsible, it’s a huge problem, because then we're not setting the integration, and we can lose a lot of data along the process. And because not all the revenue units, or people, are given the seat. For example, not all of them understand the importance of tools and integrations and the RevOps responsibilities. And that is why sometimes a lot of data can be lost along the way,” Leore said.
Yes: The overarching view RevOps has
One of the reasons some experts explained that RevOps is best suited for this ownership is that they see a bigger picture and more overarching view of the revenue team / customer journey needs compared to other departments.
Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, said that tech stack ownership could be one of those things where the buck can be passed around, but RevOps has the best view of the needs. “I just didn't see anyone else who really has a stake in this apart from RevOps, to do it properly.” He also spoke about how someone needs to own it to know which tools are required for which teams, which new tools are available and possibly better, as well as “ensuring that the teams can get their problems or issues with those particular systems from a sales perspective sorted out. Who's got the overarching view of if the tech stack is too compressed, or if we're having some data bottlenecks,” Jonathan said.
It depends: Partnering with other teams
For the 'it depends' answers to this research question, RevOps partnering with other teams on tech stack ownership was one of the common answers. However, there were differences in which other teams should be part of tech stack ownership.
For example, Jeremey Donovan, SVP of Sales Strategy at SalesLoft, said, “Most of the time, yes. However, a decent percentage of the time, the tech stack is owned by IT, which is fine.” This answer also comes into play with the company size and structure coniderations, if the company is large enough and has an IT team.
Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, said RevOps owns it in collaboration with marketing because marketing has had more tools budget at the organizations he’s led. This asker also overlaps with the budget-related answers to the question.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2 Marketing, said they own it, “but working closely with the end users and empowering them to be a champion for those tools. I think it depends on the size again ...But if they (the RevOops team) do own them, they want to also own the training of them. I like decentralized approaches for things, especially depending on the size, where you can still own the systems, but it doesn't mean you're preventing anyone from doing anything in them. And I do think that also means marketing ops people can be an admin in Salesforce or, depending on the size of the company, making sure there's not too much red tape when there shouldn't be. But then, making sure there's enough…don't make every person on the team [an admin],” Crissy said.
As you can see, many of the answers have more than one reason why it depends, with company size tied into a lot of answers.
It depends: Teams need some autonomy for speed and customization
Some of the ‘it depends’ answers focused on the needs of the individual teams for knowing the customization needed, and the speed at which changes may be needed.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said for companies that move fast, you can’t wait for a centralized owner to manage it, so sales ops and marketing ops each need some autonomy in tech. “It's a matter of fatalism. At startups, for example, you can't wait for a centralized IT [department] to manage it. And so, sales ops, marketing ops, they're going to be autonomous, they're gonna have a great level of autonomy. And so at that point RevOps, depending on how you define what RevOps is, is going to own that tech stack from vendor evaluation to bringing it on board, implementing it to integrating the technology, to designing it to the building it designing it, testing it, deploying it and change management for large companies. I've been in this situation before [where] you hand over the keys to a centralized team... They have some fairly robust frameworks for their project management and kudos to them. There's always a higher floor, as soon as I keep thinking I level up. I find that, at that point, what you really own is the ability to extract value from those tools, when you're early on in a company's space. When you have that high level of autonomy, you can stick your head in the sand and just focus on living in a cave on these technologies, but it's hard to extract value when you're also being very tactical, when your company grows up, and you hand those keys over. Now you have to focus on, ‘Why did we select this tool?’ A lot of these tools have some feature parity, but why did I choose this one tool over the other, and how am I going to extract value as quickly as possible, and enable the organization in a way that allows them to be successful,” Jeff said.
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, said, “Yes and no. I think RevOps owns the ecosystem and is responsible for maintaining and streamlining connecting tools, but there may be disparate tools that operate outside the ‘connected ecosystem’ that surrounding teams will maintain. Often your super users will sit in other parts of the organization, so working closely with these team members will help ensure you’re developing the right roadmap to support their needs.”
It depends: Company size
Another ‘it depends’ trend discussed the difference in tech stack ownership considerations for big companies compared to small companies, which could also relate to the need to partner with other teams on the ownership to divide up the work required for larger companies with more users. For example, at enterprise-size companies, the IT team may own all tools as their main job as opposed to the RevOps team where tools are only part of the focus.
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, said, “There's a point in a company's growth where I'm not the person you should call when Salesforce is down...I own the tech stack from a rep-usability level, and for business requirements design so it's efficient and effective. Absolutely. Do I own it from a user satisfaction level? Absolutely. Do I own it from a technical level? No, I don't, I need to partner with my IT teams on that...I think at an earlier stage company I have owned more of the tech stack. Once you're nearing $100 million... in annual revenue and/or really getting close to pre-IPO, then the keys of the kingdom move...I don't necessarily have to own the home and turn the light switch on or off on it, I can own the business requirements to try to ensure if you will [get] end-user satisfaction. Easier said than done.”
Michael Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, said it depends on company size, and in a small company it’s easier for RevOps to be able to own it. But as the company grows, “You start to have different needs that are specific to the departments. Where the dedicated [customer success] ops, sales ops, and marketing ops diverge from. I think you need to have a Chief Revenue Officer that sits at the top of everything. And then you have VPs, and then people directors and system directors that report into the VPs. And ultimately, there is a go-to-market team that all the different departments roll up into. So should RevOps own the tech stack? I think it should be centralized. It should be essentially owned by a go-to-market or like a Chief Revenue Officer, or revenue team… but each department is going to need to have its own tech stacks,” Michael said.
It depends: Company structure, if there are other technical teams or company-wide tools
Though somewhat dependent on company size, company structure also plays a role in the answers to this question. For example, if there are other technical teams such as IT or company-wide tools that more teams than the revenue teams use.
Adam Tesan, CRO at Chargebee, said it is very situational to how an organization is set up. “Some people have a real strong, centralized IT function and others don't...We don't and [so] RevOps needs to own that tech stack… probably one of the reasons we're going to go through, and I'm excited about, that tech stack evaluation and optimization is … [there are] duplications all over the place. So yeah, in our world there, they would own that tech stack. And part of owning that is making sure it's optimized, making sure the systems talk to each other, in order for you to get the right type of data, that you need to get out of it and ensure that, more importantly, the frontline teams have the data that they need to act swiftly. I was talking about having your marketing systems signal intent data in real time when a prospect is interacting with a social ad or LinkedIn. So that signal gets passed over directly to a BDR and [they] can reach out to that person in real time. And your probability of success of engaging with them goes up. So, yeah, they have to own the tech stack. And there's going to be a myriad of integrations and touchpoints, and if your process is reengineering to optimize, then you have to own the systems that manage those processes,” Adam said.
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, also talked about the company structure and size influencing the answer to this question. “It's a partnership in different organizations depending on how big you are. If you're lucky enough to have some IT support, then obviously, you'd be partnering with IT. And if you're lucky enough to have a PMO… then you may have some support there as well. But in a smaller company, oftentimes you are the [project manager], you're the IT person, you're actually going out to vendors and figuring out what are the best tools to bring in house based on the business case or the use cases that you have. So yeah, I do think that the RevOps team owns the tech stack, or if not, they at least have a ton of input. And chances are they are going to be the administrator or at least have a feed into how the system is configured if they're not the ones actually doing it themselves. But a lot of times, they're the ones literally setting up the integration, configuring the fields, mapping the data, and then building out the process workflow on how it user is going to use the use the tool, as well as the data flow, and then training. We're also responsible for training the reps and on how to use the tool. And then we're help desk support when there is an issue. I remember there were days on implementing systems where it was just me and one other person in a small company and some days I just felt like I was help desk, and that was it...going back to the fact that you're closest to the team, and the day-to-day into the business. Who better than the RevOps team to manage the tools that the team is using?” Rosalyn said,
Briana Okyere, Community Lead at AdaptivOps community and Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, said, “It's definitely something that has to have development involved in it. But I think it's more of a bridge. So I think operations needs to own the tech stack, as much of it as engineering does. And I think it needs to be a joint effort.”
As you have seen in this research, there are many reasons why RevOps should own the revenue tech stack, and the situations when it may be best to work closely with other teams but not solely own the tools.
Thank you to all the experts for their thoughts!
Part two of this chapter will be published soon!
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