Much like each company's definition of RevOps, career paths to start in RevOps roles can be very different, especially a few years ago when this term and combined discipline were first emerging. Operations people's career journeys are often very interesting stories, and many people have a wide variety of seemingly unrelated roles before discovering or "falling into" this work. A few people interviewed were intentionally (or unintentionally) collecting experience across the customer journey and skills for RevOps before these roles started to exist.
The questions analyzed for this individual success chapter:
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
Similar to the answers about the ideal skills and background for RevOps professionals, many of the experts interviewed had different paths to arrive at their current roles.
The most common answers from the 35 experts included:
A few notes about the research:
Many people, including myself, “fell” into ops because there are not many colleges that offer an operations major or ops classes aside from supply chain and manufacturing classes. It is still a hidden or not-often-publicized area of work that people may not realize exists until they are partway through their career after gaining experience at several companies and seeing the recurring need for this type of work.
Let’s look at some of the common responses about paths to RevOps.
Many of the experts discussed having experience working in sales operations, which makes sense since it is one of the more established types of operations in many companies, as discussed in previous chapters.
Alana Zimmer started in sales operations and then moved into a customer-facing business operations role, which had a heavy accounting and finance component. “It was kind of a natural path into revenue operations. From there, I was first introduced to revenue operations a handful of years ago when it was first coming onto the scene. I thought it was just a buzzword, but it's stuck around. So that's been my path: sales operations to business operations and strategic operations to wrap up,” Alana said.
Julia Herman talked about falling into a RevOps career. “So in my first company, I was there for 10 years, and I was really always working on the sales side, but in a kind of number of different roles. So, sales enablement roles, sales training roles, product management for sales (having sales products that they could sell), and eventually also the budgeting part of sales and really expanding on that. So think I spent 10 years [doing that]. When I was looking for my next role, my next role was more clearly defined as a Sales Operations Director…that's how I was already doing all the things without actually being called sales operations,” Julia said.
Dana Therrien’s full story was discussed in a previous chapter, as he’s been in sales operations since 2001 and has a unique perspective in witnessing and shaping the journey of establishing revenue operations. For a brief review, In 2015, he started at the research firm SiriusDecisions as an analyst on their sales operations practice team and ended up leading that research and advisory practice, which later became Forrester. In his 2015 job interview, he included a prediction about sales, marketing, and customer success operations consolidating into something maybe called revenue operations, maybe commercial operations, or some sort of a cross-functional operations group because the technologies were just aligning these organizations so much more tightly than they ever had before. In 2017-2018, after talking to a lot of vendors like LeanData, Clari, and People.ai and pulling data on the RevOps terms from Linkedin regarding job titles, he started to talk more about RevOps within SiruisDecisions, gathering more data about the boom in RevOps job titles on LinkedIn. Eventually, Dana left SiriusDecisions in 2019 to focus on ReveOps roles and advisory. “I'm glad I never compromised on the vision and on what was happening because it was the truth. And the truth will just eventually prevail. And that's exactly what's happened. And it's continued to grow since then,” Dana said.
A sales operations background can be one of the clearest paths into RevOps for professionals working in and around this area before the term ‘RevOps’ was established, when sales ops was a more recognized term for job titles even if they were also working in other parts of the customer journey.
Many of the interviewed experts have worked in marketing-related roles during their careers.
Nicole Pereira talked about her agency's journey from marketing and marketing tech into revenue operations. She had a previous agency focused on marketing and a newer agency specializing in technical work across the revenue journey. “I feel like I was always running a marketing agency that really was a RevOps agency. For a very long time, I and my company had been focusing on the operational side of the tools that revenue-generating teams use more than the marketing, sales, or service tactics that are employed on top of those systems. We played on both sides of the fence because there was no word for the people who just did the operational layer. And then, for some period of time, anyone who was in marketing ops, sales ops, or service ops was usually at very large organizations where that could actually be a title. At smaller or midsize organizations, that function didn't exist. So we were using a tool (HubSpot) that crossed all those functions early on. They were smart in getting alignment between the sales and the marketing side, and then the service side was brought in. And then people started going, ‘Hey, revenue operations is an operational layer that services [all 3 teams], versus a marketing ops or sales ops or service ops team, having their own agenda in the same tools.’ So I feel like I've been moving in this direction for a long time. I just didn't really have a container for what it is. Early on, I really gravitated towards Martech as a title…[I called myself and my company a] marketing technologist because I was using the technology and building systems. But then as time went by, I was also doing that for the sales side. I was also doing that for the service side. But I was still called Martech. Well, now there's an operational layer that follows revenue from the beginning to the end. We finally claimed that as a title because we have a name for it,” Nicole said.
Karen Steele talked about starting working on the marketing side, and then the vendor side for a front-row seat in the early days of defining RevOps. ”I think I'm gonna speak from the perspective of coming from the marketing side and then being at a vendor who had a [RevOps] solution, where we uncovered a lot of the trends and things that were happening around this concept of RevOps. So first of all, as a marketer, I've always had demand [generation] growth teams that manage the marketing automation systems and a bunch of the other tools that feed the pipeline, ultimately, with the goal of having a unified go-to-market strategy for the business, Karen said.
Karen continued, "So the ops function, over the years, has often lived in the marketing ops function or has lived in marketing, and a lot of companies now are actually creating separate RevOps teams and moving marketing ops underneath that. And in fact, when I was at LeanData, one of the pioneers in the RevOps space, we did move marketing ops out of marketing. [It was] still a very close partnership. I didn't feel like I was losing anything because I was more interested in having this singular approach to our go-to-market strategy and, ultimately, revenue. So having all the ops under one leader serving all parts of the business; sales, marketing, and customer success; made a lot of sense. As a thought leader on behalf of being at LeanData for a couple of years, we really talked to a lot of customers early on and then talked to market analysts. Nobody was calling it RevOps [then]. But we started talking to customers, and what they started describing, and what they were looking for, was everything I just described, which was the singular ops function and merging that into one place. Everybody does it a little bit differently, but there are some really sharp people out there who have really taken these now cohesive teams and really benefited their companies in big ways.”
Lauren Nickels described a journey starting from marketing assistant for health care as the internet trasformed marketing, operations, and more. “My path has been kind of interesting. So I started in very traditional marketing [in a] marketing assistant role way back when for a health care system, learning all the channels that we did in those days: print marketing, direct mail, very traditional marketing channels. And then, somewhere along the line, the internet came along. And I remember distinctly when Google advertising started, and one of my bosses at the time saying, ‘So there's this whole Google Ad thing, can you go figure that out?’... I tried to figure out ‘this whole Google thing’ and quickly realized we needed somebody a lot more savvy than I was. But what I realized [is that] I had an affinity for trying to align what we were doing, understood the workflow of it, the targeting structure, tagging ads, and then tracking that coming in for a website. It was that kind of infrastructure, system setup workflow, that I realized that was actually what I liked," Lauren said.
Lauren continued, “And so I stayed more on that online advertising side and went back to traditional marketing, but took my digital marketing background that helped drive our Golf Channel, and then moved back to running all of our online advertising, and that was when marketing operations became a thing. So you were starting to hear more about marketing operations [which] never really existed early in my career. And my digital advertising lent itself a lot to the teams that would implement or the programming [teams]. And it led to me leading the team, it evolved to that around Eloqua. And basically the operation side, and it just was an evolution from there."
"So with Blackline, specifically, I was bought in [for] marketing operations. But I reported that through sales operations, and over the course of five years, it evolved to sales operations, then evolved to go-to-market operations for the last two-and-a-half to three years with our new leadership team. And I think it's really the best evolution I've seen of operations. Because what I loved about having marketing operations aligned with sales operations was that marketing can't succeed without sales, and sales can't succeed without marketing. And so having that literally where we were aligned as one group was very helpful because I knew I couldn't get any of my system infrastructure setup completed without support from some of the sales operations folks. And now the three-legged stool is customer operations, saying, ‘How can we have that end-to-end customer lifecycle from marketing through sales through to the customer?’ I've really never worked for an organization that was as highly aligned across that entire spectrum… every company has room for improvement. But we are set up definitely for success, which is really fun…" Lauren said.
Lauren added, "I am on the marketing operations team now. And marketing ops, for me, was really the Marketo operations and we managed a lot of the other system and infrastructure reporting. That was really what marketing ops did, and my role was actually split across a couple of people, but I also moved to through demand gen. And I'm truly just focused on the people, the process, and the infrastructure. Just making sure there's alignment. I'm actually working on a whole new project management infrastructure for the entire team to help us consolidate a lot of tech. So my role has changed, but [it is] closely aligned with marketing as my functional group.”
Jenna Hanington’s path into RevOps began with leading the marketing team at a small startup in Atlanta. “As is the nature with startups, I was wearing a lot of hats, including Salesforce administration, marketing operations, business development, compensation management, lead management, etc. My company was acquired when I was about a year into that role, and the new company already had a proficient marketing team. What the company lacked was an operational foundation across sales and marketing, so I pitched the CRO on the concept of Revenue Operations to better align the two organizations. I was fortunate enough to be given a shot at developing this new function, and I spent the next three years building a RevOps team at what is now a 600-person, $150M company from the ground up. We now support everything from lead generation to client advocacy,” Jenna said.
Mallory Lee’s career also started in marketing. “I was always in marketing and marketing operations. Through that experience, I became very skilled in sales and marketing alignment. When I had the chance to join revenue operations at Terminus, I knew my past sales collaboration would be enough to get me started with the new function,” Mallory said.
As marketing is a huge component of RevOps, which some people argue is one of the most misunderstood components, a background in marketing-related roles can be another common progression and advantage when moving into RevOps work.
Marketing operations was also part of the career path of many of the experts interviewed. Some of the above experts in the marketing-related roles also had more specific marketing ops roles in their journey toward RevOps.
Andy Mowat talked about the career-turning moment that led to focusing on marketing operations and then into revenue ops. "[I] was asked to figure out marketing automation for Elance. Got hooked,” Andy said.
Crissy Saunders discussed working in all the major areas of RevOps, starting with marketing ops for a marketing operations tool. “I was the second marketing ops person at Marketo back in 2010 and started my career there. And that was even when marketing ops was being [formed, the term was new]. Beyond that, I still stayed in marketing ops, but I've always loved just supporting the whole revenue team, and working really closely with sales development and sales, creating processes that will support all those teams to drive revenue. I've always been very interested in how businesses work, how they can work well, and how the teams will find [and] create business. And so I've always positioned myself in those areas. I worked in demand gen and in more traditional marketing, creating campaigns, and so I do a little bit of that here. [It’s] something that I might end up doing more of as I start to grow the team because I love strategy. But I've always been in the ops world because even when I worked in demand gen, I still managed marketing ops and even had a role where I've been sales ops as well for the companies. Always touched the whole [funnel]. I’ve kind of been a revenue ops team of one at a startup, so supporting all of those functions,” Crissy said.
Mike Rizzo talked about his start at an advertising technology company, which could be considered a company serving marketing operations professionals as users, at the company that bought MySpace. "They were basically a giant ad network. Kind of like Google AdSense, they would serve up display ads that they bought inventory on. I ventured into that space learned a little bit about the ad tech world, and actually learned a little bit of code because you had to code ads to get onto the server. I was on the operation side of it and moved into an account management role. Because I had exposure to code and now talking to clients [as I was just graduating from college for business and marketing], I thought I’d try to start an agency. So I taught myself how to build websites and emails and then eventually took a job helping a company establish its first newsletter. It later spawned into running their CRM and their newsletter program and then getting them on a marketing automation platform, which was Sugar CRM and Pardot right when Pardot got bought by Salesforce. So I had to move them off Pardot. And then the rest of the story is kind of history from there. I had done all this data migration work and started writing emails, and then I took my first proper marketing operations manager job at Mavenlink when they were an early-stage startup, and I built the integration on HubSpot and Salesforce, among other tech stacks. And I've just stayed in that space the rest of the time even though I took on other roles, like head of growth or director of demand gen. Those kinds of roles were all still very operationally focused. That's my background; it all started in ad tech,” Mike said.
Expanding a marketing ops role or experience into the full customer journey in RevOps is another successful path, with a few common stories about working in marketing ops for software companies targeting marketing ops professionals.
Sales experience and an understanding of sales were discussed earlier in this chapter as helpful experiences for RevOps professionals to be able to understand and empathize with people in those unique positions in the company.
Virinchi Duvvuri called himself an operationally focused sales leader. “What I mean by that is when I go into any organization, and I'm running sales, the first thing that always comes up to my mind is [that] I need to see exactly what's happening. So I'll usually do a quick chart-out of what the sales processes are, and so on and so forth. That was just a natural tendency for me, and as I started going through my career, I started interfacing more with marketing and interfacing more with customer success. As I started doing more of these sales leadership roles, I started realizing I needed to understand what these other people were doing and integrate very closely. And that's where this whole revenue operations [interest] came from is the need to pull this together. I never knew the name [until] probably two to three years ago when this name was really being used. That's when I started realizing that's what I'm doing,” Virinchi said.
Virinchi continued, “I'm doing two roles right now. I'm doing sales leadership and I'm doing revenue operations. Both of them are related, but they're not the same job…I am a sales leader but I'm not going to be your typical sales leader that doesn't really understand operations. I'm actually very focused on that because I want to make sure we can rinse and repeat everything we do. And at the same time, I want to go out with my reps and really figure out what's going on with those deals, because there's a level of art and science. I look at the RevOps as the science, and I look at the sales as the art of everything… the startup I created was for revenue operations. It was really about understanding the activity that people are doing on different opportunities and really understanding forecasts. We tied in MEDDPIC, and all these things we started blending together in order for us to really understand what was going on with the business…"
"You shouldn't just go find a RevOps person that doesn't know sales…you shouldn't hire a RevOps leader that doesn't understand customer success…you shouldn't hire a RevOps person who doesn't understand marketing. You’ve got to understand all those campaigns and conversions, top of the funnel, how to take that and validate deals for salespeople…and really understand the process behind it…It takes some time to get that breadth of knowledge and have experience in those areas….So anyone looking to hire a RevOps leader needs to be able to check the boxes on those three things,” Virinchi said.
Virinchi also talked about a checklist of skills for RevOps leaders. “They need to check the box: have you carried the bag and run sales teams? Have you done anything on the marketing side? Have you understood campaigns and sales? Have you done anything on the customer success side? And have you done it with SaaS?”
Spencer Parikh started in sales, then deliberately took marketing and customer success roles, and then worked closely with founders and CEOs to eventually learn the whole revenue cycle, though it wasn’t all planned out from the start. “My career goal was always to be a vice president or a CRO because I thoroughly enjoyed the budgeting process, I enjoy the strategic aspects, I enjoy the legal aspects… I like that big-picture view. So, my career goal was to be VP/CRO. I always had a desire to learn and improve, constantly looking outside to understand what was going on. The ‘aha moment’ happened when I was at FreedomVoice, and I was coming out of j2 Global as a senior manager for the marketing side of eFax corporate. I got a job as Director of Marketing at FreedomVoice. It was about a 60-person company. And that's when I really realized that everyone's definition of sales and marketing and customer service success was different... because I thought they hired me to do this. And then I realized I'm either missing a connection or some sort of point. I've been in executive meetings when I was like, ‘Oh, who's responsible for revenue? Well, sales is, okay. But what about marketing? Well, online marketing, sure. But then the lead handoff is a different thing. But if you want to tie revenue to marketing, then we need to just adjust all the systems so we can really attribute leads to revenue…’ So that was my aha moment,” Spencer said.
Spencer continued, “And then I wanted to step back and also go forward a few steps. And I really wanted to understand more about how all these businesses operate. I joined SiriusDecisions…to get back into the frontline role of driving revenue and creating pipeline selling; I really missed being on the marketing side. I wanted to get better educated in terms of [identifying] where are the gaps in terms of budgets, where the gaps are in terms of skill sets in the organization. And being at SiriusDecisions… it's like getting an MBA; you really expand your peer network, and you really understand a data-centric and a framework perspective, what gaps are, and what challenges are. I got a good understanding of issues affecting alignment between product, sales, marketing, and finance...After I left Sirius, I joined Mintigo, which is the predictive analytics SaaS play up in San Mateo, and I was on the customer success side. And again, they asked, ‘You got sales experience and marketing experience; why do you want to go to customer service?’ I really wanted to be more customer-facing. And I wanted to understand more about what happens post-sale in SaaS environments. ..so I joined that team, and it was fantastic. And then, I did channel sales, and I got a lot of good experience in B2C and B2B in a hybrid model. And I have worked for the last five years directly for CEOs and founders. This is where I really learned to look at things from the other person's point of view, their history, and their understanding. It gave me lessons on being prepared for when to push and when to educate versus execute, [and how] hiring for the culture is really important. Building trust and credibility and driving back to core values. And so I just think all these things were really good foundational elements to properly do RevOps.”
Jonathan Fianu talked about a history of working in enterprise sales and entrepreneurship. ”I've been an individual contributor for a long while, off a foundation of being an entrepreneur. I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life, and it's only been the last five to seven years that I started to take more of that individual contributor role on the sales team and really hone my experience in enterprise software sales, selling complex machine learning software. So I've come from that foundation, and as a result of being this individual contributor and having performed in a variety of different environments, I was then… being asked to come into companies as either first person in a territory, or first person within the function, to help start it up... I've been quite happy being self-sufficient. I've had experience in everything from banging on the phones as an SDR, I've even built a CRM before, I've migrated CRMs, I've had to work hand-in-hand with marketing, sales… legal, to set up different structures to manage RFPs. And then all the way going through to [when] you get that capacity, and then you have to then hire the team, hire SDRs, higher AEs, and so on and so forth,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan continued, “So, I've been fortunate to have experience across the commercial function. And then, as a result of that, I had a decision of what to do …either start to become [a higher level] individual contributor and continue along that path, or I can look at this area of RevOps, which I've always been doing as part of my role... But essentially, it was a conscious decision to go into the revenue operations space after being an enterprise sales performer. It came out of trying to understand what is the path to being a CRO and my own personal ambitions. And I was looking at the way my career was going and I was quite comfortable and happy being this individual contributor in enterprise sales... But one of the big frustrations was, in short, I had this feeling that if I was leading through data and insight about how to actually be successful, I wanted to prove that out, and I wanted to also start to have exposure to the full brunt of revenue operations as I could see it, which would mean going at a stage above what I was currently comfortable with, which was seed [round] to Series B. It was again a conscious choice to go with the company that I am at the moment, which is series C, and with great ambitions in the near term, and to then take on that RevOps role with [a view of the] next jump after that will be that CRO piece at an early stage business.”
Sales can often be the largest team, the team many companies focus their efforts on, a team that is often structured differently for compensation and other factors, and the team most visibly tied to revenue. Having a background working in these types of roles can help RevOps roles understand what is needed for these people to grow and for the company’s revenue to grow.
Some of the experts discussed their experience in systems administration roles, which helped them in the more technical roles within RevOps or in leading those technical team members.
Nicole Smith said, “I actually have a very technical background and have been working on the Salesforce platform for the last 13+ years. I realized more and more how you can build automation to better support the process, so it was really a natural progression to move toward sales operations. I’ve found that as I’ve been involved in sales operations, I’ve naturally included other pieces of the business that assist in generating revenue, making a case for revenue operations.”
Jeff Ignacio mentioned the system administration piece of past roles in his story, detailed further in the next section. About systems work, when asked about how he’s called himself a revenue architect, Jeff said, “I think it's illustrative of what we do in RevOps. At its lowest levels, you can be a revenue mechanic and just optimize and [work] in systems all day long, or you're just shuttling data from one system to another. But a revenue engine architect is different, it's taking a look at something and imagining what it could look like. And that's where you lean on your expertise, your creativity, your ability to use data, to basically come up with something that the company has not yet gone through. That's where I think you have to be a little bit more creative, and architects are that.”
Several other experts mentioned a technical part of their experience, such as the moment they were asked to figure out marketing automation, Google ads, or another technology where the technical knowledge was a gap in the company’s needs. Working in these systems gave people more visibility, clarity, and understanding of the big picture you can often gain in systems, especially if you’re linking them together. Systems work can also give you a greater understanding of customer behavior, and other learnings that may lead one to realize they enjoy this type of work, as well as give them helpful experience for future roles.
Simimto the need for a general operations mindset discussed in the previous research section of this chapter, experience in several more general types of operations was discussed by several experts along their path into RevOps.
Gianluca Pucacco said, “[I’ve] been in Ops most of my career, got the chance to work in call center analytics, process improvement, and Six Sigma, FPA (Financial Planning and Analysis), Sales Excellence, Strategy and Planning. The only time I didn’t have an Ops title in my career was when I was at MS (Microsoft), where I sat more on the business side.”
Matt Volm started as VP of Business Operations (BizOps) at Ally.io when the company had about 25 employees. “I was a BizOps team of 1, and that meant I was responsible for accounting/finance, legal/compliance, talent acquisition, HR, and revenue operations. I had never been in RevOps before, but it was now my job to support the entire GTM team. I led BizOps and RevOps at Ally.io over the course of 15 months, helping the company grow revenue by 9x over that time period and headcount from 25 people to 130 people. I left Ally.io to start Funnel IQ, a GTM operating system that keeps marketing, sales, and CS aligned, so most of our customers are in RevOps as well,” Matt said.
As RevOps combines multiple types of operations work, having a broad or general operations background across the business can be a great foundation.
Several of the experts talked about how part of their path into RevOps included working in analyst roles and/or in finance.
Jeremy Donovan gave his answer in a very ops-mindset flowchart format, including analyst work: “Engineering → analyst → product → marketing → Sales leadership → RevOps.”
Jeff Ignacio worked in technology, sales, and finance and said he then fell into sales ops and RevOps. “I had worked in technology and sales early in my career. And as a frontline seller, I recognize how hard it is to make quota every month. When I went to business school, I wanted to be a consultant for one of the strategic consulting firms, but I ended up in finance at big tech companies, at Intel and then at Google. And while I was at Google I supported the sales team in a different capacity as an FP&A analyst. There I was hyper-focused on certain specialized pieces of sales support, so territories, incentives, annual planning, headcount capacity, all the things that make for a successful partnership between finance and sales," Jeff said.
Jeff continued, “And one of the things that I had realized I wanted to understand was [how] I can look at the business from the rearview mirror. I'm planning based on historical data. But how do I get closer to the customer? I would be very keen on supporting business so I actually partnered with a team called the sales operations team over at Google. And I thought, ‘How can I get into that type of role but not be so hyper-specialized like my counterparts were at Google?’ I kind of want to see the whole enchilada. So I ended up joining a couple of startups. Well, one startup in particular got busier. And that's where I was thrown into the deep end of the pool and the tools that made me successful were insufficient to cover the entire role and responsibility for position. I was very good at the quota, the compensation, and all the ones I already did at Google. But this one required me to get knee-deep into systems like systems administration. Really designing comp plans from the ground up. And those were things that I had not done in my past and so that was more of a trial by fire. But that prepared me because I had an experienced marketing ops counterpart. And he is a rockstar in marketing ops. And so, I learned a lot about the handoff between marketing to sales and vice versa, that feedback loop from sales to marketing. And so from that, I had to lean pretty hard on my managers and other peers. And that's how I kind of learned the craft of sales ops. And since then, I've expanded my role to RevOps, which is really focused on alignment across marketing and CS (customer success); it's a much wider mandate than sales ops.”
Rosalyn Santa Elena also started out working in finance. “I started by managing accounts receivable, which is really interesting because I was on the flip side of managing billing, collections, credit, and really managing the AR (accounts receivable) for a company. This was about 22 years ago or so, and I actually had an opportunity to move over to commissions, which is really interesting because I remember it was under finance. Our CFO at the time asked me to take over the Commissions team. I thought I didn't know anything about paying people; it's been all about collecting money and getting people to pay me. So I didn't really know too much about it, but his intent was to really leverage my quote-to-cash end-to-end internal process experience. If you think about collections and commissions, [they] are at the tail end of everyone else's process. And so I decided, I'll go ahead and try something totally different. And I really leveraged the relationships that I had within the company cross-functionally, as well as understanding the end-to-end process, and I really found my calling,” Rosalyn said.
Rosalyn continued, “I've always enjoyed working with sales and with the go-to-market side. Commissions is so much more than paying people. From an outsider's perspective, it's just paying salespeople lots of money, but sales compensation is really that end-to-end driver. If it's done well, if it's really aligned to the strategy, you're really driving behavior, you really have an impact on actual results for the revenue team. So I started out in sales comp; when you're covering the end-to-end, you really understand the business. You have to understand everything about the revenue cycle; you have to understand how we go to market. What does the selling motion look like, how do we actually acquire customers, how do we book and bill a customer and actually close the deal? And then how do we pay them? So there's that end-to-end on sales compensation [where] you have to understand all the operational foundation.”
Rosalyn added, “Naturally, my role started broadening. I started taking on more of a general operations position, still focused on sales primarily. Then as I progressed through my career, I started picking up some experience around marketing operations and moving up earlier in the funnel. And then. as we started moving into more of a recurring model… I really picked up a lot more around value drivers, customer success, and customer experience. And then really driving operations for renewals, account management upsells, as well as managing all of the churn, and that type of thing. So my role started broadening. Even when I look back, a lot of my titles were sales ops, but it really was all of go-to-market operations. At some point in time, I had marketing and sales, and then other times, I had marketing, sales, and customer success… So, I've really found my calling. I love everything about go-to-market, everything about the revenue side. And up until recently I never thought I would actually consider being a seller, but you never know, that may be the next step. I've actually talked to other operations professionals, and I talk to a lot of sales leaders, especially in my current role. I have an opportunity to really talk to a lot of prospects about the product. Never say never.”
As a key part of RevOps is understanding all sources of revenue, having experience in financial roles can be very helpful for many parts of RevOps.
Customer success roles were another part of some people’s journey into Revenue Operations, assisting people in understanding an often under-emphasized part of the customer journey and RevOps.
Michael Ewing started as a consultant at HubSpot, starting the Dublin office as “a small group of experts that were trying to find new people and basically build a better process. It was HubSpot’s first foray into having a new office. And so we started to build new playbooks for onboarding customers. And I took the best of the stuff from our headquarters in Cambridge, left the worst of the playbooks behind, and started to come up with a new way of onboarding customers [that was] more project-based and ended up getting faster time-to-value and onboarding more customers faster with greater retention results. After being in Dublin for about a year and being successful in finding the team to help [the office] be self-sufficient, I moved back to Cambridge to headquarters and started to get into program management, specifically on the customer success side. I liked solving scaling problems, areas where I thought we could be more efficient. And so I started to work on building out a one-to-many customer success team function, hosting webinars, coming up with a knowledge base, and these sorts of things. And eventually that dovetailed into looking more specifically at how to help our account managers, or customer success managers, be more efficient. So I started to develop internal alerts, [such as] when a customer point-of-contact leaves the company, you want to alert the account manager that this thing happened. So building out those systems and building out a health score system of looking at qualitative and quantitative analysis of customers…”
Michael continued, “HubSpot decided to form a revenue renewal management team with the purpose of taking all the contract work off of the customer success managers, giving that contract renewal work to another team, where the customer success managers could dedicate more time to customer success. …that's really where I started to get into what we call RevOps, the renewal management team at HubSpot. We first reported into the services organization. And a few years later, we reported into the sales organization. But really, this department sits pretty firmly between sales and services. A good analogy of a renewal manager is using the soccer analogy, football is very popular here in Europe. The renewal manager is like a midfielder on a soccer pitch. The renewal ball comes to the renewal manager, and at times, the renewal manager will dribble the ball upfield and find that pass to the offensive player, the sales rep, to help that sales rep score the goal and get an upgrade or cross-sell other jobs. The renewal manager will kind of dribble the ball all the way up, and they will help the customer figure out what they need, they can demonstrate the value of the products, and they can sell the value themselves to score the goal. And other times, customers are not be seeing [value] so much so he says we're going to move back in place of defense, and help our services team, and avoid cancellations and minimize downgrades.”
Michael added, “So, I felt that’s an analogy to say, where I find RevOps to be most effective is in aligning sales and services to work really well together to maximize revenue retention. Where marketing comes into it, is you need to communicate to your customers about their renewal or about new products, and that's kind of where my role in revenue operations comes from, is navigating that alignment between sales and services and market.”
Hilary Headlee also got her start in customer success. “I really started in customer success, and I was always doing a little bit of customer success and then something with sales CRM. So my first internship was managing the CRM for a radio station. But I always liked the customer side. What I liked about it was that I sat between our sales reps and our sales managers, who I loved, working with our product and our customers. I felt like I really had an understanding of what was happening in our industry, in our marketplace, with our competitors, with our own customers, and that I could provide value there and I love that early on, it shifted. And when [someone] was on maternity leave, and they needed someone to manage the Salesforce system, I did it, and I really loved it. I started to get a behind-the-scenes view of getting into the systems and the data, and then drive in some of the insights and strategy and planning and helping on more of a macro level. And so that's really how I ran actually customer success, sales operations, and sales training or enablement teams, up until about lynda.com when I was asked to pick one way or the other. And so I ended up, sadly, dropping customer success from my list of core focuses and just picked sales operations and enablement to keep moving in that direction. And so that's where I've stayed,” Hilary said.
Hilary continued, “I look at it, not through a discipline lens, but I love managing or working in every single thing that could possibly help a rep do their job better so customers have what they need. So that, to me, looks like… sales operations with revenue planning, headcount, territory, quota, pipeline, forecasting, and analytics, and then in sales enablement things like process, playbooks, positioning, messaging, certifications, great comms, and so forth. I love having the opportunity to do that. And that's really how I got to RevOps and enablement. Why I've really stayed in it is because I feel like I'm helping customers ultimately, which was my first love.”
Alison Elworthy also led customer success as part of a journey into RevOps. “I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to start my HubSpot career in marketing ops, then to oversee major changes in sales ops, and then to lead the customer success organization. Now, as I work on building our RevOps organization, I’m grateful to have these experiences to pull on; specifically, leading customer success has given me a new perspective on our customers and their experience with us. That’s how I know how important it is to build a GTM strategy centered on the customer experience. And because I’ve seen first-hand the issues that emerge when teams work in functional operations silos, I know just how powerful it will be to align our platform, processes, and perspectives and work as one team, pursuing one goal: building a delightful customer experience at scale.”
As a key part of succeeding in RevOps is understanding the entire customer journey and focusing on the customer, having experience working in customer success roles can be a helpful part of a path into revenue operations.
An interesting step in several experts’ journey into RevOps was working in law or journalism, two disciplines that require intensive research and communication skills.
Melissa McCready explains how her journey started at law firms. “When I started working, first of all, I thought I was going to be an attorney. That didn't happen... I was working with some law firms … they're working crazy hours…of course, there are crazy hours in high tech. But I can't argue for something that I don't believe in; it would be really, really difficult…and that’s something you have to do as an attorney. …Moving forward, I started working as a paralegal, doing a ton of research, doing contract management, working with legal, and working with all of the different teams on contracts. I would talk to the engineering folks about contracts that they needed to have for getting patents. And patent agreements where somebody could license what they were doing as well, and then work it across to a marketing and partnership agreement. So I got a lot of touch in those areas. I didn't know I was doing all of that at the time because it didn't have a name,” Melissa said.
Melissa continued, “But I was also programming systems. Because the internet just came out, and digital signature just got passed into law. And so it was like, why are we not using these things to automate this? So I did that. I just read an Access database book and looked at how to use the internet …it was pretty cool. [It took] two weeks for contracts, on average, and I got it down to like 15 minutes. So that's what tools do. [There was no marketing ops training or word for it,] none of those tools existed. The closest that you got was Excel, Microsoft products, Corel WordPerfect, that's what we had. And then the databases came online. And that was really cool. And Sales Logic came out and Siebel came out. And that's what brought me out to California because I am from Illinois, outside of Chicago [where I couldn’t do this work]. I was working for a Siebel systems integrator in Chicago, and nobody had any clue what I was talking about. I felt like I should have this conversation somewhere else. Siebel fell when Salesforce came up; I was playing with that tool. And there was another company that I went to develop a CRM tool that was tied into an email marketing tool, that company is now Lyris. They were email labs, and the tool we were building was called Sales Center, taking everything and putting it together in a cloud tool. The whole cloud thing just started.”
“So you just think back to all those times when none of this stuff existed. It's like I've grown up with the systems from the very beginning, which is so weird. And how fast that's all happened, I can blink and remember when it would be so nice if we could just change a field label in Salesforce, not having to create a custom field. The simplest stuff, what we couldn't do early on. So many capabilities have been added to these tools. It's been really fun to see,” Melissa said.
Melissa continued, “The one thing that's happened repeatedly is that people think that the tools just drive themselves. I can't tell you how many clients I've had [who] go and put things in [the tool]. And I'm like, 'Wait a second, you're supposed to tell me before you do that because you just blew up these three other things when you were putting that in the system. [And now] it's not working.' [They say] something's broken, and I say nothing's broken, you didn't implement correctly, you have to follow the instructions for implementation. And you have to know the systems. When it's hitting three or four different systems, you need to be able to say what the impact of this is before you get started, so that you can plan accordingly. And companies don't do that. And they don't think about business requirements, [they think it is] just extra paperwork. No, there's a reason for it. When doing really sophisticated, heavy lifting projects, business requirements are everything.”
“When I was at that last company, we built out a data warehouse in three months…We did a whole bunch of speaking engagements with Snowflake to talk about how we did that because it was insanely fast. But it was because the team of us had all worked together previously. And we all were happy documentarians, and we all had really deep process expertise in multiple systems...I've been in Salesforce, I’ve been in Marketo, but I've also been in data warehouses, and it's a totally different skill set to be able to draw out all the different data points to build out… So that you have one main customer record in order to be able to blend different data points. And so that's what we did at that company, which was super exciting,” Melissa said.
Melissa added, “That's where you see a RevOps team coming in, you see a growth ops team; what we were doing is we took sales and marketing, Marketo feeds, Salesforce feeds, and we were building this data warehouse and reporting with Tableau. And we had the Battle of the BI (busines intelligence) because we had every BI tool you could possibly imagine. And we had the sales ops team trying to shove Salesforce Einstein down our throats. [I said] 'Mark my words that Salesforce buys Tableau. …So you're better off investing in this system because Einstein will go away because it is too convoluted.' .. And for a tool with BI, you probably have one or two reporting people in your organization, if you've got 1000 people [in the company], it's insane how few data scientists and data people there are. So I said, ‘Let's go with Tableau.’ So we did. And we were able to stand it all up…We were operationalizing team performance and looking at areas that we had gaps in. Maybe it was skill set, maybe we needed more training, and being able to identify those things, looking at these different systems. Not just looking at external factors, looking at internal factors. So it's kind of funny, we were doing the growth operations stuff before we even put a name to it.”
Leore Spira also started a career in law. “I started my career as a lawyer, as an intern actually, in one of the biggest law firms [in Israel]. And then I decided to change my career path to transition to marketing. I was the marketing coordinator at a nonprofit organization here in Israel, and I was responsible for raising donations, producing the yearly gala, and creating campaigns and messaging for the organization. But then I felt that I was too young to change the world; I could do that by volunteering and contributing and donating my own skills, either soft or professional skills, to others. And I wanted to develop by myself. Then I started my [master’s degree] in government strategy and marketing,” Leore said.
Leore continued, “I gained my first position as marketing coordinator at an enterprise corporate company… [my manager] was sort of my mentor, she saw my potential and slowly started the transition of my career without even asking me. She always told me ‘you understand business, you're better with businesses, I can see the board with you.’ So, she helped me to make this transition and move from marketing to supporting sales and then to sales operations. Then my next roles were in sales, sales operations manager and mostly I dealt with their strategies and processes in regards to the sales department process. But then I started to work at hypergrowth startups, and in my last company, and also here at Syte, I had to establish the sales operations department fast. I have not just worked with sales but also with all the business units that were responsible for the funnel, which means from top up, define marketing to sales, to sales development, to customer success and support and finance. This is how I became a revenue operations [professional].”
Leore added, “And today, I'm trying to be humble, [but] people are always telling me, I don't like this term, that I'm becoming an expert in revenue operations because my methodology is to build processes and to better understand the full funnel from my perspective and not as sales operations. From a macro perspective. This is what got me into revenue operations because I always was that kind of person. I think this is something that I got from my law degree and from the internship there, and then becoming a certified lawyer. Always look at the macro.”
Maggie Butler's journey started in journalism, “This journalism student didn't even know what revenue operations was. When I was growing up, I thought I was going to be a news reporter. I really like to work under pressure. And I really like writing and communication, those things just seem to work well for me…As I grew up, I realized that the perfect role for that can have many faces and can be expressed in many different ways. And so I started my career at a startup that was geared towards teaching celebrities how to do their social media, at a time when disparate channels...that unifying platform underneath didn't really exist yet. Celebrities at that time had their PR manager do all their press for them and really sort of be their voice. And at the time, there was this authentic wave of communication that was happening through social media because all of a sudden… you could touch those people through Twitter, you could talk directly to them. And then all of a sudden, celebrities are realizing that using their voices in that way, we could be really powerful…"
Maggie continued, "I was part of a team that created an iPhone app that pushed one message out to many platforms. And we taught celebrities how to use an iPhone and how to do it. So that was pretty cool. What that showed me is that there are a lot of different ways to communicate. I really liked technology. So working in product, and working in tech, and working in communications has sort of just been my background. At HubSpot, there was an opportunity where I was working in product marketing, and it really just lent itself nicely to what the marketing operations team needed at the time, which was some process. At the time [when] I joined the operations team, there were two people trying to support a marketing team of at least 100. And then working directly with sales ops at the beginning, [then] services ops, partner ops, all these ops teams really flourished in the last five years or so. [We were] trying to figure out, how does a marketing ops team support the marketing team? What are some of the things that we centralize under us in terms of email operations, compliance, or list building? Or how do we create processes that give marketers and other people who need to use what we own autonomy to do things without having to talk to us? And how do we enable that? So that's how I ended up in RevOps. Trying to really think about my focus, I feel it was process, really in marketing operations and communicating that, creating that, documenting that, enabling other people to use systems created from that. So that's how I ended up here.”
The need for research, seeing the big picture, contracts, mediation, building a business case, and other learnings can make legal or journalism experience a helpful part of a path into RevOps.
In conclusion, there are many paths you could take to arrive in RevOps and be successful in your career. Careers such as Revenue Operations benefit from people with a varied background and wide interests who are collecting a portfolio of different experiences as opposed to ‘climbing a ladder’ in one narrow specialization. There is also space for specialists to find success now in many companies with larger RevOps teams as the field matures and more large companies adopt it.
Eric Steeves writes about Breaking into RevOps: Key Skills to Accelerate Your Career Path
Top Listener MOps and RevOps Career Questions Answered on The Revenue Growth Architects podcast by CS2
Haris Odobasic at Revenue Wizards shares answers to “What advice would you give anyone starting a career in RevOps?”
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