Because of the wide range of RevOps responsibilities and the wide range of interests and backgrounds that lead people into working in RevOps, it’s always interesting to see what projects people are working on that really excite them. Being excited about your work can be an element of individual success in your career, which is why it’s included in this chapter.
The questions analyzed for this individual success chapter:
- What training or background makes someone successful in RevOps?
- What was your path into RevOps?
- In your RevOps role, what do you spend the most time doing?
- What RevOps project are you working on right now that excites you? (this blog)
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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 (otherwise, I'd be changing them constantly)
- If you were interviewed and your quote feels out of context, please contact me now while there is time to correct it.
- I am not adding new research or new quotes to the book. I had to stop the research to finish editing and publishing.
What RevOps project are you working on right now that excites you?
That broad range of potential work means there wasn’t a lot of overlap of commonalities in the exact projects people were currently working on at the time of interviewing.
For clarity, these answers were grouped into the same categories as the previously discussed question about where people spent the most time.
Here are some of the RevOps projects people were excited to be working on:
Tech stack projects
- Choosing a CPQ (configure, price, quote) vendor
- Tech stack evaluation and optimization
- Integrating customer journey and tech touchpoints
- Re-architecting Salesforce so you can follow the same customer throughout their journey
- Integrations and integration software
- Salesforce cleanup
- Starting to use a new business intelligence tool
- Tracking customer retention and renewals correctly in Salesforce
- Getting rid of tech debt from building so quickly
- Building a system/integration to increase efficiency and reduce redundancy between two tools
- Building an operating system for go-to-market teams
- Problem-solving for clients to get the right data at the right time and trust it
- Analyzing customer movement through segments
- Leveraging data more nimbly
- Getting end-to-end visibility on the funnel
- Forecasting
- Improving data hygiene so it’s clean and sustainable
Strategy projects
- Yearly planning, including budgets for headcount
- Building strategy for RevOps
- Starting a RevOps department
- Hosting a Customer Success RevOps meetup
- Helping create education on RevOps and general ops
- Improving an ops community
- Scaling the business using trustworthy analytics, go-to-market strategy, and structure
- Exploring low-touch/no-touch business models
Process projects
- Handoff between sales and service so customers get the most from the product right away
- Driving a sales playbook to ensure disciplined execution of the process
- Account-based marketing (ABM) projects for clients
- Operationalizing marketing plans like ABM
- Creating a product-qualified lead model with account hierarchy to give the right lead at the right time when the decision-maker is ready
- Building the department processes and strategy
- Improving/fixing deal management, reducing complexity
- Improving the customer experience
- Lead scoring and lead routing improvement
As you can see, there are many potential exciting projects happening in RevOps at any given time. It’s also key to note that what may excite one person may not excite another person or that the results of the project may be exciting while the work doing the project may be less interesting to one person. There is space for many types of interests in RevOps, to ensure you enjoy at least some of the work! Let’s explore some of these projects more in-depth.
Tech stack projects
Adam Tesan, CRO at Chargebee, had a hard time just choosing one project when there were so many interesting projects in play with a fast-growing company and RevOps team. He described projects in tech, data, and strategy, two of which you’ll see in the below sections. “The tech stack evaluation and optimization is probably going to take us over a year to do, so we've kicked off that. I think the interesting thing that we're doing…[is we’ve] mapped out a customer journey of how a customer comes into the business and started watching our technology. And [mapping] all the touchpoints of that technology to the customer journey, which I thought was a really interesting approach. So that one's really interesting and exciting, just because it's got everything to do with the customer, which I'm a big fan of,” Adam said.
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, also described a few exciting projects, including one related to tech, data, customers, and other interconnected topics like many RevOps projects. “There's a really fun one. It's the hardest project I've worked on. We’re re-architecting our Salesforce instance, and I've never done that. And so we're going through a process to move from more of an e-commerce build to an enterprise build. So we have to change the structure, we're building an automated hierarchy, we're adding some new activity, all the while making sure everything is secure and privacy compliant, to the nth degree. So, those are things that are that are pretty exciting,” Hilary said.
When asked if this initiative started during the overnight increase in Zoom usage during the pandemic shift to remote work, Hilary said, “No, it started two years [previously]. I was actually just writing the slide on it. My CEO would ask me in a meeting’ ‘Tell me when [a team member] last talked to customer ABC.’ And you want to be able to just pop up Salesforce and go, ‘I know exactly where that is.’ But because of our instance, we didn’t have all of our [user activity inside the product] in Salesforce... We didn't have a hierarchy that grouped everything together, and we created accounts for every subscription. So, a regular customer could have a couple of thousand accounts, and then they weren't grouped together, and so forth. So [the problem] was identified earlier…[because] I just wasn't able to answer what I thought were pretty basic questions from our CEO. It took a while to get going because it's a pretty big sell as a new person to ask the company to re-engineer their Salesforce. But I think it's gonna be really great and the business sees the value, now we have other values that it can bring, but it's going to be a labor of love. Just like doing a CPQ (configure, price, quote software) or an ERP (enterprise resource planning software) project, there's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but I'm really excited about what it can do for our end users, and then again what it can do for our customers if we're able to get better access to information or whatever it is that we need to do.”
Data projects
Setting up proper data hygiene can be another exciting project for RevOps, which will decrease time spent on unpleasant cleanup while giving you clean data to fuel accurate insights and other exciting projects and results. Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, was really excited about a sustainable data hygiene project. “So in my mind, I'm happy to look at data once and say, ‘Yep, this is great, this is sustainable for our business. Let's do it.’ But I don't want to look at it again after that [from a hygiene perspective]. And so how can we renew our data and make it streamlined and work for us, because the idea is that your data grows exponentially as you bring on more customers and you retain those customers. So how does my data just live its own life without me kind of babysitting it through the process?” Melanie said.
Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, said his most exciting project is creating “that end-to-end visibility…[today] I was doing this funnel analysis…not anything too complicated, but you do have complications when you're dealing with multiple systems, or your Salesforce instance isn't optimized, and so there's bad data. When you can't sync your CRM, your reporting, and your finance systems, that's a hurdle or a challenge. So, getting to that moment where actually at the click of a button, I'll be able to see all of that. We're getting close, and that really excites me because then I can really do what I see is the main core bit of my role, which is to actually start to analyze insights and say, ‘Hey, we should be selling our product here in this area’ or ‘We're under-selling in this particular area’ [using a] value lens...so I'm excited by the prospect of getting to that point of doing my job…You’ve got to have the rough in order to have the smooth. I don't even see it as too much of a rough, it's kind of rewarding to put that those pieces in place, that's what excites me.”
Adam Tesan also talked about one of the customer data projects his team was working on. “We're also doing a lot of deep scientific analysis on customer movements through our segments, which we're using our own team, and we're using some of our investors’ resources. So that's actually quite a really interesting project,” Adam said.
Strategy projects
Since the interviews took place in the fall, annual planning, budgeting, and other strategic topics discovered in that planning process were some of the exciting work of these RevOps experts.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said, “Planning for the following year is exciting. And I'll tell you why that's exciting. It's because there are future team members who are going to be great cultural fits... I can't wait to meet them, but in order to get them here, we have to decide what our go-to-market strategy and approach is going to be. How many people do we need to bring in, what's that support network going to look like from a systems perspective, how many managers [do] we need to bring on, and then how do we enable them, from our onboarding and continuous programs perspective, to get that up and running.”
Rosalyn Santa Elena was new to her role as Head of Revenue Operations at Clari and discussed the discovery process of entering a new company combined with annual planning. “Because Clari is my fourth SaaS startup, it's almost a repetitive or the same process, just in a different company. A lot of times, I think you come in as a RevOps person, or in any role, when you join a company, and you immediately have to quickly assess the current state. You think about where you want to go, you've got to map out all of the gaps and start to get there, figure out what's on fire versus what just needs some tweaking and some iterations to help at scale. Right now, probably like a lot of other ops leaders, I'm really focused on next year's planning, as well as closing out the year… we're spending a lot of time around figuring out next year's go-to-market motion, segmentation, accounts, territories, and that type of thing,” Rosalyn said.
Adam Tesan also explained a strategy project that excited him at that moment. “One of the other things that we're doing is building in a strategy function into RevOps to help us really figure out more strategic initiatives like geo expansions, vertical expansions, and take some ownership of the the research and analysis required there. So that somebody owns that… and we can make decisions and move quickly on some of those more strategic initiatives,” Adam said.
Alison Elworthy discussed building a new RevOps department, which is definitely exciting for many revenue operations professionals. “Starting RevOps at HubSpot is what’s most exciting to me right now! I believe RevOps will transform how our industry views operations and enable teams to move from a growth stage to a scale stage. Every day at HubSpot, my new team and I get to work on the business while we work in the business — it’s inspiring and motivating work. We are building a new strategy that we soon hope to share with our customers and the world,” Alison said.
Process projects
Some of the project examples could best be described as process projects, though they involve an overlaps some of the previous categories.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, discussed account-based marketing (ABM). “ABM will always be my baby…Go Nimbly is almost like two instances: the management team and the delivery team, which are consultants. I don't get to work the amount of time that I wish with the delivery team to see them in action. So when that happens, and I see course recordings or I see them directly doing [this work] it's just pure fire to me. It's really those projects that keep me doing what I am doing because it's impressive going from zero to 100 with a company that didn't even believe this (ABM) was a thing. So I think those are projects that right now interest me the most and that gives me a smile,” Lorena said.
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, was excited about revamping their lead scoring model and introducing greater automation into lead routing, “which will reduce some of the pressure on our internal team. On the client success side of the business, we are exploring some low-touch/tech-touch models to support SMB (small-and-medium business) accounts, which will involve leveraging our technology and data to drive our outreach and support model.”
Richard Dunkel, Global Head of Field Enablement at Celonis, was excited about a few projects related to operational rigor and measurement of processes. “Right now we are focused on driving our sales playbook and focusing on disciplined execution at every stage of our process. We are also implementing performance metrics for onboarding across several key roles and then reporting on these metrics to the respective leaders,” Richard said.
Conclusion
In conclusion, being excited about your work, or at least parts of it, fuels your desire to do a good job and your individual success in your RevOps career. Though everyone’s definition of success may be different, you will usually be happier in your job if the work you’re doing every day is aligned with your interests. Luckily, RevOps has such a wide variety of work that there is a good chance you’ll be working on something interesting most of the time.
Other questions answered in this individual success chapter (and in blogs):
- What training or background makes someone successful in RevOps?
- What was your path into RevOps?
- In your RevOps role, what do you spend the most time doing?
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