With so many different definitions and expectations about what RevOps is, it is not a surprise that the factors for individual success within RevOps would vary, depending on how your company views RevOps.
If you’re a RevOps leader, or a team of one person, the breadth of skills and knowledge needed to be an expert in every possible task or area that RevOps may be in charge of would make you a rare unicorn. You would need a varied background in marketing, sales, customer success, ops, finance, and more. As Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO at Remotish, said, “It’s hard to serve someone in those roles if you haven’t done it yourself, if you haven’t been on all of the teams: sales, marketing, or customer success. If you haven’t been in those roles, you don’t know what to look for, what to fix or improve.” This statement brings the research back around to acquiring people skills for RevOps such as empathy for the teams and the customers. It also proves the need for a team from diverse backgrounds rather than relying on finding one rare person who, while they might have the breadth of knowledge and varied skills, would likely not have the time to complete every possible RevOps tasks for a company by themselves.
Gianluca Pucacco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, talked about this need for a mix of skills among the team. “In my opinion, RevOps is a team’s sport, so you want to make sure across the organization you have the right mix of talent. Cognitive diversity is going ot be vital to the success of the organization. You want some ex-consultants, but at the same time you want folks that have grown up in pure Ops. You also want strong analytics folks, strong program managers, and great communicator,” Gianluca said.
As we’ll discuss in this chapter, factors for individual success for leadership can be different from factors for success for any specialized individual contributors of larger RevOps teams. The larger goal of the department being strategic vs. only tactical will benefit all RevOps team members if RevOps leadership is expected to be strategic. But remember that there may be some individual contributors who enjoy being tactical and aren’t looking for ambitious career growth that comes from increasing their strategic work… it all comes down to our least favorite but most common answer to questions: it depends.
For a newly combined and recognized area of work like RevOps, where there isn't consistent information online and most information is passed verbally or in hard-to-find ways online, this chapter may be valuable for people in newly created RevOps departments and/or are also new in their career. They are navigating so much newness. This chapter may also be valuable to the leadership of companies who may be hiring, giving performance reviews, or coaching their RevOps team.
Despite the dependencies on each situation, the information gathered from the following questions has been categorized into hopefully helpful data about the most common factors of individual or personal success in RevOps.
The questions analyzed for this chapter:
This first blog will discuss the first question.
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Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
For example, is it more successful if someone comes from ops or if they come from the sales, marketing, or customer success team?
This is one of my favorite questions in the research. I’ve been fascinated by people’s journeys into operations in general and their journeys into RevOps, specifically.
I’ve always been curious about how someone gets to where they are today. One of the reasons for my lifelong education pursuit is that there does not seem to be a clear way to get to the executive level at a company, a roadmap of the step-by-step path to becoming a CEO or other C-level executive.
This missing roadmap could be compared to how people start working in operations and especially how they start in RevOps since it is a newer term. The roadmap to working in operations is also missing since so many people come from a variety of directions and “fall into it” based on their interests and skills.
But what if you purposefully want to build a career in operations? How do you do it? What skills and experience should you collect?
Let’s see if we can build a list of common qualifications that could help you build a roadmap to success for entering and rising in RevOps careers.
Some of the common overall responses to this question were:
Though being data literate was #1, many of the most common answers are that hidden part of RevOps mentioned in previous chapters: people skills.
For RevOps team leaders, a few specific skills were also discussed in addition to the above answers.
Data literacy and data analysis were a trend across many people’s answers. This skill is valuable for many careers and crucial in RevOps. For this discussion, data analysis and finance experience were grouped together.
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, spoke specifically about data analysis in relation to RevOps success, in addition to a discussion about generalists which will be covered later in the chapter. “I think a lot of individuals come in through that path as a data analyst or a financial analyst, or maybe a Salesforce admin, so they have that perspective that it's all about the data, versus others [who] may have come from a process or generalist perspective so they see data as one element, but then there are so many other factors involved,” Rosalyn said.
Rosalyn continued, “I see a lot more of the operator in terms of a technical operator of data, so they come from that lens, which is great because it's super important. But I think as they start to progress more in their career, they'll probably start to see the other elements [of RevOps] around the strategy and the go-to-market planning, and less data focus. It's still going to be based on data but more of that balance… between art and science. There's the science aspect with all the data and what the data is telling me, but then in anything related to a buyer’s journey, there's going to be some art because you're dealing with the clients’ emotions, where they're coming from, what they value, and so some of that has to be mixed in with the science to really be successful.”
Matthew Solomon, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, has found that individuals who come from an operations or database management/architecture role “tend to fare better at tackling the types of projects that RevOps takes on. That being said, they need to be flexible and move tactically with the business, which might mean deploying a minimal viable solution.”
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, talked about coming from a finance background in addition to discussing the later topic of having broad experience in sales, marketing, and other roles. “I think there are two camps of people that can be successful in RevOps… One is someone with great technical acumen, with a willingness to develop the business acumen… the systems administration crowd, or they're going to be in the finance crowd. I happen to come from the finance group. And then there's the set of folks who start with the business acumen, and they might be in marketing, they might be in sales, maybe they're a sales development rep, and a quote-unquote crossover, it's the dark side. And so we're all learning,” Jeff said.
An anonymous executive spoke about the importance of data analysis skills and said, ”I think an analytics background is probably the most relevant. Because the truth, in my opinion, is that it's truly a data position. Operations is the orchestration of what the data tells you to do.”
That analytical mindset and experience is one skill that Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, talked about as well. “In terms of the analytical roles, I do think somebody who came from the analytics space, studied math in college, or things like that is more suited for that,” Julia said.
Building stories from the data that humans can understand, not merely analyzing and working with data, was a subject Spencer Parikh, founder of ioAudio, spoke about. “An analyst’s background would help them gather, interpret, and use complex data to develop actionable steps. That's a big part of [RevOps],” Spencer said.
Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, spoke on this same topic as one of the main skills of RevOps. “They need to be data literate, they need to be able to understand statistics and communicate data really well. How can we dumb data down to communicate that? I think that's really important,” Sylvain said.
Needing a mix of the experience on the team, going along with the team sport metaphor from Gianluca earlier, was something Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, also spoke about. Lauren told a story about how someone on the team needs to have the finance/analytics experience.
“Where I was not I was not successful in the role was that I didn't have a financial analyst, because of the rolling analysis of the markets and the data [in that role]. So data-driven and analytics-driven. I think if you are not an analyst and highly analytical personality or have that skill set [then you] can hire to it… you have to be able to think very analytically and ideally have the chops like Excel. Ops and analytics jobs actually work there because that's where the modeling and adjusting of models can play such a central role in everything that we do. I like seeing people come in the organization with financial analyst types of roles,” Lauren said.
Lauren continued, “Where my piece of my reporting role went to was somebody with no marketing [background], but he had a really strong finance and accounting background. I just had to help him get up to speed on the marketing side… This person is providing so much value, you can see how much better it is. And then it makes me less stressed…I understand the business and the right business questions. But I don't [think in] zeros and ones, I don't do that whole modeling thing. [So now] we are more data-driven, as we should be. And finding folks that can really think critically, but then also have the skill set to manipulate the data quickly and nimbly, the right datasets to pull from and all of that is very, very important. Especially for RevOps.”
As you can see, data and/or financial analysis skills and literacy are very important to understand, and individuals with these skills can find success working in RevOps.
The answers about having experience on the sales, marketing, and customer success teams were grouped with the other answers about empathy in general or empathy for the customer. Having experience in the roles you’re working with every day is one way to develop empathy for them and understand their needs and the challenges you can help with that will ultimately help achieve the company's goals. Having empathy and focus on the end customer for the company will also drive success in your RevOps career, with a better understanding of the full customer journey.
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, added perspective about the need for empathy and understanding of the customer in RevOps. “It doesn’t matter if you come from marketing, sales, or a services background -- a true commitment to the customer is the key to success in RevOps,” Alison said.
Sylvain Guiliani thinks successful RevOps people need a lot of empathy “because, at the end of the day, they are setting all tools and processes for the end user, which are going to be salespeople, marketing people, you name it. And so as an ops person, you might think this is a beautiful process, you have a nice flowchart of this being assigned to this, and then we get data. But you also have to have a lot of empathy because the salesperson is going to have to input a ton of data, right? So how much data entry are they gonna have to do to justify that beautiful process to work [correctly]. And so having empathy for other people's jobs is really important, or experience doing those jobs. If you've been the sales rep, you'll have a lot more empathy. I don't want them to do that much data entry because I know how painful it was. So I would say this is the main criteria [for success].”
Dana Therrien, Senior Sales Specialist of Sales Performance Management at Anaplan, said he thinks some of the gaps in revenue operations leadership today include the lack of firm understanding of marketing and the complexity of marketing. “Marketing is so much more of a science now than it ever has been in B2B (business-to-business companies). And there's a tech stack that's involved in that, from demand generation all the way through brand management. I think brand is probably the least understood piece of it,” Dana said. RevOps people with backgrounds or skills in marketing are valuable for this reason.
Julia Herman said some of the best people come from a Sales or Business Development Representative (SDR or BDR) role, people who are looking to move up and get more technical in their careers. “They already have some technical acumen. But perhaps they realize that being on the phone is not their strongest passion,” Julia said, which overlaps with the technical skills discussed later. Coming from these roles would be very helpful in understanding their goals and challenges.
Jerry Bonura, Senior Principal at TwentyPine, an executive search firm for RevOps, said having a sales background or some experience in sales gives the RevOps person empathy for their struggles. “Knowing the pain that those people feel every day, I think that helps people be successful in the role a lot,” Jerry said.
It’s rare to find one person with the blend of all the skills you need, which Jonathan Fianu, Head of Revenue Operations, spoke about. “Having a lens on the customer is hugely important…I think I've got a nice blend of those skill sets, but I'm still learning, and there are lots of areas where I'm deficient. But having a sales background is hugely helpful because it gives you empathy with the sales team. There's a lot of stuff that you need to start to drive, and it needs to be done from a position of understanding,” Jonathan said.
An anonymous executive added that some individuals have too much theory and not enough practice to succeed in RevOps, if they haven’t been in roles in charge of quotas or people with quotas or measuring/setting quotas. Having experience in a quota-driven role not only gives you experience but also empathy to those unique stresses when compensation is related to the ability or blockers to achieving goals.
Briana Okyere, Community Lead at AdaptivOps community and Community and Events Lead at Tonkean, said, “I think if somebody is also an empathetic person, so instead of only thinking about themselves, they're thinking about the greater good of the organization and they want to improve upon that and make it more efficient as a whole. So it requires a big-picture mindset, which not everybody has. And then just intense attention to detail is key in operations. And not everyone has that, so I think human skills that can be learned by anybody but also come naturally to a lot of people, I think it moves them into operations.”
Empathy for coworkers and customers is a hugely important skill in RevOps, when the work affects so many people’s daily lives directly and indirectly.
This discussion of a general operations mindset or experience as an important skill or background for RevOps combines the answers of:
Rosalyn Santa Elena talked about how some people are ops people or not ops people, similar to some people being a big company person or small company person. It can also relate to the differences between a specialist (who may be the big company person with one niche) vs. a generalist (similar to being a small company person who wears a lot of hats). Rosalyn said it's the people with the ops mindset, the ops people, who are more successful in RevOps.
Mallory Lee, Senior Director, Operations at Terminus, said it doesn’t matter which team someone in RevOps comes in from, what matters is “their desire to be a connector, an optimizer, a relationship builder, and a fixer.”
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, said, “First of all, RevOps are project managers. Because eventually, this is what we do. We have projects that we manage.”
Project management training is also a background valued by Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack. “I think that it transfers really well and to recognizing revenue correctly because you're almost always problem solving,” Melanie said.
Jeff Ignacio talked about the benefits of coming to RevOps from one of the revenue teams. “Learning technology, I personally think, is easy. Learning sales and going through marketing, that takes a brave face. So I think the people who come in from sales and then develop the technical acumen, particularly reps who display a knack for measuring their pipeline meticulously, or they have spreadsheets open all the time looking at their ratios, I think those folks have the aptitude to do extremely well in RevOps,” Jeff said.
When discussing what makes someone successful in RevOps, Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite said, “The only through line I really see is they're all tinkerers. They're all builders, folks that are really inclined and motivated by making things, and making things just a little bit better. They don't settle for good enough…common aspects are folks that really enjoy and find satisfaction by iterating, by building, and by questioning their assumptions. And so that's that's a little bit of a left brain and right brain function, it's a little bit of black magic of finding the right balance between people process, systems process, tool processes. And that's it. I feel like the wizards that like to figure out that black magic do really well.”
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, said it comes down to having a mix of two things: experience in some kind of operations function to get good at processes, systems, and data literacy; and the other piece is being able to experiment, “because the pace of business is changing a lot, and different projects are going to come at you, so a mix of experience of understanding what good process looks like, what good systems look like, what good data looks like. And then marrying that with the right kind of experimental mind that you can't go to another company and do operations like you did at a prior company. It doesn't work that way,” Hilary said.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, talked about how her background in Design Thinking has helped in RevOps, by becoming comfortable staying in the problem longer and not offering up instant solutions. “Design thinking teaches you [and] gives you the tools to stay in the problem solving [mode]. And [stay] in the problem space, way more than in the solving space. So as humans, we tend to to get anxiety when we face a problem, we don't savor it, we don't enjoy it, we dislike it…Design thinking allows you to be calm in the problem space for a longer period of time before jumping to a solution. So I think applying that mindset has made me more tolerant to risk. I know that for any action that I take, I'm not going to bankrupt the company…we're not dealing with curing cancer… we're dealing with problems that are natural in organizations. So design thinking allows me to be comfortable in that space…. Those are conversations that not a lot of people have because they don't even know how to how to define that…if we're going to go to through a full transformation organization-wide, let's do it the right way…Let's iterate. Let's fail fast and often. Let's not punish people. Let's learn from that. Let's strive for friction. People are so afraid and demonize friction. I don't know why. Instead, use it to propel, to bring the business higher to new levels,” Lorena said.
Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, said she doesn’t think the background matters as long as someone has curiosity and appreciation for the broader process, “i.e. if you come from marketing, having a true desire to understand and optimize what happens after a lead is generated and is handed over to sales is key. People who will be successful in RevOps are often critical thinkers, data-driven, and obsessed with making processes and outcomes better or more efficient than they found them,” Jenna said.
When so few people start their careers in operations, discovering how this operations mindset sets you apart from colleagues is an interesting story many of us have. Briana Okyere said, “[The story often starts with ] I was working in sales, and I realized the processes were really inefficient, so I started to fix all of them, and then all of a sudden I was the sales ops person. And so I think it's more about what your area of interest is and less about your background. I think the mindset of someone who wants to see everything working properly is is key to having a successful career in RevOps.”
The many skills and interests that make people successful in any type of operations will logically help their success in revenue operations.
Many of the experts talked about how having a mix of experience, or being a generalist, is helpful for individuals to find success in RevOps roles.
One champion for broad experience and becoming a master generalist is Lorena Morales. Lorena talked about how being a generalist was frowned upon in certain cultures and career paths, compared to being a specialist, and explained the value of “T-shaped” skills and knowing “just enough to be dangerous” about many topics.
“The idea is that your company allows you some professional development time in order to become what I call now a master generalist. At one time, I believe this was frowned upon because coming from Mexico, you don't jump companies… [but] I became a jack of all trades… I'd done pretty much every single part of the marketing organization. I've done content, I’ve done paid acquisition, I've done branding, I've done product, I've done pretty much everything that you can imagine. And in times like these, it's where I can easily jump to Salesforce. And I can then jump into all the paid acquisition tools, and I am equally effective. It's simply because I had the opportunity to become a T-shaped person where I have a speciality, but I am also very dangerous in many other areas,” Lorena said.
A mix of experience can also include having worked in different business locations and cultures, in addition to the mix of job titles. When asked if having a global background and mindset helps in RevOps, Lorena said, “Absolutely, because I've had the fortune of working internationally and not only working but also experiencing different cultures and different skill sets and different minorities in many, many ways. I am a minority, [often] I've been the only one I know [or] the first one [at a company]. That has allowed me to almost be like a Global Citizen and that allows me to have a bigger library of ideas and have ways to dare, to challenge [the status quo]. And that's what revenue operations is doing, right? …I think having a global mindset just allows you to be more tolerant, more patient, and more forgiving, not only with others but with yourself. I think having a global mindset has allowed me to see that life is full of opportunities. If it is not right now, it's probably gonna be next month, or next year, or in the next five years. And I think revenue operations has a lot to do with that. If you don't successfully find your [desired role or person to fill a role], in two years, that might change. And you might find the exact individual that you need for the size of your organization and your industry. So I think that's how they tie together.”
Jonathan Fianu also talked about how having a global mindset helped in RevOps, since he has worked for and with companies in many parts of the world. “It allows for a greater degree of empathy and understanding, especially in this globalized market and globalized world, to different people and cultures. Having worked in different situations, seen it from different angles, is hugely valuable when dealing with different teams that are now spread over the world where you have increasing [numbers of people who] work from home and in work from anywhere situations. It gives [you] a robustness and an edge to deal with people, because ultimately, you're melding people's systems and insight all together. And people are the main part of that, so if you can communicate your vision and communicate what you like to do, take them on the journey with you, then you can be successful. Having a global background that really supports that,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan also discussed the benefits of having a different viewpoint than a current boss. “He has other concerns and perspectives. For example, I think he'll put far more emphasis on enablement and creating a sales center of excellence. That's absolutely important, but I see that as a second priority to having the data lens view, that end-to-end visibility. If I don't have the data, I can't perform…there are people who you need to build up the culture and the staff, and I do think it's fundamental in different ways. I think he chose to bring me on and we get on very well because we can have these robust differing exchanges in different views,” Jonathan said.
Gianluca Pucacco continued speaking about the benefits of having a broad range of experience. “I always look at 4 components: 1) Analytics 2) Ops 3) Strategy 4) stakeholder management...all aspects are important for a strong Rev Ops person then depending on the role within RevOps that you play, you will Major or Minor in one of the 4 components,” Gianluca said.
The need for deep experience or broad experience will depend on the role, Richard Dunkel, Global Head of Field Enablement at Celonis, said. “We have roles on our team where having in-field experience in that role is critical. We have other roles that are more design and operational in nature but still need to have a background specifically in revenue operations, curriculum design, or sales enablement. [And all of our] people must have the ability to identify areas of opportunity and take action,” Richard said.
Julia Herman agrees that the needed experience depends on the role, though she wants background diversity in the team she’s hiring: some people from sales, some from marketing, and some from other roles.
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2, had a good answer about how the skills or background depends on the role, because the leader doesn’t have to be technical, and some technical people may not want to be leaders. She sees RevOps teams working together like engineering and product teams do, ideally, depending on the size of the company.
Related to the difference in required skills for leaders vs. individual contributors, the leader's skills usually were more generalist skills or backgrounds since they lead a variety of activities, while the individual contributors often skewed more towards specialists with deeper knowledge in one area.
Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, agreed that having broad experience gives someone “the ability to fully understand how things are functioning and how those current functions or processes can affect the people,” which is key for success in RevOps. Having broad experience across the RevOps team is necessary, as “people from multiple backgrounds such as sales, marketing or customer success allows for a more diverse thought process and, in turn, a more holistic revenue operations function,” Nicole said.
Since RevOps was born of a mix of many departments, roles, causes, and needs, it makes sense that these roles and teams need a mix of different experiences, backgrounds, and skills.
On the topics of generalists, having that varied background can help you see the big picture of how the business operates and inform the strategy you can provide. Working in a consulting role at some point in your career can help you gain more variety of experiences and problem-solving faster than many internal roles. In consulting you're working across many different companies as well as developing people skills and problem-solving skills when talking to clients every day. Consultants are also used to juggling multiple clients and stakeholders at the same time, which is another needed skill in RevOps with their many cross-functional relationships. These skills and experience are very helpful in many RevOps roles.
Sylvain Guiliani said “I think [empathy’s] why people from consultant backgrounds work really well, because they’re usually a good communicator. Good consultants will come in, take a problem, distill it down to a solution, and communicate that very well. They're very good at managing multiple stakeholders. They know how to ask questions because they don't necessarily have a lot of experience in an industry or problem so they [ask] 'Tell me more about this. Why this, Why this? Why are you doing it like this, Not like this?' And so they're very good at collecting a lot of information, people with a consultant, or analyst type of background. On the developer side, the thing that I felt for me was a great strength was building the construction of things into a system and then into multiple, achievable blocks. Because in engineering, usually you have this massive problem, you have this big infrastructure, how can you break it down into digestible pieces and into the processing machine that just works by itself? One that basically can spit out some data that other services can then use to do their own things? I think that was like a big advantage that I had to be able to do those things, to help you build a system that works by themselves….”
Spencer Parikh said, “I wish I had started my career with a consulting background. I'm talking big, like, PwC, Ernst and Young, because they really have a good understanding as far as talking cross-functionally, building frameworks, prescribing plans for execution, and then measuring it. So that consulting background is super helpful for RevOps, coupled with experience, though. You can't take somebody right out of [the] years at PwC and then put them into the [RevOps], [because] they may not have enough credibility, they may not have enough seniority…But that consulting background would help a lot because RevOps is building process, documentation, and building stories out of the data, like we talked about. So I think that's a big part of it.”
Adam Tesan, CRO of Chargbee, added, “I think the other area where successful people that I've seen in operations come from is more of a consulting background. So maybe they've been with Deloitte or Accenture, and they've got into executing on projects that those types of companies would typically take on, because they have a lot of the similar type of type of skill sets.”
As someone who has worked in solo businesses, small businesses, corporations, and agencies, I agree that working with many different companies at the same time (such as during consulting or agency work) will help broaden your experience quickly.
Though good communication is key for success in most careers, the number of different people and departments that RevOps needs to align and interact with make communication a crucial skill for these roles. They need to be thinking about good communication inside the company and communications outside the company with the customers. Mediation and Influence are some of the specific varieties of communication skills needed.
Sylvain Giuliani also said the RevOps people need to be very good communicators and good mediators because RevOps people “are that glue function between different leaders in the organization.”
Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, Operations at HubSpot, said that communication is an important skill since alignment is so important in RevOps. “Some of that obsession with staying aligned comes through in how you communicate, what kind of meetings you have, what kind of channels you use for that communication, how often you're doing those things. And I think that it's really easy to put together a communication plan for a group, it's even harder to make one where everybody is getting the right message at the right time in the right way. And sometimes that means one [plan] for the whole group. Sometimes that means several [plans] for several different types of people in the group. That's where things like the DARCI project management model, where some people are consulted versus informed, can be really helpful. But I think that the skill of written, verbal, and just stakeholder communication is a big one,” Maggie said.
Though technical skills were not many experts' first answer, they were usually mentioned as more of an afterthought or given, or with a caveat of combining these skills with people skills. Another common discussion was the need for technical skills for non-manager jobs, or technical skills for more specialized jobs at larger companies that have larger, more specialized RevOps teams, where the team isn’t one RevOps person doing multiple roles.
Nicole Smith said, “I think having a technical background is beneficial, but I also think some of the key skills that can really elevate someone in revenue operations are attention to detail and empathy. The ability to fully understand how things are functioning and how those current functions or processes can affect the people using them is really key.”
Julia Herman said one of the backgrounds to include on a RevOps team could include something technical, similar to Salesforce admin support.
Sylvain Guiliani said, “I'm actually very anti-tool in general in ops people. [Instead of deciding on the tool first,] No, we're going to identify the problems we have matched up to the description for the job [to be done]… what is the problem? And what's the tool to solve that problem, or to implement the process that solves that problem? Different situation, different tools.”
Leore Spira talked about how a tech person can work in Revenue Operations. "I think you have to come from a background that is related to business in some sort of way. You cannot be, for example, a tech guy or girl [only, and then go into] revenue operations. Because when you code all day, you have your degree in computer science, you can be the smartest, [but then] you have to learn business…If you don't understand business, what you will do is you'll create a process or strategy that is super efficient [but it's] a strategy that will suit maybe one department but could not work with the other departments. You wouldn't understand the relationship, the kind of relationship, and the communication that should be with every department," Leore said.
Crissy Saunders talked about the difference in technical skill or background needs for managers vs. non-managers. “I don't think that means that those people can't build out a career if they're only technical. I just think that you don't need to know how to code to be a good head of revenue operations. Because there's a lot of different thinking that goes behind it, knowing what needs to be done, and knowing enough of the tech, having enough of those technical skills to know what needs to be done. Knowing what processes fail, what projects should be prioritized… working cross-functionally to work with different departments. It can be a bit hard or a bit lost for people who really do love just staying in the systems and setting up processes and coding and stuff like that,” Crissy said.
Crissy continued, "There's a difference between those roles and the people that make up them, but I think at least having some background in operations or engineering is the best…management or directors are the more strategic people on the RevOps team, setting what the roadmap is going to be, scoping out projects, working cross-functionally with everyone on the teams, doing training, all that, and those people are working separately than the people who are executing the technical work. And I think that can be the same person in some cases, in some organizations, especially small startups that hold one-person roles. They do the job, they have the soft skills to do all the other things. But if you get into larger organizations, that's where I think there'll be people doing the more technical roles and then people who are more on the creative side who are just defining what needs to be done and how it should be done.”
For a conclusion to this section of the individual success chapter, we’ll return to Rosalyn Santa Elena’s answer about the background of RevOps people. "Like anything else, it's a journey. And I think we will continue to see more, rather than less, of this in revenue operations, the terminology and the function. And more people are gravitating into the space, whether they're coming from a sales background, marketing background, or even from a finance background or other areas...what I'd be really interested to see, which is a question that we get asked all the time, is what's the next step for a RevOps leader? It will be interesting to see over the next five or six years or so, if we start to see more revenue operations leaders progressing into a CRO role, or a CEO role, or maybe RevOps starts to report directly into the CEO… I think a lot of that has to do with what we do as practitioners in terms of how we elevate this function. Going back to making sure that we’re helping elevate it to be more strategic and more value-driven and have more of a bigger impact. I think we can help mold and shape where this role goes,” Rosalyn said.
Other questions that will be answered in this department success chapter (and in blogs) will include:
Related questions I answered in interviews, after collecting this research:
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