Since there currently is very little consistency in RevOps roles, comparing roles at one company to another company, there is a wide variety of potential projects and goals that any RevOps professional may be working on at the moment. The research question "In your RevOps role, what do you spend the most time doing?" aimed to find similarities in the amount of time spent in certain categories of work, to find some common ground, and to explore how these professionals divide up their time and prioritize. It also demonstrates how many different responsibilities RevOps covers, reiterating the previous research question about the broad range of department responsibilities.
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? (this blog)
- What RevOps project are you working on right now that excites you?
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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.
In your RevOps role, what do you spend the most time doing?
Since the responsibilities of RevOps are so broad, there may be different focuses at different times of the year or during different years. One example may be that once a solid tech and data foundation is in place, you may move on to other types of work and then revisit those topics for maintenance and improvement projects. There will be additional discussion about how where you spend most of the time depends on the maturity (how long and how well it’s been run) of RevOps at the company.
As with many types of roles, individual contributor roles may divide their time in a different way than people managers and leadership. And in all roles, where you spend most of your time contributes to your individual success by making sure you’re spending time on the right things to achieve your career goals.
Out of the 35 people interviewed, some of the responses were:
- Salesforce (and other tools/tech stack) improvement and integrations: 13 people
- Data analytics or analysis, forecasting: 10 people
- Air traffic control between marketing, sales, and customer teams (alignment, collecting and sharing information, guiding people to the right solution, communicating to leadership): 8 people
- Process audit/development/improvement: 7 people
- Data consistency and availability (full-funnel end-to-end visibility): 7 people
- Identifying stories/challenges/problems/gaps that matter across all teams: 5 people
- Making sure customers are getting a good time-to-value and experience in the product: 4 people
- Managing and coaching their team: 3 people
- Improving productivity of customer-facing teams: 3 people
- Revenue strategy/planning/road mapping: 3 people
- Documentation: 2 people
- Problem-solving: 2 people
- Handoff between sales and customer success: 1 person
- Sales process: 1 person
- Aligning sales and service for renewals: 1 person
- Account-based marketing: 1 person
- Budgeting: 1 person
- Enablement: 1 person
- Creating the team structure and roles: 1 person
- Talking to prospects and customers, understanding customer needs: 1 person
Because RevOps roles can be so wide and encompassing, many experts mentioned more than one area of work as where they are spending the most time. For example, Mallory Lee, Senior Director of Operations at Terminus, said, “I spend most of my time forecasting business performance, communicating to our executive leadership team, evaluating technology, and prioritizing projects across our different teams and departments.”
Let’s take a closer look at some of the common categories of answers about what RevOps professionals spend the most time doing in their jobs.
Tech stack improvements and integrations
Despite one of the overall themes of this research being about not getting stuck in the tactical and tools side of RevOps, tech stack (software) improvements were the #1 shared answer about what these RevOps experts spend the most time doing. Likely, it is the #1 request or the loudest request they hear from their leadership or the teams these professionals work with, from people who don’t know that tool management should not be RevOps' #1 priority.
It is also important to note that some of the experts’ answers related to tech were not always about the time spent hands-on fixing things inside the tools. As you’ll see, some of the answers overlap more strategic topics such as roadmapping and pricing.
Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, spends the most time on budgeting at the moment since she just started in her role. The number two thing she spends time on, behind people management, “is obviously, Salesforce. So everything related to Salesforce: Salesforce projects, Salesforce support. For the most part, individual contributor wise, it's the budgeting, but then as a team, you're spending the most time in Salesforce,” Julia said.
Systems and tool support and data are also the categories of work where Jenna Hanington, VP of Revenue Operations at Experity, spends the bulk of her time. “Our marketing, sales, and customer success organizations depend on my team for administration and roadmap of their tools and data. This may involve gathering business requirements for Salesforce, evaluating/integrating/onboarding a new tool, pulling reports, building scalable reporting outputs, and more. I also spend a good amount of time as a liaison with our Board of Directors, working through strategic projects like revamping our pricing,” Jenna said.
Matt Volm, CEO and Co-Founder at Funnel IQ and Co-Founder of the RevOps Co-op community, said the area where he spends the most time is “definitely technical systems work and analysis. [I’m] always trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s changed over time within our funnel.”
On the flip side of the conversation, Jerry Bonura, Senior Principal (RevOps recruiter) at TwentyPine, tells us about the problems caused when software work is where RevOps roles spend most of their time. “The main reason that a lot of people want to leave their companies is because a lot of them are stuck doing so much Salesforce work. Companies hire really senior sales ops and RevOps leaders…like a director of sales ops, director of RevOps, then the CRO and VP of Sales [say] I need a really strategic person, really analytical numbers-driven, data-driven [person], I want that strategic right hand. And then they hire this person [who says] ‘Wow, your Salesforce instance or HubSpot data is such an absolute [mess]. I can't even calculate pipeline velocity for you because there's no good data here. All the deals going back for years are totally messed up. I can't even pull insights out of the data to help you with strategic decision-making because it's such a mess.’ That's a common occurrence…So, a lot of people are spending too much time fixing Salesforce, and [they] hate it, and it holds them back. People don't want to spend 80% of their time doing Salesforce,” Jerry said.
Your individual success is affected by what you spend the most time doing in your job. Depending on the maturity of RevOps at your organization, you or members of your RevOps team may be spending a lot of time dealing with software issues. Hopefully, after the foundation is built (or re-built), this time can be spent on more visibly impactful work.
Another lesson here is to be clear and realistic when hiring for RevOps about how much of a hands-on-software role it is. Even if the other leaders say they want a strategic right-hand person in RevOps, when you're interviewing, ask good questions and do some digging to find out if the role will need to create the software setup foundation before you are able to complete any larger strategic work or find out if that work has been completed already.
Data analysis
Similar to tech stack work, the amount of data analysis work can vary depending on the maturity of RevOps, how long and how well RevOps has existed at the company where you work. Is the right data already being collected to gain the insights you need? Are there data maintenance and improvement processes already in place? These are some of the questions to ask to determine how much time could be spent on the data analysis part of a role at that time.
Data is where Gianluca Puccaco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, is spending the most time. “I fundamentally believe it all starts from solid and accurate data. Analytics is a table stake, but until you have that foundational work in a great place, there is no point to keep on adding more work to the RevOps function. On the flip side, once you have the data component fixed, then the sky is the limit for RevOps,” Gianluca said.
Sylvain Giuliani, Head of Growth at Census, said data, consistency, and availability are the area of work that his ops function is focusing on. “As a revenue function [we’re asking] Where's the data coming from? Can we trust it? Where is it going? And how is it being used? And does everybody have access to the same data? That was, for us, the biggest pain point…we have more than half a million users. So data was very important for us to understand what are they doing. How do we segment them, how we go after them, when are we marketing them, things like that…” Sylvain said.
Sylvain continued, “[Data is] the main area where we spend our time because once we had confidence in our data, it was very easy to start automating those things because when you automate [something like] sending five emails a week, that doesn't really matter if you get it wrong, you can overload trust in your data because a mistake doesn't cost too much. [Now] If we mis-segment someone or send emails to the wrong people…[we send] a hundred thousand emails really quickly to the wrong people. So you have to have data consistency across the tools. That was a very high priority.”
Sylvain also spoke about how doing this data work first and getting trust in the data has helped with team alignment. “Any commercial leader will have that sales team who said they had been given a hundred leads, and marketing says, ‘Hey, we gave you 150 leads,’ who do you trust? Who was right? [If] both tools say different numbers, how can you find out? For me, data consistency and availability to those teams was the most important thing to have everybody on the same page and create that alignment across the teams,” Sylvain said. This point refers back to the important skill of alignment needed for department success, which could rely on individual people’s work in data first.
Sylvain also explained that data availability means the data not only exists but the teams are able to use it. “A perfect example of that was we had a BI (business intelligence) tool… the marketing team was like, ‘Hey, that's great that we can graph the segment of user who is using our product more, because we can track how many activities they're doing. And it would be nice if we had that data in Marketo so we can use those milestones to trigger campaigns like, you've been using feature A but not feature B, let's [trigger campaigns off that and let sales know].’ So the data existed [in the BI tool], but it couldn't be operationalized basically,” Sylvain said. This is another more strategic aspect related to RevOps data problem-solving work.
Gaining alignment by spending time focusing on data is what Karen Steele, Founder and Advisor at Alloy, also spoke about. ”I think that the big focus, as I've been part of RevOps and go to market teams, is always looking at and making sure we've got the right data coming in from all these various systems, and then making sure that we understand what the leading indicators and KPIs are, and we're all on the same page measuring those,” Karen said.
Though the amount of time you spend on data-related work may depend on the current state of data at your company, it is a foundational piece of RevOps that will likely be a part of most RevOps roles, whether using the data for more leadership topics such as alignment, or doing more hands-on individual contributor work in the reporting, setup, integrations, or maintenance of the data.
Alignment, Communication, Strategy
The third most common work category that experts were spending the most time in was related to communication, alignment, and strategy. Talking to customers was also grouped into this category of work, as it informs strategy and communication to internal leadership about RevOps’ focus on the customer. Some of these answers included talking about acting as air traffic control between marketing, sales, and customer teams. Other people discussed collecting and sharing information, guiding people to the right solution, and communicating with leadership. This topic has been discussed in previous chapters as a key part of many types of success, so it makes sense to see people spending most of their time on this work.
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, talked about spending time listening to ops people internally and externally to the company, with the goal of understanding and alignment. “We’re launching our new RevOps organization in the New Year, and right now, I spend most of my time simply listening and thinking about alignment. One of the key issues limiting the impact of ops teams right now is that they’re reactive and underwater — and they don’t have time to build systems and processes that preemptively address inefficiencies. Getting aligned as a new team and how we execute on that alignment is really step one and a crucial milestone in the RevOps journey. So by creating space to listen, I hope to get a deep understanding of how we can get aligned by getting to the root of the issues and turn our team from reactive to proactive,” Alison said.
The word and act of ‘understanding’ was also discussed by Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, where the majority of his time was spent. “I look at RevOps as the air traffic controller between all three of these groups. And what I do on a daily basis is make sure that there are no collisions. So, is marketing giving us the right stuff in order for our salespeople to take and drive the leads? Is sales doing enough, that's making sure that the leads we're getting are being driven correctly? And then are those deals, when they're closed, [are they] going to customer success like they need to? That's all I'm doing every day, and obviously, there's a whole team that does this. But it's understanding that day, today, what's going on between all three of these groups,” Virinchi said.
Michael Ewing, Senior Team Manager of Renewal Management EMEA at HubSpot, said that in the renewal management function, “we spend a lot of time working internally with sales and services. We will tag our customer success team pretty early, when the renewal deal is created, to understand the history of the account, any flags we should be aware of, and any risks. And we'll also be surfacing opportunities for our sales team. So we actually work a lot internally with both teams and a lot of behind the scenes work, and preparing for either reaching out to customers or reacting when they come to us.” Proactive communication can lead to many types of success, especially when bridging different departments and connecting internal teams with customer information.
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, was relatively new to the company at the time of her interview, though she was a two-time user of the Clari software. “With that customer lens and the fact that we're selling a product to sales leaders, really my role is one of the target personas [of our product] because we sell to leaders. So it's been interesting for me that I actually spend a lot more time in my current role than I did in prior roles actually talking to prospects and talking to customers. So I spent a lot more time talking to other ops leaders as well as heads of sales and CROs, not as much about the product per se, or capabilities or what we do, but more about overall [strategy]. How to structure your RevOps function, why do you need it, or do I even need it, and how best to structure that. So I actually do find that I'm probably spending the most time around understanding customer needs and prospect needs, and then understanding, talking through the best way for them to set up their processes,” Rosalyn said.
Understanding and talking to ops personas is something Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager of Operations at HubSpot, talked about. “I'm spending the most time learning about the calendars of the person who does this role… that's what I think is most interesting because there's a lot of different ways you can make up a RevOps role. It might be very much focused on sales and territory planning and forecasting and sales comp, or there are some things that very truly fall under departments still… one of the things I'm working on right now is trying to find the stories that matter to everybody. And that really means the challenges that this person faces that can be talked about universally, think one of those things in one of those stories is about the work that you build up in silos,” Maggie said.
Maggie gave an example of one of these universal challenges that can be solved using an operations mindset. “From an operations perspective, there’s a lot of work that you build up in the silo if you're not careful, and if you're not being strategic, all of a sudden, years go by, and you've got processes, technology, and people and in this melting pot of all this work that you've built up. And then you get to this place where all this work that you've done,[where the] intentions were so good, there are people to please and there were ideas to be had... All this work that you do is now causing problems with other people because they're either trying to do the same thing or there is friction there. And so I'm trying to learn as much as I can from other people about what those stories are so that we can figure out …what can we do to solve some of that pain,” Maggie said.
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said his company is a Series B startup with leadership that has been promoted from the frontline ranks, which can come with additional alignment challenges. In addition to spending time on the people management of his team, “I happen to be one of the more experienced go-to-market professionals in the company. So I'm actually spending a lot more time with alignment and developing goals and projects that allow us to achieve those goals,” Jeff said.
Communication, especially the sometimes-overlooked intake part of communication, is something Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, also talked about spending a lot of time on in her role. “I think I spend most of my time taking in information, sharing information, and driving towards outcomes. So that probably looks like on a calendar, a lot of meetings, but it's a lot of intake on what are the needs of the reps, what are the needs of our customers, what are the needs happening in product, marketing, success, support, security, and deals desk. And then how do we get that all wrapped up into one of the pieces of the pie in the sales ops pie or for enablement? That's really where I spend the majority of my time, on a little more of a macro view on the larger projects that tie together multiple go-to-market teams, and to make sure again that reps have what they need or what we need to get to reps and customers, or what we need to push out based on where we're at in our growth,” Hilary said.
Leore Spira, Head of Revenue Operations of Syte, spends the most time right now in “Back-to-back meetings… most of our time is spent on weeklies, with usually the VPs, to together think, plan, and build. Some [meetings] build the processes or understand the strategy and then develop process… implementing it, but also documenting it and create some guidelines… my manager here and also previously was always telling me that sometimes you need to stop and understand that people don't think and understand Salesforce, and the processes, and the rules of engagement, and the methodology, so you have to simplify everything in a way that they will understand you [how] you want them to understand you. So I'm spending a lot of time trying to translate what I think and how I see the process or the strategy and actually give it in not just words, but also explain it [like the] ‘something for dummies’ [series way]...every company that I joined tried to create some guidelines for dummies to each department. So they would work according to the process and then provide me the data that I need. So I could analyze it in a way that I can deliver insights, numbers, and other information to management, the board members, or any other department that wants to know how they're doing. I find myself doing it a lot at every company that I joined.”
Communication, alignment, strategy, and related topics are important to spend time on to achieve individual success in a RevOps role. The amount of time will depend on the roles itself (such as leadership may spend more time here vs. individual contributor), the length of time in your role (leadership may be spending more time here at the start to understand the company, individual contributors may spend time here later after getting some technical or data work in place first), how long and how well RevOps has been established at the company, and other factors.
Process-related work
This category combines some of the expert answers related to process audits, process development, process improvement, identifying stories/challenges/problems/gaps that matter across all teams, improving productivity, and then the specific processes that were mentioned. Process work can combine and overlap all the previous topics related to tech, data, and communication.
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, said though it changes every day, “in my ideal planning state for my week or for my month, most of my days are spent thinking and executing on ABM (account-based marketing), which is a program that we started back in 2018 that directly ties with revenue operations and other GTM (go-to-market) strategies simply because it focuses a lot on the customer. And probably the other 40% of my day is spent with my CRO and, most recently, with our first full RevOps hire, a brilliant mind, about how to effectively fix things either in our processes or directly into the tools. This has been fantastic because when I started, we were around 16 people, today we are around 54, so the growth has been very impressive, especially for a consultancy. And the more you grow, the more problems you encounter with your people and process.”
Problems were a topic that Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, also is spending the most time on. “Hands down, problem-solving. We're in processes, we're in internal tools, much more than other roles…we're in that data all the time, and so we see all these really high-level complicated processes. So a big part of that is really just talking to people about what's hard, what isn't working, and making a method to the madness,” Melanie said. In this answer, you can see how communication is a big part of process problem-solving and improvement.
Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, combined a few of the categories as well as people management responsibilities when discussing where she spent the most time. Nicole said, “The majority of my time is spent reviewing current processes and metrics, marrying technology with the process, and coaching and mentoring other RevOps professionals.”
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, talked about process work as spending time on ‘the new marketing assembly lines,’ which is “the process of figuring out, and documenting, all of the various tech that we had and that we're using for project management globally. And coming up with an evaluation process and coming up with a council to evaluate different types, document our processes, and now work to select a vendor [then] it's the process of actually implementing that. So that's my biggest focus…I still dabble in a lot in data hygiene projects and things like more strategic planning meetings, QBRs (quarterly business reviews), kickoffs in both of those as well.” Lauren’s answer shows how the tech stack work overlaps with process work.
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, had a very cross-functional role in the full funnel customer lifecycle and said most of her time is spent on the handoff process between sales and success, “really ensuring that customers are getting the fastest time of value as they navigate the product so with the lens towards product analytics, customer satisfaction, and ensuring that we're really delivering the fastest time to value. So that's where I spend most of my time. I work with a handful of data science analysts, sales operations analysts, and some success and implementation specialists, looking at how we can deliver value in the most meaningful way.”
Spending the most time doing process-related work can lead to individual success if you’re choosing the right processes to work on at the right time and communicating well to gather and share the necessary information. Which processes to work on at which time will depend on many factors, such as the business goals, roadmap, department maturity, time in roles, and more.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many different areas of work where a RevOps professional could be spending their time at any given moment. Those priorities may change quickly, and a key part of individual success in RevOps is the ability to prioritize, justify, and carve out the time to focus the most time in the right areas of this broad category of work, for that company at that point in time. Being able to complete that impactful work, by spending the most of their time on it, should help contribute to career success.
Other questions that will be answered in this individual success chapter (and in blogs) will include:
- What training or background makes someone successful in RevOps?
- What was your path into RevOps?
- What RevOps project are you working on right now that excites you?
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