RevOps Co-op's RevOpsAF conference was recently held in San Diego, as the first RevOps Conference created by RevOps Professionals for the RevOps Community. I wrote about the first few sessions I attended in part 1 and part 2 of this series. Today's final post continues with additional Day 1 and Day 2 sessions I attended. I was teaching a bootcamp the morning of Day 2 so I didn't attend as many sessions as Day 1. There were also a lot of great sessions running at the same time throughout the conference -- it was hard to decide which ones to attend!
Sessions in this post:
Jeff Ignacio, VP of GTM Ops at Regrow Ag; Camela Thompson, RevOps Veteran and Head of Marketing at RevOps Co-op; and Lorena Morales, Director of Global Digital Marketing Revenue Operations at JLL discussed why and how to build and support a diverse team.
Look at these terrible diversity statistics for the tech industry. White males are overrepresented. We need to do better.
More than 50% of women leave tech within the first 5 years. We need to be better at retaining diversity as well as hiring.
Lorena talked about personally having "all the badges," crossing every diversity box on forms except veterans. "As humans, we all have different layers. The more layers you have, the harder these charts hit the soul."
Lorena also said she learned a new term at the global company she's at now at, 'diversity washing,' seen at publicly traded companies. Forbes describes this as "when businesses hire members of minority groups in roles that have no real function beyond building fake trust in communities to make more money."
Jeff talked about how the closer we can get in our companies to representing the general population, the better. The changes have to be systemic, such as how Google introduced coding classes for elementary school girls and minorities. When hiring, we should be looking for the right strengths, profiles, and diverse backgrounds beyond work.
Diversity is more than just a "good thing to do" or the right thing to do.
Diverse teams perform better:
Jeff said that he looks for complementary skill sets among the team, people who are approaching problems and solutions with different views.
You can't achieve excellence without diversity. Diversity helps companies with problem-solving, innovation, and human-centered design.
Lorena started her career at American male-dominated companies and was frustrated with being the lone person with an accent or her gender in most rooms, which created insecurity. She now intentionally looks to join a company with more than three accents in a room.
JLL, her current company, is the highest-performing team in her 15-year career. It is not a coincidence, it's the diverse team.
Jeff said execution teams are greater than the sum of their parts. The first hire is often a generalist with a diverse background, and then later specialists are hired. Companies need to go where the puck is going to be on the ice.
Product problems and internal company problems caused by teams that lacked diversity:
Don't create problematic, biased job descriptions. Remove the biased words that will prevent groups of people from applying, such as words skewing towards men or inflexible schedules skewing towards people without kids. There are tools that can find and replace these biased words. Use them!
Startups often hire from their network, which is people similar to them. Or they will label people as 'not a culture fit' if they are not from the same background. Do not make these mistakes.
Lorena talked about how blind screening software exists for job candidates, so why is no one using it? It runs resumes through a program that removes the name, the age, and anything else that creates biases.
If you're using this tool, and hiring for skills, then if the candidate is still a white male, it's likely because they are a good candidate.
Jeff said don't surround yourself with 'yes' people, no 'rock stars,' no one doing more than anyone should do.
Lorena discussed how we also need to maintain those diverse hires, make them feel welcome, and retain them at the company. Consider neurodivergence as well, people who digest information differently than yourself. She does that for her team now to be inclusive.
Camela talked about consistently representing the underrepresented, as a diverse person in leadership.
Your company may have microcultures, like EMEA sales which may be the Wild West. Make them still feel included in conversations.
In the interview process, think about who is doing the hiring. You need diverse interviewers. Challenge the company culture to take a chance on candidates, and if they take a chance on a stretch hire, give the new hire the time and support needed for the stretch role.
Jeff talked about making sure the interview process is thoughtful since it is often an exhausting, flawed process.
Create profiles of experiences and of the role, choose a set of different people for interviewers, and create standard questions such as asking what were choices and trade-offs they've had to do. If people seem over-prepared, dig in and ask more questions to sniff out the real answers about their experience.
Lorena saw a Latina C-level woman at an event where she first thought, 'Hey, I can do that, it feels possible.'
Jeff said your life and career are a fingerprint, and no one else has it. Role models are valuable.
Create a personal board of advisors, He and Darrell Alfonso talk every week, balancing and learning from Darrell's marketing ops background to Jeff's sales ops background.
These are all shortcuts so you don't have to go through 20 years of pain like them.
Rebecca Silverstein, Director of RevOps at BrightFlag, provided tips and tactics for resourcing your most valuable asset - time - as your task list keeps growing, your inbox is filling up by the minute, and you've just been tagged into three new projects across the business...
I like that she mentioned a dog slide incentive to keep people interested until the final slide! I included the dog slide at the end of this summary 😀!
She's been at her company since 2020 and her first road map said she would have a team of 4+ by 2024. She is still a RevOps team of one among a go-to-market organization of 50 people, BUT they just hired a RevOps manager who starts soon!
Separate yourself from the function by referring to yourself as the "RevOps team," even if you are just one person. For example, instead of using your name, say, "RevOps delivers this."
To help reinforce this concept, create an email alias like revopsrequests@company.com to centralize requests. That also sets your team up in the future to receive requests in one central location instead of individual name emails, and gets people in other departments thinking about you having a team.
Document answers to common questions and direct people there. Don't answer the same question more than twice. Help people develop muscle memory to help themselves.
Set the tone and respect your time so others will, too. Remind people of strategic projects and the time you're spending on them.
Join communities and network with peers to learn outside of your company.
And remember: there is no such thing as a RevOps emergency. Don't panic!
I can't resist a puppy photo!
Kevin Knieriem, President of Strategic GTM at Clari, has been with the company for five years and shared with the audience how he developed the process for running revenue. At Clari, he's worked with many growing companies (such as customers) and learned from them, through the past 12-24 tough months especially.
RevOps is America's number one fastest-growing job, according to CNBC. It is now going outside of tech into other industries and business models.
What is causing this expansion?
The expectations of investors and boards.
The motto used to be 'growth at all costs,' and now it's about efficiency, which needs the customer journey to be tied together. Which means RevOps is needed more than ever!
Ultimately, the question is about whether we will meet, beat, or miss on the revenue number.
The biggest problem in plain sight is revenue leak.
All areas of earned revenue are leaking out of the funnel across the customer journey.
Employees rely on outdated, disconnected tools, which leads to revenue leaks.
The impact of the leak is $2 trillion in economic value destroyed and 15% of average top-line revenue lost.
Do a revenue leak assessment.
Revenue Cadences: the operating system across your company that drives consistent execution of your revenue strategy.
Revenue cadence is where he has spent a lot of time, running revenue as a process instead of as an art.
He started documenting meetings and found there was no consistent cadence to the forecast calls, pipeline calls, etc. They were all different between each manager and different times and different amounts of time between calls.
So first look at all your meetings by segment or industry, and then look at all revenue activities.
Think in quarters.
What you do in week one of the quarter is going to be different than other weeks.
You're operating next quarter and the current quarter, with different KPIs at different weeks.
So write down all your meetings, then assess if you are running them consistently. If they are run differently, you get different results all the time. If you can run them consistently, you can get consistent, predictable results.
Kevin has a revenue cadence playbook here.
How do you know if the process and cadence are being followed?
He has a different dashboard for each week, which reports to know if the process is being followed, and he uses AI meeting recordings to tell if the process is being followed.
Revenue leaders have two jobs:
AI can impact both of these, but AI is only as good as the data you're putting into it or pointing it at. Using a generic algorithm still leads to revenue leaks. You need to use AI that is built for revenue, including types of predictive AI, descriptive AI, and generative AI.
Create an AI Council in your revenue organization to decide when and how to use AI.
He does not see a lot of revenue teams doing this; mostly, he sees business transformation teams owning it, and he wants it to be in the revenue teams.
Read more about the sessions I attended at RevOpsAF: part one and part two!