Sales Assembly’s RevOps Roundup is a monthly collection of tips, trends, and tactics to help you navigate the wild west of Revenue & Sales Operations – featuring yours truly, Sheriff Brad Rosen, Head of Revenue Operations here at Sales Assembly.Â
Let’s get into it. Yippee Ki Kay!
In March of 2020, the world changed. Along with the change in health and welfare, came a massive shift in technology and the way we all do business. The work from home shift created a rift between those companies that had a strong operational team in place and those that did not.Â
When Covid hit, did your organization have the tools in place to seamlessly transition to working remotely? If not, was your ops team able to quickly evaluate new tools that would keep your organization productive during a pandemic (Zoom, Gong, Slack, SFDC approvals that used to happen in person)?
Rev Ops is at the forefront of any organization and how they think about flexibility and scalability. The tools and processes we create allow organizations to create certainty in an uncertain world. We know all the newest technologies and the latest SaaS acronyms and nomenclature 📖
Now more than ever, we are seeing the value of having one team focus on organizational efficiencies. Guess who is going to be needed again when we go back into the office or switch to a hybrid working environment? You guessed it, RevOps!
Your MPOC moved companies…again
Are you selling to the VP of Sales? They change jobs on average every 18 months. Selling to someone else in the org? The average tenure at a tech company across the board is 3 years ✌ Â
Your Main Point Of Contact just left their role. Were you aware? If not, you may be behind the proverbial eightball in your sales/renewal cycle.   Â
That’s where tools like People.ai, Apollo, and UserGems come in! Not only can these tools alert you when a contact has left their role, but they can also share where they are now and append your CRM data. This way your Sales/CS team is aware that they need to find a new contact at the old company and that they need to reach out to the existing contact to build a relationship at their new company.Â
Sales software, so hot right now
Over the past few months, some heavy hitters in the sales tech space have raised some serious dough. What does that mean for you? Likely more features, more functionality, and probably a few more calls from their sales reps 😀
Outreach raised $200M while SalesLoft brought in $100M – that’s a lot of cash betting that you and your team are going to ramp up your Sales Engagement efforts.
Gong nabbed a ¼ of a billion ($250M)! making it a multicorn? If you aren’t already using software for Revenue Intelligence, you may be in the Late Majority.
Spiff and CaptivateIQ both brought in $46M as they try to build the best way to automate and track your commissions – music to every Rev Ops leader’s ears!
Below are a few insights from leading RevOps pros throughout our awesome community:
Michael Harness, Vice President – Head of Sales, Americas, G2
Q: As a sales leader, what do you look for most in a Rev Ops business partner?
A: The first thing to establish between a Revenue Leader and a RevOps Leader is alignment – the two have to see eye to eye on what outcomes the two are driving towards together for the business. Common goals and objectives for the company and the GTM team will forge a tighter relationship here. Â
The second is trust – can I lean on a RevOps Leader to be the objective source of truth on things like ROE, planning, quotas, etc? Can the RevOps Leader be the objective voice that helps a Revenue Leader make decisions and determine direction relative to these important topics? Can the RevOps leader trust that the Revenue Leader can accept an objective ruling from RevOps on topics where a revenue leader could be tied to subjectively (like quota) and respect those opinions/decisions? Â
The third is agility and reaction time – RevOps Leaders get a TON thrown at them from every angle. Is that fair? Probably not. But, it’s part of the job as we know it today. From a Revenue Leader’s perspective, the speed, agility, and reaction time of my RevOps partner is incredibly important. On that note, it’s also important for a RevOps Leader to be able to voice their priorities to a Revenue Leader… in other words, they need the ability and the relationship with a Revenue Leader to say “no” or de-prioritize certain things. Despite what some Revenue Leaders think, RevOps personnel are not vampires – they need sleep at night.
Final thought – it’s also super important that the relationship between Revenue Leaders and RevOps Leaders is a partnership, not a dictatorship. Neither role rules or governs the other, but rather they work together. It’s important that both parties involved have an equal voice, influence, and decision-making ability for the relationship to truly work well. Â
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David Kohn, Senior Manager, Sales Operations, Gong
Q: What is the most challenging and rewarding part of being a Rev Ops professional?
A: The most challenging part of Rev Ops is annual planning, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Deciding on a plan is a cross-functional effort involving capacity plans, modeling, determining strategic bets, and developing hiring plans. All of these items are made easier by analyzing historical data in order to give guidance but when the historical data is muddled with the impacts of COVID-19 on your business it is hard to use that data to predict future periods. Depending on your customer base there were also macroeconomic unknowns going into 2021 with things like stimulus packages, state/federal reopening plans, etc. An already challenging exercise was especially difficult going into 2021.
The most rewarding aspect of Rev Ops is building visibility into the business for sales leaders and executives. Data and dashboards are great but truly understanding the context of that data to drive insights that will move the business to do something different is extremely gratifying. Whether the cadence is a monthly/quarterly business review, weekly pipeline councils, or ad hoc analysis, motivating the team to act in a way to improve the outcomes of the business based on an insight you found never gets old.
Did you know that…
Publicly traded companies with Revenue Operations groups saw 71% higher stock performance than those that don’t.
And that…Â
Companies with aligned revenue support grew 19% faster and were 15% more profitable.
Hence why we are seeing such large growth in this area…Â
Over the past 2 years, centralized revenue operations have gone from 15% to 40%, while centers of expertise or excellence have grown from 18% to 37%.Â
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