GTM Partners Leaders Summit: RevOps and Revenue Intelligence

Go Where the Experts Are

If you want to watch the best baseball players in the world, you go to a Major League Baseball game.  If you want to learn all there is to know about rockets and space, you pay a visit to a NASA facility.  If you want to eat the best barbecue of your life, you go to the American Royal World Series of Barbecue in Kansas City.

The point is, when you want to see and learn from the best, you go to where the experts are.  For RevOps fanatics, that gathering occurred on March 30th, via a webinar hosted by GTM Partners on RevOps and revenue intelligence.

Couldn't make it?  Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Here are some highlights from the sessions on the current state of the RevOps industry and where it’s headed in the future. 

State of RevOps-Category Leaders Panel Discussion

Moderated by:  

• Lindsay Cordell of  GTM Partners

Featuring:  

• Brendan Tolleson of RevPartners
• Udi Ledergor of  Gong
• Lindsey Tishgart of  Mediafly
• Michael Ni of  Openprise

Brendan Tolleson’s Thoughts

• The flywheel is operated by either applying force or reducing friction.  In the past, when the mantra was, “grow at all costs”, the solution was force (adding people) and sales efficiency was not a consideration.  But now that most companies are having to do more with less, it’s all about reducing friction, which can be accomplished through revenue operations (in particular, the weaponization of data). 
• RevOps drives revenue through an organization in three ways:  volume, conversion, and time.  RevOps professionals ("strategic tacticians”) provide value to an organization because they can speak to where leakage is occurring and to what needs to be prioritized.
• A tool can have a bunch of different uses and advantages to it, but if your team isn't actually using (adopting) it, then it’s worthless.  The hierarchy is adoption, then process, then tools.  

• When it comes to your CRM, it should be a product, not a project.  Here, the users are internal as opposed to external, and the RevOps professional is thinking about how to create feature releases that the sales, marketing, CS, and finance teams are actually going to use.  How they’re using the tool can indicate if technical debt is being created.

Udi Ledergor’s Thoughts

• Five years ago, no one was talking about RevOps; instead, it was SalesOps and Marketing Ops.  But revenue is now a “team sport” with sales, marketing, and CS.  The understanding today is that Ops can’t be siloed if you want a well-oiled revenue machine.  

• As organizations shift and grow, they need to think about correct reporting structures.  There may not be a one-size-fits-all answer, but these types of questions at least need to be asked to continue to improve alignment.  
• Strategic initiatives cannot exist in siloed organizations, they need company-wide adoption.  RevOps, and tools like Gong, can help track these initiatives (e.g. talk tracks) in real-time, as opposed to six months later, to see where adoption may not be taking place.  This allows changes to be made the next day.
• Companies are trying to get back to basics, and, as a result, looking at which systems they can cut out.  This should signal to sales and marketing teams that you really need to demonstrate how your product adds value and can either make money, save money, save time, and/or reduce risk.
• People in MarketingOps see themselves as marketers, not as Ops people.  For those SalesOps and CS Ops, it’s the opposite; they see themselves as Ops people. Neither is wrong, it just depends on career paths and goals.   
• ChatGPT is not capable of solving your business problems with a brand new idea, but it can quickly tell you what other companies have done in similar situations.

Lindsey Tishgart’s Thoughts

• The length of the sales cycle is growing and there is more scrutiny on purchases than in the recent past.  When buyers are overwhelmed, they tend to retreat instead of moving forward. 
• Companies must engage in creating value and clarity for the buyer, and focusing on buyer enablement.  In addition, they also need to look at changing positioning, doubling down in certain areas while shifting away from others.
• In RevOps, the holistic mindset of the marketing perspective is valuable because every lead, opportunity, and account are not the same.  When you’re selling to multiple personas and have different use cases, having the marketing lens gives you an advantage in being more proactive with issues in workflows and conversion rates.
• Not all metrics are created equal.  Customer lifetime value and retention rates are key in assessing which types/segments of customers to pursue.
  

• When it comes to AI, marketers are proceeding with caution until it’s clear how it will affect the buyer.  There needs to be a lot of inspection on the back end as it relates to response rates, conversion rates, and account/buyer health. 

Mike Ni’s Thoughts

• We still live in a very siloed world, and RevOps is the key to leveraging data from across the entire customer lifecycle to create alignment and collaboration across different channels.  

• While RevOps is great at breaking down silos, it needs to continue to provide answers to how all these channels should be working together to ensure clean customer data and help our systems work together to create predictability and reliability of data.  Why is this important?  Because you can’t manage what you can’t accurately measure.
• The future is a shift from big data to big Ops, no code solutions, and how operations teams will need to employ mass automation and find tools which aggregate and unify tech stacks.  RevOps professionals are key to figuring out how tech stacks can deliver on a more integrated, collaborative flow across all the different selling teams.
• Figuring out how to leverage data for the operations team, so they can help the whole organization scale in terms of how they leverage data, is key.
• There is currently a rise of centralized Ops where you have verticals by specialization.  

Future of RevOps by Industry Experts

Moderated by:  

• Lindsay Cordell of  GTM Partners

Featuring:

• Brian Kreutz of RevPartners
• Ali (French) Siebel of Groove
• Jonathan Morgan of  AchieveIt
• Mollie Bodensteiner of Deel
• Melissa McCready of  Sendoso

Brian Kreutz’s Thoughts

• For people who are new to a career in RevOps, it’s all about building new things, such as reports and dashboards.  To maximize success, you should focus more on the discovery side (what problems are we solving?  What inputs are we trying to get?)
• The building aspect is the easy part.  The real questions are:   can you get the right discovery to build it correctly and can you actually adopt the process?  If the process is not adopted, it doesn’t matter how good the process is.  In a similar way, if there’s not a process with the tool, it doesn’t matter how many tools you have.  Bottom line:  focus on the adoption of the process of the tool you’re using.

• RevOps should not be thought of as a project with a start and end date, but rather something with a go live date (and a specific process) that goes on forever.
• It’s always a good idea to take a snapshot of the “before” phase to establish a benchmark.  This will be helpful in assessing what success looks like.
• While it might make you feel important to create a dashboard for a CEO, they will not actually be the ones using it.  That’s why getting ground level buy-in from someone like an SDR is huge because they’re the ones who can provide real-time feedback.  

Ali (French) Siebel’s Thoughts

• There are pros and cons to getting input/feedback on tools.  On the one hand, the feedback given can obviously help the company determine which tools are worthwhile investments, but there is an opportunity cost debate as you’re often asking AE’s to take time out of closing deals and winning revenue to learn the tool and assess it.

Jonathan Morgan’s Thoughts

• Encouraging involvement from the get-go when you’re evaluating new tools is helpful as it can increase adoption.  
• The growth of RevOps has been a great thing, but at the same time it has created a situation where some companies undertake it and have no real idea of what they’re doing, they’re just doing RevOps “because they’re supposed to”.  It is within these companies that you will often see job descriptions for things such as SalesOps just rebranded as “RevOps” in an effort to recruit better talent. 

• Many people think that RevOps is just the alignment of go-to-market teams and being efficient with processes.  While those two things certainly make up a part of Revops, if you’re not directly thinking about the customer, then you’re not really doing everything that RevOps should be.
• The goal for companies should be to think about the customer from the beginning and implement RevOps at an early stage, not later when they just need to fix something.

Mollie Bodensteiner’s Thoughts

• When it comes to tool evaluation and feedback, it’s important to get a variety of opinions (i.e. don’t always go to the same rep).  It’s also important to set expectations around time commitments.    

• RevOps is a new discipline (at least the name is new) and just a few years ago there weren't a ton of resources available when looking for guidance in building things like org charts.  That’s why community has been so important.  It has, in part, helped to define what RevOps actually looks like. 
• The level of maturity, knowledge, and awareness has increased in the RevOps field as the role has become more fleshed out over time thanks to communities like RevRoom.
• Revenue operations is a strategic business mindset that is made in terms of how someone thinks about their organization, and the function and the value they want to provide to their customers through experience.

Melissa McCready’s Thoughts

• Within the last two years, the most impactful changes in RevOps have been the incorporation of customer success and the fact that RevOps has started to evolve as a career path and become a part of the C-suite.  
• Going forward, leadership will be one of the most important skills as there are a lot of new people coming into the fold.

• Moving strategic initiatives ahead and creating storytelling around data will be crucial for future RevOps development.
• If you’re running a tech stack properly, you’re running it like a product.

Some Key Takeaways

• Adoption must be your true north.  You can have highly detailed processes in place and the world’s best tools at your disposal, but if they aren’t being used then it means nothing.

• Siloed = stunted.  When an organization has siloed departments, strategic initiatives will be nonexistent.  RevOps implementation is key to breaking down these silos and leveraging data to create alignment and collaboration across different channels.  

• RevOps is still a baby.  Just 3 years ago, no one was talking about RevOps.  Many people in the field are new, and the discipline will continue to mature and develop in the coming years.