Chapter 6: RevOps Department Success -- excerpt
Research question: What do you think is the most important factor in determining RevOps success?
Here are some of the common answers to the question related to factors of success, followed by the number of people who included the information in their answer to the above question. A lot of answers were similar and overlapped so it was difficult to categorize them into common themes.
- Alignment from the company leadership about: what RevOps should be doing (no political rivalries), performance metrics, job clarity, and values: 16 people
- Securing leadership buy-in, having RevOps included in executive strategy, having an equal voice and influence on the leadership team as sales, marketing, and CS: 14 people
- Alignment and/or collaboration between the teams RevOps serves: 13 people
- Communication and relationship building (also related to influence and alignment): 7 people
- Infrastructure to make it all happen...Having data you can trust so you can measure your success, know where you are starting from, having end-to-end visibility: 6 people
- Alignment around a better customer experience, value alignment between customer and company: 4 people
- Making sure they are strategic, having a roadmap tied to goals: 3 people
- The urgency to allow change, being able to influence/enable to create change: 3 people
- Movement of the revenue number: 2 people
What is not mentioned: software. This may be surprising if you’re in any networking groups related to RevOps where most discussions are about tools, or if you do any Google searches of RevOps and find most of the content is from software companies talking about how RevOps focuses on software admin. Software knowledge and use is not what will ultimately make you successful in RevOps, according to the experts.
Let’s take a closer look at the most common of these success-related answers.
Alignment on what RevOps should be doing and securing leadership buy-in
Though we dove deeper into the topic of alignment in the People chapter, there were a few excellent answers to the question of why alignment from leadership drives RevOps success. This includes aligning everyone on what RevOps is and what it should be doing, and getting alignment about what success in RevOps means for the department and for the company. These top two answers to the question are very similar and will be combined in this discussion.
Jeff Ignacio said it most clearly, “I think that's how you measure success is one: aligning expectations, and two: determining what the critical path is going to look like.”
Alana Zimmer spoke about how “success is very much aligning so there's job clarity, job alignment, functional alignment within people, that systems are built for scale and optimized for the organization itself. And there are very clear work streams; there's very clear alignment in the actual processes that are built to support that.”
Not only do the job roles need to be in alignment among all people in the company, the measures of success need to be agreed upon for the roles and the RevOps department overall.
Richard Dunkel said that RevOps needs to be aligned with leadership “on performance measures and targeted areas of process improvement and then have to execute a plan that combines training content, processes, tools, operating rhythms and reporting that allow us to collectively drive towards our targeted areas of improvement to achieve business results.”
If the measures of success are not agreed-upon, no one will be able to agree that RevOps success was achieved.
