This week I'm sharing a few excerpts from Chapter 3: People, which is about the first of the main three RevOps principles of people, process, and tools.
Chapter 3: RevOps Principle #1: People -- excerpt 1
If you’ve visited any RevOps community, searched Google or LinkedIn, or attended a RevOps webinar, you’ve seen many conversations about tech and data, and perhaps an occasional tidbit about processes.
I get it. Those technical topics seem more straightforward, or even fun, to research and debate compared to the human-centered operations topics such as enabling people to do their best work, adoption and utilization of the process and tools, change management, influence, mediation, empathy, communication…how to actually make the elusive “alignment” happen. Human behavior and psychology are less straightforward to understand and solve compared to tool administration and data analysis.
The dream that buying a piece of tech could be the solution to all our problems is a lovely dream. But it’s still just a dream. In reality, if you or your department don’t have people skills, none of your RevOps process, tech, or data projects will succeed.
What do you mean by ‘people’?
The word “people” by itself is vague and could apply to any part of business or life. If that’s your argument, I’ll try to related ‘people’ more specifically to RevOps by speaking about:
Customers and prospects
Leadership (non-RevOps leadership)
Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams that RevOps enables
RevOps teams, professionals, and leaders in a company
RevOps professionals across companies, as a larger community
So many people!
Why is ‘people’ a larger part of RevOps roles compared to the rest of the company?
There are at least two main factors that make the ‘people’ aspect more important in RevOps roles compared to other roles.
RevOps professionals deal with more people from more departments and more levels compared to many other roles in other departments. For example, an individual contributor in the marketing department may only communicate with the marketing team on a regular basis (this is not ideal, just average), while a RevOps team member will be communicating with marketing people, salespeople, customer success people, occasionally product and finance people, leadership…
And with the confusion most people have about what RevOps is and does, working in RevOps requires getting constant buy-in and backing up decisions with multiple leaders and teams. RevOps is handling multiple requests from multiple sources across the company. Compare this to, perhaps, a sales leader as the only person giving work to the sales team member, RevOps is being bombarded from all angles outside of the RevOps department with requests to work on “their” projects first.
The combination of interacting with more people across departments and levels, plus misalignment to what RevOps is or should be doing, makes it exponentially more necessary for RevOps professionals to have good people skills.
A focus on the customer is another human or people factor, bringing it back to the success of the people buying the product or service. Remember, customers are people, they are not just data!
Chapter 3: RevOps Principle #1: People -- excerpt 2
Company leaders are people
Another important human aspect of RevOps is getting alignment and agreement on what RevOps should be doing (going back to the problem of having differing definitions) – which usually means aligning leadership.
And without leadership buy-in, RevOps can sometimes become relegated to a support or task-taking department instead of a strategic business partner that is driving success. When this happens, the company is not experiencing the full benefit of true RevOps. HubSpot’s executives have said that alignment eats strategy for breakfast and needs to be done first. Making this alignment happen requires excellent people skills, including communication, negotiation, and mediation.
Let’s first discuss how a reporting structure can help or hinder the alignment capabilities and success of RevOps. This research question looks at how difficult it could be to align leaders to focus on the full customer journey and experience, based on who RevOps is reporting to.
Leaders as people: Who does your RevOps team report to, or roll into?
Out of 35 experts interviewed, this many people gave these answers:
CRO: 13 people
CEO: 4 people
COO: 4 people
CFO: 2 people
Other answers included:
Head of Sales
VP of Ops
SVP of Marketing
CCO
Accounting
Business operations
President
Managing operating partner
Chief of Staff
Note that this question could have been misread/interpreted as 'What is the highest level of role in RevOps?' instead of its intention of asking who the leader of the RevOps department reports to.
The highest level RevOps titles mentioned in interviews:
VP or EVP of RevOps
GTM COO but reports to CRO
Director of RevOps reports to CRO
This question was usually followed up with a “Should” question. If the expert felt their company wasn’t set up ideally, then who should RevOps department report to?
...
Common themes from people’s answers about how to set up the RevOps reporting structure in the best way to allow success:
Ideally, RevOps should be reporting to a neutral leader with authority, like CEO or COO, but not a sales, marketing, or customer team leader.
If reporting to a CRO, it needs to be a true CRO with equal involvement in sales, marketing, and customer success. It should not be a sales leader whose position was renamed or promoted to CRO, though they only have sales knowledge and sales leadership (this is similar to the common problem of renaming sales ops to RevOps).
Company leadership needs to agree on the reporting structure before starting a RevOps team.
As a step between having siloed departments and having a RevOps team, you can unofficially form a RevOps alliance between ops people in separate departments and then create an official reporting structure later.
Having dotted-line reporting, and not an official RevOps team, is a good start and better than nothing. But it causes issues when the people don’t all report to one leader with unified metrics, especially if each of the leaders has competing priorities and do not have shared definitions of everything in their data dictionary (Thanks to Jeff Ignacio for the term “data dictionary.”) It can be very hard to succeed and see the full benefit of RevOps with this structure, or lack of structure.
Some of the content from this book research helped create the RevOps bootcamp from HubSpot Academy I co-created and co-teach. The next cohort of this live, 6-week, free bootcamp starts in October.
