What is Revenue Operations? Well, RevOps, as it’s more commonly known, is a fairly new concept for most of us, but it’s a growing discipline that’s helping many leading B2B tech companies improve their customer acquisition, increase sales, and accelerate growth.
In this episode, Lorena Morales talks to Matt Dodgson about all things RevOps, including how and when to get started, and how to set yourself up for success.
Who they are: Lorena Morales, Director of Global Digital Marketing Revenue Operations at JLL.
A bit of background: Until recently, Lorena was VP of Marketing for Go Nimbly, one of the first consultancies to specialise in the RevOps methodology. She’s currently based in San Francisco, California.
Where you can find her:
Here you’ll find some of the best advice from the podcast that you can easily digest and learn from.
Whenever looking at an emerging trend, or something that’s still relatively unfamiliar, it’s always useful to start with a definition.
Lorena identified two key characteristics that can be used to define RevOps:
She explained, “Firstly, if you’re not focusing on your customer, then it’s not revenue operations. It can be GTM operations, it can be sales operations, it can be many other things, but RevOps needs to be external and focused on the customer. You then must also have alignment with all the customer-facing teams, which are in this case marketing, sales, and customer success.”
Moving on to the second point, Lorena continued, “Of course, the other thing you need is to have a leader. RevOps doesn’t happen without a leader. It can be a director of revenue operations, it can be a CRO, which is a very new title. Whatever that might be, you need a leader that matches everything together.”
“Why do you align the teams? You do it to achieve revenue growth. If you’re not looking after revenue, then you’re probably a charity not an organisation. So those are the main components of revenue operations.”
According to Lorena, RevOps is something you can begin practicing at any size and any stage of growth. But it’s important to fully understand the concept and ensure you create a strategy that’s tailored to your own unique business before you get started.
Lorena said, “Thinking about revenue operations won’t hurt your business at any stage. Even if you’re at series A, most likely you should start thinking about it. However, executing on revenue operations, that’s a different story.”
“Definitely, we’re talking about a model that is going to be particular to every business, but what will be fair is prioritisation, for example. Maybe companies that are at early stages, as I said, series A funding, they won’t really see the value yet, as a lot of the complex implementation of revenue operations comes with pains that don’t appear in series A.”
“For example, if you’re growing your team in series B from 20 reps to 30 reps, to 35 to 60, most likely your sales instance is going to start suffering alterations. And with that, your systems are going to start changing. So those pain points that we see after series B, series C, all the way to IPO, are kind of the sweet spot for revenue operations to be implemented.”
Although, if you’re experiencing certain challenges within your sales function, Lorena suggested you should solve those before worrying about RevOps.
She explained, “If you’re not hitting sales quota, you don’t need revenue operations yet, because you first need to fix that and make sure that you hit quota every single quarter.”
“However, as I mentioned earlier, every single organisation should be thinking about alignment between the customer-facing teams and processes. If you can start getting that alignment early in the days of the organisation, you’re going to set yourself up for success.”
Whether you’re considering hiring someone to look after RevOps for your business, or perhaps thinking of pursuing it as a career move, there’s no better person to tell us what makes a great RevOps specialist.
And the timing couldn’t be better, as Lorena is currently hiring for her own RevOps team, so she was able to provide some insights into how she’s personally approaching that process.
She said, “One of the main things is, do they know the basic stuff? For example, with marketing, correctly defining what a lead is. Can you tell me what was a lead in your previous company and how you were nurturing it? Can you walk me through what happened to that lead from beginning to end? This is going to spot someone that understands the health of the business and how they’re thinking about revenue operations.”
“The second thing is they need to be comfortable in the tech stack. You cannot be a marketer in this world if you do not understand automation, because a lot of automation happens in the process now. And thank God, because we couldn’t scale businesses without the automation that is happening today.”
So those are some of the marketing competencies that are required for a RevOps role. When it comes to the sales side of things, Lorena said, “If you only rely on things like charisma to make a sale happen, but then you have no idea how marketing content creation works, for example, RevOps is probably not for you.”
Lorena explained that when she’s hiring for RevOps, she’s looking for people who understand the work of their colleagues across all areas of the business, and how it all ties together across the whole customer journey.
She added, “If you worked in sales, most likely your outreach cadences came from marketing. If you’re doing, for example, account-based marketing (ABM), most likely you partner with sales. It’s a give and take. So, people that come from marketing, they should understand sales and vice versa.”
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