Pt. 2 How I got into RevOps
In Part 1 of how I got into RevOps I shared my journeyman history of bouncing around between management consulting, real estate, and agency recruiting. So how the heck did I get into Revenue Operations?
It definitely was not a straight line.
I’m assuming many of my readers can relate to this.
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I’ll be honest. I found the highs and lows of having a quota hung around my neck like a fatty gold chain. It felt HEAVY. Additionally I felt that I was working for the money and that didn’t quite satisfy me as much as problems that were deeply technical and numbers oriented.
So I decided to apply for business school. I took the GMAT. Three times believe it or not. I moved up from the 84th percentile to the 96th percentile on the final exam. I got into the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. It was time to leave for a new adventure.
Let’s skip the two years at Bschool. It was awesome! But it did set me up for a finance career (ha! or so I thought). I interned at Intel’s corporate venture capital group (Intel Capital) and received a full time offer to join their strategic finance team. It sounded amazing! Turned out it was a lot less strategic than I had hoped. My team was specifically purposed to roll up quarterly financials from across the entire business. I had access to the entire PnL of a publicly traded company. Quite a responsibility.
My personality is one that tends to move quickly and take on many things. My role required the opposite. It required someone that moved deliberately and concentrated on the task at hand. Going against my own nature was something to be nurtured. Doing well in this role would require incredible discipline and personal growth.
The move to Google
I received a phone call out of nowhere from a recruiter calling from Google. The Googs! Of course I was going to take the call.
Three months later I ended up with an offer. But first let’s talk about the recruiting process. It was very similar to what I had gone through interviewing with consulting firms in business school. I received case study style interviews. These were always my favorite. In fact I prefer to use this style of interview myself when interviewing potential team members.
On the case
“Design a financial model framework for a customer support team and make a decision on whether or not to invest in Program X”.
No spreadsheet. No pen or paper. It’s a verbal interview.
Obviously I would have the opportunity to ask clarifying questions. The interviewer might have the data at hand or not. In fact they might have just been making things up. The goal of the interview to gauge my critical thinking skills.
So what would be my attack plan?
From previous interviews my goal is to showcase critical thinking, getting to the heart of the matter, gathering information, making decisions, and detailing risks/opportunities. If all goes well I should have been able to do the following:
Leverage what I know about customer support teams
Cut down the size of the problem into smaller parts
Identify the KPIs that matter
Staying mentally organized
Making a judgment or series of judgments
Spell out risks involved
Here’s a quick TL;DR of a 45 minute interview.
Leverage what I know. Customers can reach (or try to?) customer support via phone, email, chat.
My clarifying questions:
Number of tickets received daily?
% of tickets via each channel?
Cut down the size of the problem. Is there 100% coverage on support tickets and is Google handling these tickets in a cost effective manner? Breaking all of these down per segment (business segment, support channel - phone/email/chat).
Identify the KPIs that matter. Break out lagging and leading indicators.
Leading
% of tickets resolved by segment
Time to resolve tickets per segment by segment
Cost by segment
Lagging
Cost per ticket resolved
Tickets resolved per support agent
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Making a judgment. My core focus was to increase automation in support to raise the segmentation line ever so higher. The core metrics that should change should be a decreased cost per ticket and a higher number of tickets resolved per support agent.
Risks. Automation in a vacuum rarely goes well. Customers are people and quite frankly will still want a human touch to having their issues resolved. So what’s the balance one needs to strike in the pursuit of efficient support systems?
Supporting sales at Google as a financial analyst
I must have done something right in the interview process because I received an offer. Dumbstruck. I said yes.
Supporting the sales organization in a finance capacity is an amazing experience. Much of my work had significant overlap with sales operations:
Quotas
Compensation design
Unit economics
Forecasting
Deal desk (deal structuring, pricing, risk management)
Headcount modeling
My favorite teammates to partner with was the Sales Operations organization at Google. They seemed to know every little thing about each of the sales managers and the reps. The strategic work they were doing around account plans, addressable market analysis, and pricing were really interesting to me.
We were both doing strategic work. But I felt that my Sales Operations peers were much closer to the pulse of the market than my role in finance.
Out of the blue
A recruiter who had tried to hire me for another startup years earlier reached out to me. She was working for a little unknown startup called Visier, an enterprise data analytics platform for HR professionals. They had a Director of Sales Operations role available.
I was not the ideal fit candidate for them. I did not have experience with Salesforce. I had not led a sales team previously.
But I did have a lot going for me so I sold the fact that I had partnered with sales, had been in sales (agency recruiting), and have had deep experience in planning and forecasting. I learned technical skills like Python and SQL at Google. How hard could Salesforce be?
Once I was in the role I was a Director in title only. No team reporting to me but an enormous amount of responsibilities. I was happy about the title and pay bump but I also felt quite a bit of imposter syndrome.
Leaning into the role
I absolutely loved this role. Working with the sales team to continuously plan and execute was a joy. But I also felt like I was trying to learn the job while on the job. No documentation, training, mentors, NOTHING.
So here’s what I will say to those in the same boat.
Teams-of-one need to be dangerous with Salesforce and/or Hubspot
Build the basics first before moving onto the advanced topics
Be in sync with your GTM leadership
Be a master over your operating cadences
You don't need to me a full fledged master with Salesforce. But you absolutely should master the following:
Custom fields
Page layouts
Flows
Permission sets, profiles, roles
If you’re wading into Apex I highly suggest you bring in a specialist and invest in documentation.
Building basics is also important. You’ll often hear me (nowadays) use the phrase crawl, walk, run. When I first came into the role I tried implementing too many changes into the organization. The team couldn’t absorb that much change in a short period and nor could I. I tried taking on too much.
For example, an organization that has a lack of serious pipeline shouldn’t be worrying about how manual it is to build a quote. There are no deals to build quotes for! Focus on the higher priority problem. Pipeline!
In my early days I tried to build out the following cadences:
Pipeline management and forecasting
Win/Loss reviews
Pricing reviews
Weekly training session
Ops Office Hours
It was all too much too quickly. What the organization really needed was a solid pipeline management and forecasting rhythm. Once that was bolted down we could turn our attention to building the other fancy things in life.
Back to poker and taking bets
The truth is that someone took a bet on me. They didn’t have to. So this what I will say about those who are looking to break into the profession.
Someone will take a bet on you and you will make it pay off for them.
I personally think I have a long runway ahead of me. But it’s also time to recognize that giving back to the community should also be a part of how I spend my time. Building this newsletter, the courses, and posting on LinkedIn. Yes I do ask to be paid for what I do but I also pick my spots on where I can give back with nothing in return. I want someone to take a bet on you.
And you are going to make that bet pay off 100x. We talked about 10x being a moonshot bet while I was at Google. Even better then that I believe that if a professional leans into their craft they’ll have an opportunity to make it worthwhile.
So if you’re interviewing
Don’t get down on yourself. It’s discouraging to be rejected. I’ve been rejected more times than I can count. Michael Jordan once put it like this.
I’ve been coaching a few folks who are in the market. Here’s my general advice on prepping for RevOps Manager and Director roles.
Come prepared with two or three stories with a CAR format (context, action, result)
Be prepared if someone digs into your story that you are able to “show” your work. Avoid taking credit for projects where you played a small or non-existent role. I’ll get into this in a second.
Put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders and bring out the ‘why’. What impact did your work have?
Do your homework on a few levels: the individual interviewing you, the history of the company, the industry.
Bring questions as if you are already in the role
Ask the interviewer if there are other areas they would like to dig into but didn’t have the time to ask
The CAR Format
Context. Action, Result.
I often cite an example of reducing sales cycles from 330 days to 275 days. At the time, we were concerned our pipeline moved too slowly and left little opportunity for in-year pipeline generation to have any effect for the year. Once the year turned over our results were essentially set for us. Naturally there is an asymptote to how much time you can shave off of a sales cycle but we felt confident we could shave a few weeks here and there.
The actions we took were to deconstruct our sales motion from beginning to end. We found there were a few areas where we could speed things up:
Always confirming dates for the next meeting. Vague next steps added a back and forth of setting calendar dates. Often we would see two weeks added to the sales motion because of this.
Building four demo environments catering to the core verticals we won the most in. This saved the need for two demos: a generic demo and a custom demo. Many of our buyers didn’t know what they wanted until they saw it was possible from our tool. Instead of doing a generic demo and collecting feedback for a second demo, we just cut to the chase. This saved us another two weeks.
Empowering sellers with a pricing sheet and an authorized discount threshold. Instead of having to negotiate every little deal with ourselves we armed our sales reps with clear guidance on what they could do. That saved one week.
We built a proposal building function where each relevant team member across the company could access proposals and leave their two cents. We set strict SLAs. This saved two weeks.
The last week we saved was signaling deal volume to our legal team. Sending in too many deals at once clogged up our ability to send redlines. We set thresholds for when our company would use the customer’s paper over ours.
The result was a drastic reduction in sales process over the course of a year. We shaved off an average of 8 weeks. This enabled our marketing and sales teams more time to generate pipeline that could count for the year.
Digging into your stories
One approach I explore when interviewing is to have you tell me about a project you worked on. The next three or four questions will be to keep double clicking into your story. I'm sniffing out what possibilities you considered and ultimately why you forced the tradeoffs you did. Then I'd like to dig into the interpersonal working relationships throughout the course of the project. What did you document? How did you communicate to others involved? Did the project have any issues along the way?
I don't want you to tell me what you think I want to hear. I want to hear the truth. Not a flawless hero story. I'm sure you took a lunch to the face or to the gut along the way. Maybe you were knocked out.
I want to know that you got off the mat and were ready to do it all over again.
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