James Lee
With silos everywhere, there’s no way to convert the insights from your leading indicators into actionable strategies. That’s where RevOps shines. Learn how to build your RevOps team to unlock pipeline and capacity with these 5 do’s and don’ts.
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is now the fastest-growing job in North America, as reported by Forbes. I’m not surprised, since RevOps aligns interdisciplines like sales and marketing in a clear, customer-focused way.
The beauty of RevOps is that there are plenty of ways to get it right. But here’s the kicker: there are just as many ways to get it so, very wrong.
That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Minami Rojas, Head of Growth at Endgame, to talk about how technology and systems can boost future pipeline and capacity, with some proven do's and don'ts from my experiences at Asana and Writer.
When you're setting up RevOps in a young company, it's natural to want to nail down your systems and operations from the get-go. And while these elements are important, at this stage you need to focus on your leading indicators.
In the beginning, these metrics are your driving force. They tell you what’s working and what’s not. Then, as your business grows, these same metrics help you remove the walls that tend to pop up between different teams.
And while it might not seem like it matters now, it will become obvious if and when teams start making decisions in isolation. Independent decisions will create a disjointed environment that hampers communication and slows the company’s overall operational velocity.
I saw this firsthand at Asana. As we were approaching the $100 million mark, there was this phrase that kept floating around the organization: "IPO readiness." At that point, I had to hand over the management of our technology and systems to a business technology team. This seemed like a good idea in theory, but it actually slowed us down.
To move quickly, you actually have to break down those silos and convert the insights from your leading indicators into actionable strategies. That’s where RevOps comes in.
The most effective strategy to dismantle silos is, quite simply, to center everything around the customer.
At Writer, we foster a customer-centric mindset across all departments—marketing, product, customer success, and others. We shift the focus from being product-led or sales-led to being entirely customer-led. This means everyone in the organization is dedicated to delivering value to the customer.
Our CEO sets a clear expectation: sell to a customer, deploy within 30 days, and at the end of that period, the customer should be ready to give us a reference. It doesn't matter if a particular aspect doesn't perfectly align with sales or customer success norms, everyone chips in to ensure customer satisfaction.
Teams that might have once worked in isolation now have a common purpose and a reason to collaborate.
We all work to keep the customer at the forefront, so every action we take contributes to a cohesive, unified strategy that benefits our customers. And as a result, we have higher customer satisfaction, repeat business, and referrals—all of which are key drivers of sustainable revenue growth. Remember: when the customer wins, the entire company, including the revenue team, also wins.
I've come to realize that the real go-to-market (GTM) team magic happens when the operations team is truly in sync with the field team.
A perfect example of this actually happened recently at Writer when we needed to ramp up our sales reps and generate more pipeline. Our CEO made it clear that models weren't enough. What mattered was ensuring that every sales rep actually had sufficient pipeline.
So, what did we do? For every new hire, we created a dedicated Slack channel involving SDR leaders, marketing, and even the CEO. We focused on pinpointing their accounts, running targeted events for them, and within 60 days, we aimed to get them sufficient opportunities and meetings to meet quota. This level of detail is what I believe every RevOps team should strive for.
Here’s why: being in RevOps involves not just focusing on the immediate problems of the next quarter, but also looking ahead, planning for 6 to 9 months down the line. That means analyzing the business model and the leading indicators to identify and address contradictions.
So, if you're aiming for 10x growth, you need to understand what will drive that growth. Is it larger deals? Increased market share? You constantly have to challenge assumptions and make sure there's a realistic plan behind your growth aspirations.
That often involves pointing out the obvious and pushing for actionable steps by asking the hard questions: What exactly are we investing in? What strategic bets are we placing to achieve that 10x growth? This process forces the entire organization to be more accountable.
Essentially, RevOps is there to ensure that when you talk about ambitious growth, like 10x, you're also talking about the concrete steps to get there. We’re strategically positioned to drive vital conversations, ensuring all departments are synchronized in their efforts to drive revenue growth.
RevOps folks are often inundated with dozens of requests and issues—from trouble logging into Salesforce, to fixing broken systems, or resolving endless tickets. This leads to RevOps being known as the fix-it team, a reactive unit dealing with day-to-day operational hiccups.
In fact, I dealt with this at Asana. I remember how our team, despite working incredibly hard, often felt stuck. We were always behind. There were endless tickets. Systems were broken. We were trying to boil the ocean.
In hindsight, a significant part of this struggle was due to misalignment—be it in our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or trying to juggle too many objectives at once, like product-led growth, moving upmarket, and international expansion. But in this situation, it was almost impossible for us to rise above the daily grind because we were spread way too thin.
Funny enough, it was this experience that taught me that when operations are closely aligned with strategy, they move beyond just being reactionary. As RevOps leaders, we need to represent what's happening in the field and translate that effectively to financial planning and analysis teams, business operations, and executives. We need to focus less on operational vanity metrics and more time obsessing over our ICP, so that every effort is grounded in revenue generation.
Working at an AI company now, I see exactly how it can change the way we operate. It frees us from the minutiae of deal hygiene and allows us to focus on more strategic aspects to drive the business forward.
At this point, from a sales tech perspective, AI excels in 4 areas:
And while these capabilities are valuable as they stand, there's still a lot more potential to be unlocked. We're just scratching the surface of what AI can do.
One potential use case I find particularly intriguing is the use of AI in natural language processing, especially Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) systems. Imagine if sales reps could simply describe what they need in everyday language, and AI could provide them with accurate quotes or forecasts. That would be a total game-changer.
“I think there are a lot of sales experiences that are going to be more anchored around natural language queries. Like, say it in ‘human speak’, and then stuff will happen.”
All that’s to say, as RevOps leaders, our job is to make smart use of technology. It's there to simplify our operations and do the routine stuff for us. This way, we can focus more on what really matters—developing strategies, understanding our market better, and making sure our teams are aligned and working together effectively.
At the end of the day, we need to double down on what doesn’t change. People want to see true value. They want to be able to grow with you. They want good pricing and packaging. So, from one revenue leader to another, think about how to use tech as a tool that supports that–not something that overwhelms or replaces the human element of our work. That way, we can concentrate on the aspects of our roles where our experience and judgment really count.
