Passionate about driving revenue excellence working with sales, marketing, and customer success leaders. A results driven leader who believes in:
• A high sense of urgency to define and enable sales processes
• Stabilize and scale systems to work for you and not against you
• Collaborative, Team player (we may not always agree but we will work through all the angles)
• High integrity, Accountable
• Strategic Leadership, Hands on Approach
Welcome to our LIVE Slack AMA with Jeff Ignacio - where you can get all of your questions answered on our newly launched Unleashing ROI RevOps Course.
Leading the charge is Robert Gammon!
Thanks for being here, you two! The interest in this course have been super high, so I bet people have a lot of questions.
Thanks Erin! Happy to be here!
With us today is the fabulous Jeff Ignacio who is leading what could be the coolest RevOps learning course ever created.
Morning everyone!
Besides Mugatu's poor processes and inability to provide insight to his fashion sales, RevOps has increased in intensity over the last two years. My personal belief is much of it comes from 1. the explosion of technology options, 2. increasing number of CRO hires, and lastly I think that collectively as a profession we 3. have given voice to our craft. In fact it's become a discipline that one can devote an entire career to now.
It really has become a career for most of us. What seemed like a trend is now becoming a must have set of skills!
In my mind, any business runs well when it can maximize opportunities and reduce risk effectively and repeatedly. To do that, operating cadences come to the center stage. Running the following effectively: 1. forecast calls, 2. deal reviews, 3. campaign management, 4. renewals, 5. annual planning
On top of that there is the systems and process design work that underlies all of the cadences above.
I find organizations that under invest rely on tops down support for RevOps... these are recipes for strategic and process debt.
In all honesty, I think there is a real opportunity to broaden where professionals can learn the trade.
I learned the role the hard way: 1. Tons of Stack Overflow for the technical details, 2. Burning the midnight oil (working late into the night to problem solve), 3. joining communities and asking others, 4. getting in the role myself (calling prospects and figuring out what works and what doesn't)
Ha! Yes indeed.
I've partnered with RevOps Co-Op to launch an educational experiment.
We’re calling it Unleashing ROI (RevOps Impact). We're tinkering w/ the format. I'm not an educator by training, so I've put down what I've learned at startups/scaleups in a GTM Ops role for others to learn.
It's not the ONLY way to do things, but I fundamentally believe the more mental models you have at your disposal the more you'll be able to think critically through whatever problem(s) you're solving.
How freakin’ cool!
Ok, so first question about the course is from Wendy:
“Curious to know if there is any flexibility with this, how many hours/week we would expect to have a hard time commitment to, and if we are able to miss any of the sessions?”
In terms of commitment we're locking in two hours. One hour for the open lecture and one hour for a peer led group discussion.
Two hours per week. We will space it out. Personally I like the idea of launching the first cohort and learning from everyone what works, what doesn't.
^That’s RevOps right there.
Love it! That is fantastic!
Nothing like a GREAT Acronym ROI (RevOps Impact) to help us explain it!
Any good process should feature: 1. Inputs, 2. Model, 3. Outputs, 4. Inspect, 5. Reinvent
"What are some of the most common misconceptions or things that are often misunderstood regarding RevOps?"
I think the number one misconception is that RevOps doesn't have a seat at the decision making table, but feeds off the decision taking scraps.
We’ve got another question: Thanks Zach!
“Hi Jeff! I'd love to hear more about your plans for peer group sessions in the course. Will those mostly be centered around collective problem solving for member's projects/issues? Will there be broader discussions about differences in strategy and comparisons on company size etc.? Beyond that, will the cohorts be structured around a variety of company sizes/stages, or will they focus on companies at specific points in their growth?”
Zach - right now it's formatted as a second peer-led session that takes place the same week as the open lecture. Before each session each student will receive reading material. At the end of each reading are a series of questions tied to the material. They will serve as the questions for the peer group to discuss together.
In terms of contextualizing the course for varying stages of maturity, I like the idea. But honestly I think it'll be difficult to build out a "one size fits all" approach. There may be nuggets from the course that may be relevant to you and some that are not.
I'm open to feedback throughout the course so we can deepen or broaden topics as the student body sees fit.
Hi, Jeff. In an employee-heavy structure coming in as a newly formed RevOps team, it does get tricky to implement even the slightest change.
There is tons of enablement, leadership buy-ins and change management needed to do things properly.
Do you have any advice on how we can implement these changes as a RevOps team? What decision making frameworks could help? What's the ideal leadership / RevOps relationship to implement process change?
Currently a mix of internal and external humans.
We are going on a year. 5 people and growing. Servicing an account management, sales and CX team of about 50 strong. Org is currently 6 years old. Couple funding rounds. Total 150 peeps.
Shim - at 5 people covering a GTM org of 50 you have great coverage IMO. The very first thing I would do is establish a list of strategic project priorities across the business. Rank them somehow. You might use an Effort vs Impact 2x2 to stack rank. Then, gain alignment with executive stakeholders. From there, you should match bottoms up your team's capacity to handle these changes. Next, I'd establish a process for how you intake requests across the org, a process for communicating progress (i.e. sprints, SLAs), and a process for change management. Doing this will set expectations with your stakeholders.
So Jeff , Besides the folks IN this community right now... who else do you recommend take this course? Should we be sending referrals?
Robert - the course is for the new and experienced RevOps professional. I also think it's worthwhile for anyone looking to "cross over" into the trade from sales or marketing
Ooohh, CROSS OVER !
Cross over to the RevOpside.
I crossed over from FP&A. From pulling data via SQL queries and monkeying around in Excel I found myself in Sales Operations. That's an excellent fountainhead. I've also had the pleasure of recruiting internally from the sales and SDR teams. More often than not the SDRs and Sales who moved over did an excellent job of embracing the scientific side of GTM.
WHAAAT? FINANCE PEOPLE IN THE GTM TEAM?! You don't say....
Talk to us about how you see the long haul of the ROI course paying off for people? Why stick through the whole thing? (other than because my boss paid for it)?
Ha! Well, hopefully it's because 1. you have a few or many takeaways from each lecture that you can implement right away, 2. you enjoy learning from your peers as well, 3. you also have something to share with the course.
That's a great point. It's one thing to have a list of things to do... or research... or try on your own.. but this is with a whole crew of professionals backed by our community.
So give me some examples of things we could be able to implement RIGHT AWAY?
A few things we'll cover in the first few lectures: operating cadences, policy design, customer lifecycles, building the data dictionary, MBR/QBR templates, systems design, building out the ICP.
That sounds like some serious progress to those of us wondering where to start!
The type of feedback I'm looking for: 1. pace, 2. depth, 3. format. That's mostly what I'm looking for now. Fourth would be anything else that comes to mind.
Federico - I think CRM analytics can take you up to a point. Once you've crossed the threshold of usefulness with your CRM then I think the business will need to be fulfilled with more meaningful BI solutions.
As far as who "owns" the analytics I believe it should go to whoever can accomplish the following: 1. capture requirements from the org, 2. respond within SLA, 3. build for the greatest need, 4. thoughtfully manage the backlog of tactical requests, 5. establish a culture of data driven decision making, 6. carefully balance self-serve culture vs ad hoc culture
hmmmm... I don't have a clear answer to you. I think there's plenty of technology out there. The question is whether companies have the willingness to bring in a solution, the capability to implement it, and the continuity to support and enhance it.
In my own experience I find that sales and marketing get to the front of the buffet line more often than CS.
Indeed, and I think that’s evolving as CS matures.
Do I think that's right? No I don't. Newly acquired revenue is the tip of the iceberg. Renewals and upsells is where it's at. Customer loyalty pays the bills.
Hi Jeff, long time!
You provide a great resource to us, thank you!
Do you plan to talk about the change management that is required for the RevOps continual improvements being delivered?
Definitely! I will cover change management in week 5.
Week 5 is going to focus on Systems and Process rollouts.
For now, submit them to community@revopscoop.com.
^boom
Alright Jeff, you said week 5 is about Systems and process Rollouts... What are the other weeks about?
On the signup page we cover a number of different topics. But weeks 1 to 4 focus on business alignment, week 5 on process/systems, week 6 to 8 on functional ops, 9 on leading planning, and 10 on building out the org.
Great! Here’s another question from the thread: Thanks SK -
At an org of this size I'd expect the sales and marketing org to be fairly large. Assume two or three management layers for sales alone. This would in turn require layers within revops. There are a number of org structures to consider: 1. centralized RevOps, 2. decentralized / functional ops, 3. shared services (matrixed).
There are tradeoffs with each one but I'd consider you're looking at a functional ops with a RevOps/program management layer serving as a bridge to the functional execs to keep the information flowing while balancing the need to continue refining processes/systems/operating cadences.
Sounds like we're all in great hands learning from you, Jeff!
Again I'm only one viewpoint among many out there but I look forward to at least sharing my own point of view.
This is awesome by the way. Thank you for doing this. I am pumped for the class!
To answer your questions: Integrations/APIs/Appstore is a competitive advantage (for now). Having a marketplace creates "network effects" but over time this advantage erodes and commoditizes.
Overall I believe RevOps will face an uphill challenge of having to admin across a heterogeneous tech stack. That's unwieldy at best. I expect the vendors to consolidate given a long enough timeframe. Look to Hubspot and Salesforce to acquire many companies along the way.
Interesting take. It seems as though the "out of box" functionality is quite a bit behind the market, and what is promised from many providers in their marketing materials.
Creativity and resourcefulness are differentiators given your comment re: integrations/API/Appstore.
Thank you all for joining the AMA today with Jeff Ignacio, for all of you that came with GREAT questions, and to Robert Gammon for leading the charge!
Jeff will answer any unanswered questions later today as time allows - If you have further questions, you can DM me, Jeff, or Matt Volm and we are happy to help!
Thanks everyone for having me!
To learn more, here is the signup page and info for the course.
Thanks so much Jeff Ignacio and Robert Gammon !!
We also want to build out some more courses in the future...so if you 1) have ideas on other course topics you'd be interested in or 2) have expertise in a certain area and are interested in putting a course together / becoming an instructor please drop me a line via DM as we definitely want to do more of this given how valuable the knowledge sharing can be.
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