What is RevOps
Sam had a great take on his 4 key areas of what makes up RevOps:
- Data & Analytics: a key part to any RevOps team, making use of the data available to you, not being struck down by analysis paralysis and making sure it’s actually useful to the organisation.
- Enablement: across the board, not just in sales, so at Pearson the marketing team are making use of conversational intelligence tools that typically only RevOps teams have access to.
- Tools: Sam specifically doesn’t call this ‘technology’ as he feels it can put users off who think they aren’t tech people. But you need a function (RevOps) that knows what tools are being used, where there is room to trim fat & indeed add missing capability.
- And lastly, Strategy & Compensation: all around where do we play well? What’s our ICP and what is the data telling us?
Setting up RevOps from scratch
Sam’s team is almost a start-up within a huge organisation, and it was super interesting to hear how he went about setting that up from scratch. From inheriting four different CRMs and managing to consolidate that down and go live with a single Salesforce instance in his first month - some achievement if you ask us!
He then had to go about building a team, bringing in tooling to help them and one of the most interesting bits on the show for us, was around dealing with that change management piece, which maybe isn’t talked about enough? There was a real rise of “change fatigue” - so much was going on with new tooling, new processes, new people - you really need to manage that part of a business to make sure all the hard work you are doing sticks and is ultimately adopted.
The biggest opportunities for AI in RevOps (and some threats)
Sam was pretty clear on opportunities for AI within RevOps. Up-skilling of people is a big one - AI is here, and it will be prevalent in most workplaces, so we need to be equipped for that.
Helping you understand what is going on at an account level and from an insight perspective, Sam sees it as a huge plus.
But he was honest on the show, that there are risks. Are we risking authenticity of messaging when AI is writing everything for you? Are we de-skilling sales & marketing people with the ease of ‘spray & pray’ and totally generic content or sequences created by AI? For Sam, and something we’ve pondered since the episode, critical thought is an essential skill for these teams and if we’re not careful, overuse of AI could take this away.
The future of Sales & RevOps
Similar to the above point, Sam has a prediction that the future of sales teams is bringing in more skill earlier in the funnel. Essentially, the reliance of SDR/appointment setters in today’s sales world are less required. We need the full lifecycle AE types coming in early, speaking to customers and taking them through the entire journey.
RevOps specifically, Sam agreed is very much a growing discipline, but was also honest in that the function is likely to always be relatively small in number within organisations. Especially with tools available and becoming available, you can do a lot with less people.
Finally - Sam’s controversial RevOps opinion
Our favourite question on every show.
RevOps teams do too much firefighting & not enough strategy work.
And he chucked one more in which I think will ruffle a few feathers, but you’ll need to listen to the episode to find out what it is…
To wrap up
Sam is a true leader in the RevOps space and for anyone wanting to further their career in RevOps, this episode is worth a listen, you’ll definitely learn something!
Join us for the next one which will be released over the coming couple of weeks.
