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Everyone's talking about the value a RevOps team brings to building and running a sales team but there's a problem Founders/Sales Leaders face when they decide that they want to make that first RevOps hire. And unless you've made this mistake before, you'll make this mistake too. 👉 Making just one RevOps hire is incredibly hard. Here's why: That hire is going to be asked to be Strategic and help develop ✅ Territory planning ✅ Sales Process improvements ✅ Forecasting methodologies ✅ Customer Lifecycle ✅ and more BUT they'll also be asked to be Tactical and ✅ Configure your CRM ✅ Develop Reporting and Dashboards ✅ Tech stack admin ✅ Policy creation ✅ and lots and lots more super tactical stuff. So why is making that hire so hard? 🚫 Finding ONE RevOps person who can be both high-level strategic AND super-tactical is like looking for a purple squirrel. 🐿️ So when you've decided you need and want RevOps, make sure you're considering the following solutions: 👍 hiring a couple of people (strategic and tactical) 👍 hiring a strategic person and getting them outsourced RevOps help for the tactical stuff 👍 or starting with an outsourced RevOps team before committing to a full-time hire or two on your payroll. Has anybody else seen this challenge and mistake before? If you like this Sales Leadership learning lesson, you might like 10 more learning lessons here: https://lnkd.in/gKWMmpAq
You nailed it! Most RevOps folks are either strategic or tactical. If you hire a fractional team that can do all aspects of the operational flywheel you’ll be in a much better place.
These strike me as Sales Management responsibilities. I would also ask why are you bringing in people who are not selling directly to develop strategies and tactics, or have experience in that market segment. The people who are best equipped to tell you where opportunity is are the front-line salespeople getting it done. If you stop and ask engaged salespeople, they will tell you and you don't have to pay them more. They want better resources and tools to go to market and make sales. Any improvement is directly tied to their take home and that is skin in the game. Yes, these other technical issues need to be dealt with but sales leaders everywhere need to be asking their people where they see opportunity.
This is all well and fine but has the company gone through any kind of internal vision quest as it were? Have they redone a good old-fashioned SWOT to determine what their strengths are now versus when they started? Have they asked the 5 W questions again to see if their direction has changed? Before any company looks at making a RevOps hire or hiring an outside agency they should first do their own internal due diligence. By performing this task first, no matter how minute it brings something to the table for discussion. If you hire an agency you can say "Here are some things we found doing our own internal audit." If the consulting agency is legit, they will see your efforts and see the direction you are trying to go and help you. If this is going to be a personnel hire, you can use these audit findings as questions for your interview. In any case, the organization needs to do its own due diligence and redo some basic business steps before diving headlong into hiring someone or a consulting firm. 1. Ask the 5Ws 2. Redo your SWOT 3. Talk to your current Sales organization and get their feedback 4. Talk to your customers and see if you drop the ball anywhere in your process Do not put the cart before the horse.
You just articulated the reason why RevPartners was created. Thanks for being such an advocate Kevin Gaither!
YES. I just had this conversation with a VP of Sales. There is the popular myth that the purple squirrel revops person exists! The solution I recommend isn't two "revops" people, but instead a Sales Enablement person + a RevOps (technical) person. Many of the things you listed as "strategic RevOps" is actually best done by a Sales Enablement skilled person.
I've often straddled revops and marketing, and that works well for early-stage teams that do not have the budget (or need) for dedicated outsourced or in-house revops!
It is quite difficult to be both tactical and strategic at the same time. Working with the CRM alone is time consuming and requires experience too.
Kevin Gaither You've brought up an important point about the challenges that come with making the first RevOps (Revenue Operations) hire. It's a role that requires a unique blend of strategic thinking and tactical execution.
Exactly what we were seeing in 2017/2018 that made us want to start Operatus!
Author, Named Top Women in Sales and Most Influential Women in Sales. Passionate about helping tech companies realize the full power of Virtual Selling, Inside Sales and Sales Development. Board Member.
11moKevin Gaither- I agree with you on this. The same thing can be said about many positions and the first hire- such as the first VP of Sales, needs to be both strategic and tactical- they have to close deals but also have to determine the GTM strategy. It's hard to find that one unicorn person that is great at both tactical and strategy and can equally provide attention to both.