Cycles are all around us: hey there, RevOps
I heard once that sometimes life brings lessons back to you, creating cycles of learning throughout your lifetime. One such deja vu moment for me was coming across this concept of RevOps in a HubSpot certification course.
I was looking for something else, but when I saw this I dug in and quickly realized, “Oh my g-d, this is what I was trying to do in 2019 at [company] and had no idea there was a name for that!”
Then I thought again, “Wait… there was a name for that …
…
Just like the study I was going to do for my PhD take one. Holy…”
It was oddly satisfying to realize this, and galvanizing. I find connections between seemingly unlike things like a game of memory.
So who cares? Why am I writing about this?
Because it bugged me that all the people in the RevOps course that HubSpot put together seemed to come from sales ops, sales engineering, or business ops. They would advocate from time to time that you should grow your team from customer service or marketing ops, but I thought, how do you honestly see yourselve being as holistic as RevOps asks you to be when you were formerly an expert in one of the silos? (Why is this yet another area of business innovation that is not led by service design?)
“RevOps specialists work closely with teams across the business to ensure alignment and optimization of revenue operations. They facilitate collaboration and communication between sales, marketing, and customer success, and identify areas where processes can be streamlined to improve efficiency.”
You definitely should know what’s going on with sales, marketing, and customer success, and the systems they work in. But you know who else is good at facilitating collaboration and communication? Product and design people. You know who else has to find areas where processes can be streamlined to improve efficiency, aka the experience? Product and design people. You know who else is paying attention to revenue (I hope)? Product people.
To illustrate this assertion, I decided to draw a line between my product and design experience, and RevOps.
To draw said line, I thought I’d create some deja vu for readers and surface an old piece I did for uxcollective.cc called Our Project, ourselves. In there, I taught readers how to evaluate all of their experiences — personal, professional, all of it — and derive the skills or lessons they gained that they then brought into the next experience they had. That set of skills became their practitioner toolkit (for UX, but also really any role in tech, or probably life).
A non-sales based RevOps toolkit
*Each experience lists only the new skills I picked up. I definitely used all my previously-acquired skills in each subsequent role. I’m also not including every single experience because I’m older now and this article has taken much, much more time to draft than I expected. 😅
→ Grad school, but not for an MBA
| It turns out that a Master’s in International Relations is extremely helpful for working in agile software teams and managing stakeholders, especially cross-functionally. Presentation skills
→ Director of Operations at a non-profit (first hire)
| Financial accounting, being a first hire, building processes from scratch, evaluating tools and procedures, documentation, reporting, managing up
→ Project Lead, boutique agency
| Not to cheat but… project management. Also budgeting, web dev and design for MQL gen, Google Analytics, SEO, social media marketing, contract management
→ Project Manager, big-time SF tech startup (first hire)
| Say yes and then figure it out, data collection, data analysis, program creation, change management, systems thinking, relationship building, crossfunctional communication… all during hypergrowth
→ [Move to Australia]
| Make an MVP plan and then act (don’t overthink), find a way to get to Point B (it might not be the most obvious way)
→ [Run my own projects in Australia]
| Take risks and take initiative using an experimenter’s mindset (know your variables, hypothesized outcomes, and be able to roll back if needed), accept invitations to events and learn something from everyone you encounter, be interested not interesting
→ Product Research Manager, national agency
| Data generation, writing business cases for tools, pitching, diagramming, mentoring less experienced team members
→ Product Lead, internet infrastructure consulting company (first hire)
| Board of Directors presentations, team management, process documentation and evaluation between marketing, sales, customer success, product, and eng (what I called “information superhighways”); Hubspot, hiring, feedback
***This is the point where I was starting to think like a RevOps practitioner and didn’t know it.
→[Move back to the US, and now married]
| My communication skills, emotional intelligence and self-awareness got waaaaaaay better
→ Senior Product Researcher, cryptocurrency exchange (first hire)
| Data viz, SQL, R, process communication
→ Senior consultant in strategic partnerships, back at the boutique agency (first hire)
| Building a CRM, sales and sponsorship cold outreach, fundraising, accounting (internal), LinkedIn ad campaigns, Google Ads
Despite all of this experience in the communicating, collaborating, change management, data analysis and paying attention to financials and sales processes, I completed that HubSpot RevOps certification because it was really fun. I also wanted to load up my metaphorical backpack.
Why? because it’s going to be a journey — to adopting this philosophy and strategy, to hiring intelligently, and selling executives everywhere on the value of this work. Of the 9 jobs I can see for RevOps on LinkedIn posted in the past week, most sound like regular old business analyst jobs with the word RevOps thrown in. They literally all say “analyst” except one (which I think is secretly a UX job).
And you know what? That’s another moment of deja vu.*
*UX has been dealing, for pretty much all of the 21st century, with User Interface, Visual Design, and (for a while) Graphic Design jobs pretending to be UX only because some genius just threw the term in the title. Welcome, RevOps.
