DNX Workshop: The Journey to Building Operations at Scale
By Maya Edwards | DNX Summer Intern 2022
Earlier this year, DNX held another monthly knowledge workshop for our portfolio companies:
Presenter Karan Singh was the VP of Revenue Operations at Procore Technologies but has since begun helping portfolio companies full time with our friends over at Sapphire Ventures. As evident in his track record of building out effective sales operations teams at companies (Procore, Cloudera, Arcsight) that hit 3x hyper-growth and IPOs, Karan is a knowledgeable expert in building best-in-class revenue operations functions for companies at varying levels of scale and growth.
In this workshop, titled “The Journey to Building Revenue Operations at Scale,” Karan walked us through the process he underwent at multiple hypergrowth organizations to build out a revenue operations team.
This blog highlights some of the knowledge Karan shared on building Revenue Operations:
What is Revenue Operations? According to Karan, Revenue Operations is the “connective tissue” that brings revenue organization together through the process of defining strategy, plan and execution. It is the cohesive combination of sales operations, marketing operations and customer success operations that allows for “less friction in hand-offs.”
“With Revenue Operations, you are solving a problem — productivity — that you don’t yet know you have,” said Karan.
Why Revenue Operations? A strong Revenue Operations function allows you to maintain and grow seller productivity as you go through scale or hypergrowth. According to Karan, if you don’t invest in this function, you will start to stall at a certain point in the growth trajectory where it is no longer sustainable to “keep throwing bodies at the problem.”
“Without Revenue Operations, you become reactive as opposed to a predictive with these different pieces,” said Karan.
How Do You Build Revenue Operations? Karan laid out his 5 tenants of Revenue Operations:
- Strategy & Planning (the “priority engine”)
This tenant helps define how you design your revenue organization, how you segment and which markets you focus on unlocking. (target/quote setting, incentive strategy, territory design, workforce management, rules of engagement, etc.)
2. Insights & Governance (the “visibility engine”)
Governance drives your decision-making and is how you ensure strong and clean data (KPI standardization, data automation, policies), and insights serve as the organization that assesses the data and derives meaning (democratization of sanctioned data, high-quality analysts, reviewing key metrics).
3. Revenue Systems (the “technology” engine)
The first step in the execution phase, this tenant builds out the right technology to make your sellers, customer support and your marketers more focused on their direct tasks. Start with 3 core tool stacks — CRM & CPQ, Data Tools, and Sales Engagement — and progressively add more as your company grows.
4. Field Operations (the “process” engine)
Have a team or individual that can focus on articulating what processes you want to build. “Revenue is not about doing the new, big, compelling thing; it’s about doing the same core things really well,” said Karan.
5. Revenue Enablement (the “people engine”)
This tenant focuses on selling bigger and faster. It drives revenue productivity through the lens of onboarding & training, content development, messaging and effective analysis.
When Do You Invest in these Different Teams? Which of the 5 tenants you invest in depends on your company’s maturity level and location in the revenue operations journey.
In the “Early Product Market Fit” phase: focus on systems, processes and enablement to drive immediate returns (2–3 FTEs).
In the “Scaling” phase: prepare for sustainable scale and shift to forward-looking planning and insights (10:1 FTE and Rev Org ratio).
In the “Forever Company” phase: go deep and specific in all disciplines.
Thank you, Karan, for sharing your constructive and valuable knowledge with the DNX community! We will carry your advice with us throughout our journey of supporting entrepreneurs and startups.
