RevOps should hire UX or service designers — or maybe UX and service design teams should pay attention to RevOps

Background

The other day I received Greg and Taylor’s Personal Math post called, “Want a job interview? Being qualified isn’t enough.” If it hadn’t come into my email and I hadn’t been addicted to checking my email, I wouldn’t have clicked. That title gave me a burst of anger (quickly dampened with despair at the continued cruelty of a world where two more successfully, happily employed people get to talk to their audience about how hard — nay, futile! — the job search), and I don’t like to angry click.

Having said all that, I angry clicked. A few times.

After the third go around at angry clicking I finally read the piece all the way through. And lo, there was useful advice in there. (With these two there always is.) In summary the advice is:

1. Knowing a hell of a lot about your field and job function is table stakes now.
2. Revising your resume a thousand times won’t cut it
3. In addition, you need to have a point of view about your job function and the future (how the job is changing, what you will do about it). Do not tailor this to every application. It should be a general stance
4. Develop it
5. Publish it
6. Revise once a year

And that, friends and haters, is what this is. An early POV. What a great homework assignment to create for myself. Expect an email, Greg and Taylor. [Update: This post was edited to reflect feedback from Greg — thank you, Greg!]

(Wait, doesn’t she have a lot of nerve having a point of view about RevOps at this point?)

Yes, yes she does. But as I mentioned in my last post, I noticed immediately that for all the new that RevOps is, and how holistic the work has to be, it has kept a remarkably narrow hiring pool.

This makes me think about User Experience (UX), a space I was introduced to in 2012 while I was still figuring out which part of the dev stack I wanted to focus on, and then ended up shifting focus to project management and then product. UX was always part of my work, and I paid attention to the big talkers and the topics they put on the communal agenda exactly the way I am now with RevOps.

It seems to me that RevOps is at a similar point to UX back in 2012. Except UX, at that equivalent stage, welcomed practitioners from several walks of life and backgrounds; that diversity of thought and skillsets has been a net positive.

What RevOps requires

RevOps right now is mostly business operations or sales operations by another name, much like UX was mainly visual design or user interface design by another name in its earlier days.

Out of the 26 job postings on LinkedIn:

• 8 were duplicates (so actually, 18 unique job postings)
• [Fascinatingly, one is actually a product manager role focusing on Revops — go figure]
• All required SQL, Excel/Google Sheets, data viz, and previous experience in either sales ops or in a couple of cases, customer success
• Strong bias to Salesforce, people with finance or accounting degrees, and GTM experience

While there were nods to some interpersonal skills (mainly “strong communicator”) and personal traits (“self starter”), no question this domain focuses on strong analytical skills and the desire to hang out very close to the border with data engineering (extracting and cleaning data sets, doing heavy quantitative analysis, running reports, and making dashboards).

Yet much like UX requires more holistic thinking than strictly visual design, RevOps requires much more holistic thinking than strictly sales. People with certain less-easily-taught skills required to help RevOps build momentum and get funding in a company can also contribute to the team while they are skilling up at the quantitative/analytical pieces.

What RevOps should also look for

Luckily for RevOps, many folks in UX have been doing these less-easily-taught skills for a long time:

• Advocating for the job function’s overall value to the business / making the business case step by step
• Clarifying constantly what exactly the job function is to… everyone
• Teaching others how to collaborate with and include the job function
• Building cross-functional relationships between departments and silos
• Making customer journeys (Hubspot nicely points out when these are actually the same artifact between UX and Sales/Marketing)
• Generating and analyzing data + communicating this back to stakeholders who are not of the same discipline or job function
• Analyzing systems and their composite parts (including people), and figuring out how to improve the end-to-end experience (this is more specifically service design, and has come into awareness in the US on about the same timeline as RevOps)

The POV

Great RevOps teams have both members who can offer their experience in the un-asked for areas (while skilling up in the required areas) and those with the required skills currently listed.

This powerful combination ensures that not only is the work getting done at a high standard, but the team is being effectively integrated into the wider business, called upon to live up to its full purpose, and funded.