Bursts of Color - Revenue Ops 101 (Guest Interview)

You may know Wendy Lim as my partner in Burst Capital. She was previously early at Yelp where, among other roles, she built and scaled the Revenue Operations team from 3 to 50 as the sales and marketing teams grew from around 100 to 3000. Today she joins us to share some starter suggestions for building a RevOps function.

For those who would like to learn more about Rev Ops and compare notes with other companies, Wendy has offered to host a couple of Zoom sharing sessions in the coming weeks. Feel free to sign up here or pass this along to your RevOps colleague.

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What RevOps Includes: A Rough Guide by Company Stage

What is Revenue Operations?

WL: It’s the function that aims to maximize company revenue by streamlining and aligning sales, marketing and customer success. RevOps is responsible for the systems, software, processes and data for these revenue-generating functions.

Where did RevOps Come From? Why Does it Matter?

WL: Revenue Operations started to appear in the late 2000s, after the growth of functions like Sales Operations and Marketing Operations. As companies launched multiple channels and revenue models, complexity increased and there was a benefit to bringing all of this into one team.

When Should I Start a RevOps function?

WL: As soon as you begin generating revenue, you typically need the very beginnings of a RevOps function. This typically looks like:

• A basic CRM implementation; most companies use Salesforce

• Commission plan

• Sales and/or CX script

At this time, staffing will likely come from a shared resource at the company (analyst, admin, etc.); this person should be a good communicator and able to quickly pick up new systems. The responsibilities are fairly basic at this point and include cleaning up data, ad hoc trouble-shooting and documenting processes. 

A rough guide to RevOps Leaders by stage

When Should I Hire an Experienced RevOps Leader?

WL: It depends. :) Each company has a different amount of complexity based on their revenue model and channels.

That being said, once you’ve developed a repeatable sales process and you’re looking to significantly scale your revenue, that’s a good time to bring in an experienced leader. This stage might look like $10m in revenue for some companies or $25m for others.

Want To Learn & Talk More About RevOps?

WL: Join one of our upcoming sessions.