Let’s say you do work for sales ops and you only report into sales. That means that any of the decisions made in marketing have a ripple effect on the work that you do, and decisions that you make are gonna have a ripple effect on the post sale team. And if you just put blinders on and you do not care about what those ripple effects are, you’re probably not a very good ops person. Right? And so that difference between just doing solving the problem that is directly in front of your face versus actually looking around corners and anticipating what the potential ripple effects of that decision are, that’s where we find the distinction between the kind of average and stellar operations folks. This is revenue makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. You’re on LinkedIn. I am a lot too much probably. Okay. So LinkedIn released its list of the twenty five fastest growing job titles in the US. Do you have any guess on what the number one job was on that list? If it wasn’t LinkedIn, I would probably say, underwater basket weaver, but, something to do with AI, maybe? Close, but it’s actually the head of rev ops. Well, that actually makes a ton of sense. Actually, it makes a lot of sense, especially considering how the world is so so much more data for sales and marketing and for revenue teams, and it makes sense that that’s a that’s a fast growing role. So and what a perfect setup in your intro to our call to to our call to our podcast today. So we have our first dual guest setup on the show. So many people in the room today. But it worked. And it was it’s Sean Lane and Laura Adant who they have written a book called the Revenue Operations Manual, and their backgrounds, they work together, in that function at Drift. Laura is in the financial services sector, and Sean is now the founding partner at Beacon GTM, where he works with revenue leaders on their go to market execution. And this was just a deep dive into all things rev ops. It really was, and I am a rev ops nerd. And I will say all the rev ops teams I’ve looked at have looked a little bit different that whether I’ve been part of that team or I’ve joined a company. And so it’s great that they’ve kind of taken all of the learnings, not just from what they’ve done themselves, but they’ve interviewed, I think, over fifty RevOps professionals to really come up with really four major pillars that folks need to consider as they’re building their RevOps team or as they’re scaling it. Lots of really good takeaways and tips, how to hire for the right folks, how to make sure you’re best friends with the right folks. Lots of, like you said, insight and action. So let’s let’s jump in. Everyone, you know, get your notebooks out because there’s a lot to learn here. Let’s do it. Laura, Sean, thanks so much for jumping on today. Really looking forward to this conversation. We’ve been wanting to deep dive into reverent operations since we started the show, so you are you are our victims for today. Thanks for having us. It’ll either be great or it’ll be chaos. Either way, I’m up for it. We have, like, a fifty percent chaos success rate, so I think that’s okay. So let’s just jump in. So you’ve written a book. Just like the end all be all. Could you tell us a little bit about kind of where how it started, how it came to be, and then we’ll just we’ll dig into your backgrounds a little bit. We’ll actually get into the meat of of the function. But just love how do you go to from being rev ops professionals to writing? So Sean and I used to work together at Drift. I was Sean’s boss. And as I was exiting Drift, he was, basically pulling into my spot. And he said, so what are you what are you thinking about? Like, what’s next? And I’m like, well, I have this idea. He goes, well, let’s keep in touch on that. And so truth as Sean is really good at remembering everything. He did remember that conversation and he followed up about I think it was about a year later and said, hey. So, like, how’s it going on that book? Do you wanna do you wanna join forces? And it was great because at the time, it was not very much progress, and we took it on as a project that we got to work with. We liked working together so much. We had to look for another reason to work together. Well, tell us then. Tell us the title of the book and what it’s about. Yeah. So the book’s called The Revenue Operations Manual. It very much unabashedly celebrates operations folks. And that’s something that was important to Laura and I as we set out to to write this book. And there are a few other things that, you know, we really wanted to kind of accomplish in writing the book. Right? So first and foremost, we wanna make sure it wasn’t one of those books that had all of the concepts in the first chapter, and then you don’t really need to read any of the rest of the book. This book is a blueprint. So every single section of the book, every chapter is meant to be a more practical guide for operations folks to be able to use to do their job well. And then the other thing that was important to us was, you know, Laura and I are not vain enough to think that we have all the answers. And so we really wanted to make sure that we brought in experts from across a wide range of industries and different types of companies to make sure we could incorporate their voices into the book. So we’ve got interviews with, like, fifty different operators from a bunch of different industries who tell their stories, not only of their successes, but we also have this confession corner series throughout the book to basically talk about when things didn’t go according to plan. So we’re we’re excited to get it out there and for folks to be able to have this blueprint for not just why rev ops should exist, but a really practical guide for how to build a world class rev ops organization. What? My favorite thing or kind of key tenant of it of the book that that really seems to stand out is this concept of operations as a strategic I can’t talk. Strategic function as opposed to a support function, which I think is very easy for operations of any kind to sort of fall into. You’re gonna dig in a little bit on that and sort of how does and I say we have revenue operations folks listening or how do marketing operations or sales, whoever listening. How do you make that leap and say, you know what? That’s great. We can go and do all these things for you, but we’re not here just to do that. I would say first and foremost, you’re right. It’s way easier to say out loud than it is to actually pull off. Right? And you said right at the top, we’re the first rev ops folks to be on the show. Like, I host my own rev ops show, and we’ve had a hundred and thirty something episodes. Everyone says that they wanna be a strategic function and not a support function. But then what we try to do in the book is kinda outline the bridge between saying you wanna be that and actually pulling it off. And the biggest thing that Laura and I talk a lot about when we were working together and then also throughout the book is the idea that earning that seat at the table is not a given, right? And so in order to earn that seat as a strategic partner and, more importantly, to keep that seat, you have to consistently provide value to your internal stakeholders. So if we’re working with you folks, it would be marketing leadership, right, or sales leadership, customer leadership, whoever your internal customers are. Our job as operators is to make you all better at your jobs. And if you don’t feel like that’s what we’re doing with you every single day, every single week, if there’s this big chasm between things that are important to marketing operations and things that are important to marketing leadership, then you don’t really have a partnership. Right? And so looking for ways that you can provide value, we think, is the single most important thing. And then once you’ve started to do that, then it’s all about how you communicate and articulate the value, something that I think ops folks notoriously are not phenomenal at. And then lastly, how do we make sure that through different operating rhythms, we maintain alignment between all of us here on the work that’s most worth doing? Right? There’s plenty of projects to keep ops people busy, but what are the things that are actually gonna move the needle such that we create more pipeline this quarter or rep productivity increases or our retention rates get better? Right? Identifying those together as a group is how we feel like you actually become that strategic partner and also kind of bring your own perspective to the table. Yeah. Love that. And I think what I love about the way you position the book is it is a book by practitioners about, you know, the specific topic. And as somebody who’s lived in the ops world for so long and has been part of multiple rev ops functions, I will tell you, I none of them has looked like the other. There’s always a little bit different and rev ops can mean different things for different companies and different orgs. And so I would love to get your thought on, is there a consistency in theme, or is that the constant that it really is, you know, what is needed within an org? We actually do talk about that in the book that we did start out with, like, well, what do we mean by rev and up operations? And it does seem to be different for many different companies. One of that could be because we’re one of the youngest functions to exist in the corporate world. So when you’re younger in function, it does tend to look have different flavors. Another is that it’s so tied in with a company and how that company goes to market and how they choose to do what they do, and that’s unique per company. So you are gonna see some alignment with what type of company it is. So rev and operations naturally will look a little bit. We do think that it’s somewhat because of the youth in it, and we also think that there isn’t a one prescribed way that it must look in order to be effective. So it’s really to the spirit of how do you affect the outcomes and whichever branches you have under your umbrella, it is more of a philosophy and a mindset. We talk a lot about the revenue operations mindset versus it must look this way on the org chart. So I think, you know, the answer is a little bit of it’s probably the evolution of it, and it’s a little bit of the company, and it kind of doesn’t matter. Right. Now given everyone looks a little bit different, but you have sort of outlined kind of a key way to build the function in a very much a four part pillars, approach to it. Can you talk through a little bit kind of the four, and then we can just start digging on each one of them because there’s a lot of really good, insights on each section. Yeah. For sure. So like I said, we wanted the book to be a blueprint. Right? So if you were designing an a rev ops team from scratch, how would you go about doing it? Or if you were entering into a company from scratch, how would you go about making sure that the role and the team lives up to the lofty expectations that we’ve all been talking about together. Right? So part one for us is build your knowledge. So you’re brand new to a company. How do you figure out what that company does, what the product does? Where’s the low hanging fruit inside of how the company operates today? The second is building the business itself. So what are the operating rhythms that make that business run? How do we think about the customer journey, aligning the tech stack to that customer journey? Things like forecasting, pipeline management, all the stuff that people think about when they think about ops all lives in that build your business category. Then we talk about building your partnerships, and that’s what we were talking about a little bit earlier. Who are all of the different internal customers and cross functional partners that you have as an ops team? And that goes well beyond just the sales, marketing, customer success, go to market team. There’s a ton of cross functional partners that we talk about there. And then last but not least is building out the team. So who makes for a good revenue operator? How do you find these people? What do they look like? How should you staff your team? Those are kind of the four different pillars that we built on there. I mean, so many places to go here. I guess let’s just start and maybe Adam and I like to talk about things we see on LinkedIn, and you see a lot of rants on LinkedIn and all caps lock. And one of the rants I see a lot is revenue ops is just sales ops with a fancy name. Right? And I think with that initial setup that you talked about, very step one, that’s really where you’re setting that strategy and the fact that this is a more holistic approach. So can we dig into that one a little bit? And what does make a difference from sales ops? Yeah. So I think a couple things. One, Laura and I, one of our, like, pet peeves about ops people sometimes is if they are complainers. And we really wanted to make sure that nothing in the book even just sniffed of that. Right? It was really important to us that that didn’t exist because it really is about having partnerships with these different groups. And so what I would say is, you know, the on paper distinction between sales ops and rev ops is usually rev ops is a more centralized function. It usually supports more internal customers than just sales, but sales might be one of those versus in a more function specific model, sales off my report directly into sales and only support them. The point we try and make is that regardless of who you report to and, by the way, a lot of people listening to this might not be in a position where they get to redesign the org or pick who they report to. What we believe is that regardless of who you report to, you have to care about what happens in the other parts of the customer journey that you are not necessarily directly responsible for. So let’s say you do work for sales ops, and you only report into sales. That means that any of the decisions made in marketing have a ripple effect on the work that you do, and decisions that you make are gonna have a ripple effect on the post sale team. And if you just put blinders on and you do not care about what those ripple effects are, you’re probably not a very good ops person. Right? And so that difference between just doing the problem solving the problem that is directly in front of your face versus actually looking around corners and anticipating what the potential ripple effects of that decision are, that’s where we find the distinction between the kind of average and stellar operations folks. And so I think that no matter what you call it, no matter who you report to, if you instill this mindset in the work that you’re doing, that’s usually a recipe for success. Right. That makes a ton of sense. We talk about again, like, of the I I just I love the pillars. We talk about building your business and really talking about, like, the operating rhythm. I guess it it also is interesting at what point a revenue operations function comes up. Right? Because if you’re a start up and that would be probably unlikely that it’s, like, a brand new business. Like, okay. We have to, like, buy a CRM system and then build a rev ops function. I’m sure it doesn’t go. It’s not gonna go that way. But how do you look at a rev ops’s role in sort of architecting that customer journey and how you report on it and all that? And then at what phase do you think and I think the answer is probably as soon as possible. But at what phase do you think revenue operations goes from being something that we should build in the future, like, it has to happen now? So it’s probably a double question. Yeah. So I think as early as possible is probably the easy answer. We do actually talk a little bit about it of, like, sort of what the ingredients have to be. You have to be at a stage where it’s not a founder led sale, so you actually have established sales processes and something that you’re following. And we kind of think of it as the product manager that revenue operations is the product manager of your company, right, of thinking of through the whole thing of how do you go to market. So you have to be at least big enough for that. And then we talk about, like, how do you invest in these and when do you invest? And we talk we have a a great contributor, Pete Kaczynski. Is that right? That’s Sean. That’s right. Kazanji. Yep. Kazanji. I I knew I didn’t quite get it, Kazanji. He has this great, like, rule of thumb of, you know, if you think about investing in ops, like, anything that you invest in, they should be able to return at least that more to the business. So how much efficiency can you get? How how many hours can you take out of whichever it’s sales ops, sales lives, customer support lives, post support lives. So in thinking about how do you invest on a long ongoing basis. I think you had one more portion of that question that I might not have addressed in thinking about, like, how do you how do you start out? Like yeah. And then again, like, if you’re architecting again, like, you’ve got the cadence and the rhythm, but, like, the customer journey itself obviously is about all about certainly data points as well. Like, how you get involved in that and then at what stage? Yeah. We We do believe that revenue operations needs to do that right up front. And we we have some great diagrams of thinking about how do you think about it. And it doesn’t start just when you’ve started a sale. Like, it goes way before that, and it doesn’t end when you do the sale. It goes all the way after that and even upon renewal for renewing business or rebuying or buying more. So it’s really the full life cycle and thinking about the revenue operations and that mindset that Sean and I have talked about of really, you have to go beyond just the one little narrow slice, even if you’re only in charge of the one narrow slice, thinking beyond that slice and understanding how all the parts play in together from everything from your tech stack to your data. Right? Do you know and can you track your data through this? Where are the tech stack gaps where you don’t have anything that that’s probably gonna be also likely placed it as a failure? So understanding that and thinking and planning ahead, looking around the corners, like Sean said, those are what we believe revenue operations is uniquely situated to do and the power in it. I also think that if you’re gonna be in charge of instrumenting your customer journey, you need to understand it, right? So you need to have gone through this both from the perspective of your actual external customers as well as all of your internal ones. So what does the day in the life of a rep look like? What does the day in the life of a marketer, of a customer success person look like? And then as you work your way through that, you have to match the complexity of the journey that you’re building with the maturity of your company. Right? So if you’re early stage, you’re just basically figuring out what are the key milestones in this journey that we can define and count. Literally, what are the things we wanna count? It’s like this is a lead. This is a meeting. This is an opportunity. This is a customer. Can we count those basic steps? And then as you mature, you get to be company like Six Senses’ size or some of Six Senses’ customers, and your needs probably get a little bit more complex. But we think it’s really important in those conversations to make sure you match the complexity of the systems you’re building with the maturity of your company. If you can’t count those milestones I described before, you’re not ready for anything more complex than that just yet. It’s so true, and I love, the third pillar around building partnerships. Some of what I feel elevates rev ops to a strategic function is when you are really bringing the viewpoint of all of the players into this conversation. Right? Because so much of what an operations team is creating on one side has downstream effects further down, whether it’s on the data being created, whether it’s on the decisions being made. Who needs to be rev ops as best friends, I guess, in in the organization? When you think about We should answer this at the same time, Sean, and see if we have the same. I personally think it’s finance, but that’s that’s my answer. Sean, do you have an answer? One, I knew you were gonna say finance, and I was gonna agree with you. Finance. Yeah. Well, that’s not contentious at all. What we really wanted to stress though is, like, the easy ones are your go to market teams, right? Marketing, sales, and customer. Those are easy and usually built in in people’s kind of preconceived definitions about what ops is and who they work with. But, you know, we think certainly finance from, like, a budgeting, comp design, operating plan perspective is really important. But if you kind of continue to expand on that, you know, what’s your partnership look like with your recruiting team as you think about headcount and hiring plans? What’s your relationship look like with your legal team in terms of how contracts interact with all of your different systems. And then what about product? Like, imagine think about how many go to market meetings you’re in in a given week. That product’s not even in the room. Right? How can ops help kinda be the connective tissue between your product organization and the rest of the go to market? There’s a whole bunch of ways you can make those different partnerships stronger. It’s tricky, right, because all of a sudden you might end up with this charter that’s crazy broad, and so you have to be really careful about how you prioritize the work that you do. But, realistically ops should have that uniquely comprehensive view of how all of these different decisions might have ripple effects on other teams in the organization. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the biggest challenge. Right? Because any rev ops team within the rev ops function, there’s so many jobs to be done. Right? Nonnegotiables. You’ve gotta get a plan out. You’ve gotta get territories assigned. You’ve gotta make sure that tech sec is working well. How do those teams that have this never ending list of things to do also continue to drive forward strategic initiatives that will make next year better, or maybe even the next three, four years out be so much better? We actually dedicate quite a bit of time on goal setting, planning, working with your partners, all of those folks that Sean just mentioned and thinking about setting goals in not just a isolated way, but a broad and integrated way. And then even in those operating cadences, the operating meetings and rhythms of the company that you have that built into keeping track of, are those the goals that are the ones that are the most important to set up the success for this quarter, next quarter, maybe it’s two years out, but thinking of it in that integrated way of not only integrated with your various partners around the company, but integrated in the something new just happened, drop all things and go towards this, making sure that that is the right thing, that you are dropping the right things. So we spent a lot of time actually on the goal setting, both when we work together, but also, like, was we were writing about it and thinking about it and thinking about how we had a a wonderful again, another operator that came in and talked about how they did planning and talking, like, bringing in those best practices for other people that had done that. Can’t be underestimated because you’re right. Like, it’s so easy to get trapped into the the quick let’s just do this and lose sight of the what’s the most important thing to get done. So last I think we covered pillars. But the last one on build your team, right, in terms of, like, how do you think about the organizational structure? Like, it’s the rev ops person, and then it grows. But talk a little bit about how you’ve seen and how you would advise for, like, a, who’s that first hire? And then how do you go from one to two to whatever growth it takes? Yeah. So I think in finding that first hire, no matter what, that person has to be a doer. And honestly, I think our, Laura and I would both argue that even if you have an ops team of ten, the most senior leader on that team is still gonna be a doer. And and so that’s just, like, kind of ingrained in the team. And we when we talk to people and we were thinking about all the different traits that we saw in operators, there were a few that we kind of landed on that were the difference between, again, the kind of average operator and and the best ones that we sought out. And so the first is this idea of being adaptively excellent. And being adaptively excellent means you can get dropped into any situation. So if you’re that first operator coming into a brand new business and you’re the you’re a team of one, and you can use the context of places you’ve worked before, historical knowledge you have, and the environment that you’re in and thrive in that environment despite it being brand new to you. So people who can do that in a way that is real and authentic and not a way that’s, like, hand wavy and kind of BS, Like, those people are really, really good operators. You also want people who want to be the ones who solve the problems, like, almost in, like, a weirdly competitive way. Like, they want to be the one who figures out the solution to the problems that are in front of them. Those folks are usually great for those early operations teams. And then there’s just, like, a curiosity in in the the best operators that we that we spoke to as well. Like, they’re never quite satisfied. They’re looking for role models and lessons and ways that they can continue to improve themselves. So I think if you do that, then you can start to build a team. And then as you build out the team, the challenges of org design really start to shift. Right? That’s when you actually have to start to figure out what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different people on the team, just like any team that you would be building, and figure out how do you staff the team to account for those shortcomings or weaknesses or blind spots that you might have. Especially if you’re the first person or you’re the leader. You really want to find people who are better at the things that you are not good at because resources are always going to be super tight. And so Laura and I used to do this exercise with our teams. I still do it today. I encourage a bunch of people to do it that we work with. And it’s basically this color coding exercise of all of these different areas of competencies that you might have within a rev ops team. And every six months, you go through this list and you say, okay. The stuff in green is the stuff that I know I like doing and I’m good at. The stuff in red is the stuff I know I don’t like doing or prefer not to do. The stuff in blue is, I don’t really know, but I would like exposure to this. And when you run this exercise every six months, one, you’d be shocked at how people’s interests change. But, two, it helps you both to find things for that person to work on in terms of project assignment in the next six months to give them the exposure and the career growth they’re looking for, but it also makes it glaringly obvious where your shortcomings are on the current team you have. So when you do open up that next hire, you’re looking to actually plug those particular holes. Oftentimes, the best rev ops folks, maybe not often, but they’re they’re the youngest in the room. Right? It’s a it’s a young function. You said it yourself. Right? And so there’s a lot of young folks who are having to influence people with very senior titles, who have a very specific POV. Old people, is that what you’re saying? You’re saying nothing was old people. It’s not the first time we talked about it. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. No. He he he calls me old all the time. But other than titling, which I do think there’s a place for having a title for rev ops folks that is more, you know, on par with some of the other peers in, within the business, how do you help drive that influence or encourage or cultivate that influence in rev ops teams? Because they’re so used to, in certain times, maybe being on the back end of things or being working more with systems than people, but we really need them to speak up because they see things that nobody else sees. Yeah. I think I’ll start, Sean and I would love for you to finish this out because I think we both have a lot to say on this one. I think it starts with, and we talk about coming to it with a point of view. That operators need to come with it with a point of view that is backed by your data and communicated on the, as you said it, that unique view that you get as an operator, being able to connect all those dots and being able to see the upstream downstream. So first is understanding that you need to come with the point of view. And then, Sean, I’ll let you finish because I know you’re equally passionate about this. So I’ll, I think it’s a great handoff one as well. Yeah. I mean, I think the power dynamic that you described, like, can’t be understate. Like, that is usually a VP of sales or a VP of marketing and a individual contributor who’s like an analyst or, you know, maybe a mid level manager or something like that. And that’s who you have to go toe to toe with in all of the routines that we’re talking about. And I think we we didn’t talk about this in in the traits that we’re describing, but, like, you want someone who is actually going to push back on those people and actually put forth the perspective that Laura was just talking about in in terms of how they would develop it. And so I think, like, no matter how great the ops team is, I think you also still need that senior leader to be open to that conversation and be open to it. And I think all of the rhythms that we’ve talked about, if you don’t have cross functional partners who are willing to come to the table with an open mind and a collaborative mindset in terms of the work that they’re doing, like, you could have the best ops team in the whole world and it wouldn’t matter. Right? And so those partnerships are very much a two way street, but I do think it’s important for those senior leaders to recognize that sometimes the power dynamic can be a little bit imbalanced and account for that. Once you have the foundational trust, by the way, like, people are usually pretty great. Right? And it feels scary the first time, but once you prove that you know what you’re talking about and you have value to bring to the table, then all of a sudden the the playing field, I think, gets leveled pretty quick. Then you’re the first one to be tapped in. Correct. No matter what the Yeah. And you’ll know if you’re in that spot because you’ll hear from those people a lot more. So I just got a note that apparently, the book has been optioned by Universal for a movie. Just came in. So my question to you, Sean Laurie, you can go any order. Who will play you in the film? The book, really? Adam, I’m just trying to get an audio book on on the movie. Forget a movie. I’m try I’m just trying to get an audio book out there. It’s a big question. It’s a good question. Yes. I have no idea. I would leave it through the casting director. Sean seems speechless. So Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna I’m gonna leave that one. That kind of blew our minds right there. You know what, Adam? You know what the answer is? There’s no answer to that that doesn’t make us look like either we’re super vain and we think we’re way better looking than we are, or we’re just way off, in terms of who who we could have had there. Okay. So I won’t give you that answer. Taken as I would shoot for, like, the most beautiful person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hell, yeah. I actually I and and this goes on a tangent, but I actually I’ve cast several people, including Saima. I’ve given them who would play them in the movie, but it’s a little bit of an extra. Mine, I will say people have said this to me, and I don’t think it’s because it’s it’s Vince Vaughn. Because I don’t think Vince Vaughn is, like, stunningly handsome. Right? He passes, but he’s funny, and he’s oddly tall. And it’s kind of, like, the Hoffaize thing. But, anyway, I digress. Great conversation. We do have a question though that we ask everyone on the show, and we’re gonna ask both of you. And it’s gonna come probably another one’s gonna throw you off, but has nothing to do with rev ops. But it’s what is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve ever been asked to do, either positive or negative, in your career? Okay. I I do have one. I got my very first management position I got hired into. I was told that I needed to demote somebody as my first act as their manager in the first week of being your manager. That’s terrible. You’d think they really done that before you joined. Yeah. I had to deliver a pip, a demotion, and a, like, worst rating that I didn’t even write, for the review. That was the most ridiculous for me. Sean, can you top that one? Come on, please. So I used to work for a restaurant technology company, and so we did POS systems, credit card processing for restaurants. And my first job there was an implementation. So I would onboard new restaurants onto the service. And so we used to ship out, like, truly, like, brick credit card terminals to these places. And so one of my customers that I was assigned to onboard just assumed that I was coming in person, like, which we did not do. And so they were like, yeah. So what time are you gonna be at the bar to plug these in? And it was, like, literally my first job out of college. I was, like, four o’clock on Wednesday. And so I took the train to Boston, went in, and was, like, behind the bar manually plugging in all of the credit card terminals at at this restaurant, which they were using phone lines to do dial up transactions to process the credit cards. And it was an enormous bar. So there were like nine of these things. And so I spent my afternoon, plugging in credit card terminals more than once. And happy customer, man. Yeah. All worked out. Personalized service. Yeah. Alright. Well, we always talk about our definitive episodes, but this was the definitive RevOps episode, no doubt, in my mind. So Thank you guys so much for having us. Great conversation. Thank you. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. 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Revenue operations play a central role in business, but with so many pieces in motion, managing it all can feel overwhelming before we ever think about optimizing.
Luckily, Sean Lane and Laura Adint have created a clear blueprint to help RevOps professionals navigate it all.
As co-authors of The Revenue Operations Manual, Sean and Laura outline their four-pillar approach to building and scaling a RevOps team. While the specifics may vary by company, they highlight the key qualities that define a great RevOps professional, helping them become strategic partners within the business. They also share valuable insights on fostering collaboration across sales, marketing, and product teams.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Best practices for aligning RevOps with marketing, sales, and customer success
- When to bring in a RevOps team for maximum business impact
- Key traits and skills to look for when hiring RevOps professionals
Jump into the conversation:
00:00 Introducing Sean Lane and Laura Adint
02:44 The Revenue Operations Manual
05:39 RevOps as a strategic partner
10:10 The Revenue Operations blueprint and mindset
14:04 Designing the customer journey
19:09 Building strong cross-functional partnerships
22:51 Hiring the right people and building a RevOps team
27:06 How RevOps teams can drive strategic initiatives and long-term success
The 6sense Team
6sense helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team.