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The 6 Ps of Creating an Effective Revenue Operations Team

Posted on Nov 18, 2020 | 31 min

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About the speaker

Dane Voboril is Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Bynder.

He delves into a wealth of corporate experience having previously worked for many years at GHX, giving him exposure to both remote leadership and expat team building. Since his arrival at Bynder, he implemented the core tenants of a successful Revenue Operations team. Dane got to create this revenue operations framework from the ground up and use his previous experience in sales, operations, and revenue operations to lead that effort.

The Purpose of Revenue Operations

• It’s important to understand the purpose of rev ops: What does it mean? What does it do? What are the advantages of a revenue operations team? There are lots of great frameworks and resources in the revenue operations community. SiriusDecisions is one of those resources.
• Revenue Operations increases the efficiency, effectiveness, business contribution by aligning revenue, impacting operations teams. The framework is built to support the revenue engine the most effective and efficient way possible. Answer these questions:
  • How do your sales reps, how do your BDRs, how do your customer success representatives impact the customer in a meaningful way?
  • How do you increase customer satisfaction?
  • How do you drive more revenue and how do you do it the most efficient way possible where you’re increasing profitability?

Implementing Revenue Operations

• Understanding the politics of the organization is, is really paramount. There are lots of different ways you can implement revenue operations in an organization. You can have it all under one org structure where you’re taking marketing ops from marketing and sales ops from sales and customer success from downstream.
• It’s about understanding the players and driving to get alignment across those different stakeholders. And it starts at the top. It starts with executive alignment among the CMO and CRO and getting the buy-in from them that this type of alignment and coalition is going to help them be more successful in their jobs.
• The other thing is to ensure that the people who are within those teams understand what you’re doing. You almost have to reach across the aisle, so to speak, and break down those barriers.
• It’s also understanding what’s been done previously and consolidating all those efforts into one. But you need to think about the implications of what you’re trying to do and not make anyone angry. You want to listen and absorb and really understand what’s going on before you start doing anything.
• You need to make sure that what you’re doing is complementary to what the organization is trying to do, but at the same time, you also need to make sure that you’re imparting your knowledge in what’s going on and why it’s important to have revenue operations in this framework.
• Dane shares that Bynder is a very progressive company. They are very open to change and evolution. The company understands that they’re at this inflection point where it’s been rapid growth, and they’re no longer this small scrappy startup. To evolve into a big enterprise company, they need to put frameworks in place from a revenue operations perspective.

Don’t Focus on the Symptoms

• The steps are reform. First, you have to admit that you have a problem before you can fix the problem. But you have to understand what the problem is. The most important thing is don’t focus on the symptoms of the problem; you have to get to the underlying problem. What is the underlying thing you need to solve for?
• Data’s often one of the problems. Often, you come into an organization and you’re at a maturation point in the organization where the data is all over the place. You have data cleanliness issues and disjointed data that isn’t connected. You have one team reporting one thing and another team reporting another. They don’t match because you’re not using the same data sources.
• The tech stack is another huge problem. Oftentimes people implement tools because they think the tool is going to solve the problem. But, the tool can amplify your problem. In an inefficient process, automated processes become more inefficient.

Buy-In for Revenue Operations

• What motivates the team is the team coming together and seeing the potential together and going, Ooh, let’s go do that. Let’s go solve that. The strategic side is having those strategic conversations, not just with management, but also your sales leaders and sales reps, and getting them to see the potential of what can happen with a strong revenue operations function.
• It goes back to the purpose of revenue operations which is to support the sales and customer support teams and having them understand that potential and that strategic guidance that you can have. Being that strategic sparring partner to work together and think about how do we break into accounts? How do we get that internal champion? How do we make the legal process, the redlining process easier? You need to get down to the base root and prioritize the big-ticket items that are going to have the most impact for the long term.
• We’ve been seeing in the B2B space that needs revenue operations functions, is that it’s that highly dynamic environment that benefits most. Bynder is a great example of that. It’s very dynamic and growing fast, and the people are excited about that growth and change.

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