Crissy Saunders (CEO & Co-Founder, CS2 Marketing), Nick Bonfiglio (CEO, Syncari), and Rosalyn Santa Elena (Vice President, Global Revenue Operations, Neo4j) held this panel discussion at the Revenue Acceleration Festival in 2021, brought to you by our sister community, Sales Enablement Collective.
In the first part of this talk from the Revenue Acceleration Festival - Crissy, Nick and Rosalyn discuss:
Let's jump straight in 👇
Crissy ⚙️
I'm Crissy Saunders, and I'm the CEO of CS2. We’re a marketing ops agency located in the US on the West Coast.
I have two amazing guests joining me in this conversation. I have Rosalyn Santa Elena, the VP of Global Revenue Operations at Neo4J. She has a tonne of experience in business and revenue operations, and she's also the host of the Revenue Engine podcast.
I also have Nick Bonfiglio, the CEO of Syncari and the former EVP of Marketo. He's joining us with a tonne of experience on the operation side internally, but is also now answering some of the biggest problems that marketing and revenue ops leaders have when it comes to data.
We're talking about something near and dear to my heart, which is the importance of RevOps and some common issues you might find in your implementation.
I just want to highlight the importance of RevOps. We're clearly still in the infancy of RevOps, so we're going to do a little bit to set the stage on that.
There are some forward-thinking organizations that have already started that progress to put those teams together, and there's a lot that RevOps teams have on their plate.
But a big thing that we're seeing now is the importance of how all the teams can be aligned with supporting that customer journey and the customer experience.
Many of the operations teams that support different functions like sales ops, CS ops, and marketing ops all need to be aligned because they touch the same systems, but also have a part of that customer journey.
So it's just about further proving how important that organization is today.
Understanding the importance of RevOps
Crissy ⚙️
Rosalyn, you have a lot of experience in RevOps, so I want to hear from you.
Why RevOps? Why not just have better alignment between the teams and have them report as their own functions? Why group them together into one team?
Rosalyn 📈
Sales, marketing, and CS ops all have their own departments as you mentioned. They have their own key objectives, their own roadmaps, and sometimes their own data and systems.
So when it comes to aligning all of these things, oftentimes there's no one holistically looking at these across all of the departments, and more importantly, across the overall end-to-end customer journey. And that's RevOps.
We look at the total picture, not just from a strategy and KPI perspective, but also from the traditional people, process, technology, and data perspective.
And this really helps us to ensure that everyone stays aligned, that they're marching to the same beat, and they're working towards the same outcomes.
And when it comes to data, RevOps really helps to ensure that it’s accurate, comprehensive, and available to the right people at the right time.
And that's how we build that successful, repeatable revenue engine that we all want. Scalability to grow and bring more revenue faster.
Hannah Pegram
Crissy ⚙️
I think that there are so many opportunities to create chaos, but having everyone aligned on that dataset and keeping it maintained is hard enough to do alone.
But when you add on different teams who have different strategies and different goals or projects, that can be a bit tough because you might end up with duplicate data and automations. And so keeping those aligned is super important.
Top challenges associated with RevOps
Crissy ⚙️
Nick, what are some of the challenges you're seeing emerge for RevOps practitioners? What are some of the main ones that you're seeing across your clients and prospects?
Nick 📊
I think that with the prospects and customers that we're working with right now, one of the single biggest themes that we’re seeing coming out of almost every one of them is that their organizations are trapped.
It's primarily the ops organizations in this tactical firefighting mode.
And the reality is, if you're always trapped in this firefighting mode, it's really hard to think and act strategically in ways that are going to impact the revenue of a company.
Another way to say what we’re seeing is that people are spending a lot of their day putting out fires and creating new campaigns, etc, and not really putting in what it takes.
I love what Rosalyn said because we actually use this in our mission, which is that RevOps is an intersection of people, processes, and data. We spend a lot of time on the first two, and then we leave the ladder with the assumption that somebody else is going to work on that.
But the reality is to be strategic. And to move the insights of a business forward, you really have to start thinking about the data in a way that'll help grow your revenue engine. So that's thematically what we see in a lot of different companies today.
Paolo Negrini
Crissy ⚙️
I think when we're doing all of that firefighting or just being tactical, we can look like we're just grunt workers or spinning our wheels doing things all the time.
“It’s like if an engineering team was just fixing bugs all the time but wasn't doing any innovation on the product.”
With your team, you don't want to act that way. You want to maybe keep a layer. You need a buffer to account for things that might come up or fix some bugs and do some iterations.
