Living up to the high expectations of modern SaaS customers is a matter of life and death for startups. Enterprise customers are getting pickier — they expect user interfaces that feel like a B2C experience. They want to make a purchase without talking to an account executive (AE). They’d like to start small and get flexible pricing that reflects the actual value they see from the product (i.e. usage based models). And they certainly don’t want to adjust their subscriptions without undue effort, like talking to someone.

The “RevOps” job function has emerged as a way for businesses to find success in the face of these dizzying customer expectations — which, in turn, demands RevOps tools. A matter of opinion, but generally it’s accepted that RevOps (and its associated tooling) seeks to align Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Finance Operations across all phases of the customer lifecycle. 

“I think there's been a general acknowledgment of how interconnected the full revenue life cycle is,” says Lisa Kelly, former SVP of Ops at Talkdesk and LogMeIn. “You're seeing more products pulling in [data from] different areas…they can become a little bit more complex and multifunctional.” 

Demostack's Eric Portugal Welsh (who formerly led RevOps at Fivetran during the company’s meteoric initial scaling) agrees. “Everything is focused on data integrity and data centralization. It's all about getting data into the right places.”

With so many “RevOps” tools to choose from, selecting the correct product (or suite of products) might seem like a daunting task for the uninitiated. It’s possible to overpay for products that look great but don’t actually address the right business needs — and we’ve seen instances where customers purchase expensive tools and features not needed at their stage of growth. On one hand, you don’t want to purchase cheap and flashy tools that don’t scale (I may make enemies here but I don’t think Hubspot CRM is worth starting out with if you have to do a mass migration later to Salesforce as you grow into the enterprise). On the other hand, you don’t want to implement tools that require a scientist to configure (think Salesforce CPQ, which we find frequently as shelfware at early stage startups). 

“It’s possible to overpay for products that look great but don’t actually address the right business needs.” 

Fortunately, both Eric and Lisa have operationalized RevOps tools and processes at startups that grew to generate millions and billions in revenue, and they have a few pearls of wisdom to offer. Check out their full conversation on our podcast, which you can find here. And keep reading for their key insights.

Establish the metrics that matter most to your business. Use them to determine which tools and systems to put in place, what to automate, and what to do manually. 

“In most RevOps tech stacks, you can track just about anything and everything you could possibly think of,” Eric explains. But more data is not necessarily better for RevOps decision-making. 

“People are data drunk,” Lisa says, laughing. “I think it's important to have data that you can take action on, as well as identifying what those key metrics are that are truly important.”

In the early phases, according to Lisa, you're building up a pipeline. “You tend to see a lot of those products like Outreach and Gong — things like that are really focused on getting more business through the door,” says Lisa. “And the things that often get neglected that become incredibly painful are the back half of the sales process.”

The initial goal for RevOps? Identify the metrics that matter to sales and finance leadership. “[Getting] to a point where those key metrics are in a system of record — that's the important piece,” says Eric. 

“The initial goal for RevOps? Identify the metrics that matter to sales and finance leadership.” 

“You've got to have systems in place that are going to [provide] really, really watertight conversion rates,” adds Lisa. “If you think about those conversion rates, they’re pivot points for how much spend we need for marketing, how many demos we're going to have to do to be able to close this much business.”

Once you’ve identified the metrics you want at your fingertips, then you can tackle what RevOps systems and automation will help you get to them. “My approach here is always to build it manually,” says Eric. “[And then] automate it after it's working and after I've proven the metrics are valuable. How can I get the most reliable data out of this? If I require somebody to enter data into a field that requires human input, sales reps are notoriously not great at it.” 

Systems become important when the rubber meets the road — metrics really matter. “[An Excel pricing spreadsheet] was fine when you had 10 sales reps,” says Lisa. “But when you get to 25, 50, 100, all of a sudden AEs all put their own little flair on the Excel spreadsheet. You have to have gates around creativity. I think that it's finding that technology that allows you to get the business done.”

Consider bandwidth needed to manage RevOps tools. Especially if you have a small team, admin overhead matters. Try to buy for both now and later.

There’s a lot of tools out there with a lot of big promises. RevOps teams at high growth startups should ask questions about admin and overhead when considering a potential tool or system. 

“It's really easy to just stick a tool on it and call it good,” says Eric. “Just implementing to solve a problem that can be solved another way — that's a big issue. What that creates is shelfware.” 

At most startups, RevOps is a team of one or two employees. Small teams simply don't have the bandwidth to maintain every system that's implemented, especially during times of rapid growth. “The revenue operations person doesn't often ask enough questions about how difficult [a tool] is to administer,” explains Lisa. “If someone wants to change a process, or the pricing, or whatever it is, what am I going to have to do?” 

“Small teams simply don't have the bandwidth to maintain every system that's implemented, especially during times of rapid growth.” 

“I worked with a company where adding a SKU had about a 90-day tail on it,” Lisa remembers. “And it was one of those things where I was like, ‘What? Excuse me, what is happening?’ But that's [what] you see with the administration of the tools that have been cobbled together.” A tool might offer cool features or functions, but if it is clunky or difficult to manage, the ROI will never pencil out."

Consider not just your GTM motion now but what it will be in the future. Don’t paint yourself into a rigid corner.

Eric recommends thinking long-term when buying any new RevOps tools. “I think it's important to get at systems that you're familiar and most comfortable with that are going to do the job that you know they can do and be flexible enough to grow with you,” he says. “If we're looking at sales, marketing, [and] customer success, you need a system that's going to support each one of those teams as they grow.”

You have to think holistically and end-to-end as you’re making tooling decisions. Are the tools you’re choosing going to work in an environment that is changing, or will they top out and need to be ripped out? As Lisa puts it: “A lot of times year ten problems can be prevented with year three decisions. You see a ton of change in rapid growth, a ton of change — change in process, change in leaders, change in everything.” Especially in the context of rapid growth, the flexibility of modern CRMs (particularly Salesforce) makes them an important element in the RevOps tech stack. 

“Are the tools you’re choosing going to work in an environment that is changing, or will they top out and need to be ripped out?” 

So, the big takeaway here? Look for tools that work together seamlessly. “If you're comfortable administering Salesforce, you want to be comfortable administering the other tools because [they feel] similar to Salesforce in some way,” says Lisa. “There's benefit to having tools that are built to work with Salesforce specifically.”

Looking for more RevOps insights? Check out our podcast on Scaling RevOps in Hyper-Growth.