RevOps-First: The Right Way to Build GTM Teams in 2024 | Leore Spira (Director of Revenue Operations at Blink Ops, Startup Advisor)
RevOps-First: The Right Way to Build GTM Teams in 2024 | Leore Spira (Director of Revenue Operations at Blink Ops, Startup Advisor)
Leore Spira shares insights on why a RevOps-first approach is essential, stressing the need for early operational investments, strategic hires, and direct executive reporting.
If it’s 2024 and you’re still hiring tons of SDRs to do cold outbound outreach, you’re doing it wrong. Up until a few years ago, you might have gotten by—but the efficacy of these brute-force models has cratered, and AI is making that problem worse.
RevOps can transform the way your go-to-market motion operates by putting it on top of data and automation. Imagine being a startup founder trying to grow but feeling like traditional methods are as clunky as flip-flops in a marathon. Then you discover RevOps turbocharged by AI. It's like switching to high-tech running shoes that make you feel like you could outrun Usain Bolt—in other words: unstoppable 🏃♀️
The Old Way vs. The New Way of RevOps
In 2010, armed with books like Predictable Revenue, you’d hire an army of low-paid, high-potential SDRs to stamp-out repetitive calls and emails. Eventually you layered in demand generation marketing to throw thousands of leads over the wall, trusting sales to catch them. Sales struggled to keep up, sometimes over-promising to close the deal. And customer success? They were a relay team, grabbing the baton and hoping like hell that professional services would find a solution. This disjointed approach led to misaligned incentives and expectations and a fragmented customer experience. Which, in turn, drove CAC higher and retention lower.
It is at this juncture that we found ourselves sitting down with Leore Spira, the Director of Revenue Operations at Blink Ops. She’s also a Startup Advisor and a driving force helping to nurture the RevOps community.
We wanted to delve deeper into how the GTM landscape is shifting and how RevOps can help founders succeed:
Q: Can you share how you found your way into this relatively-young field of RevOps?
Leore Spira (LS): “I started my career in law, passed the bar, but decided to shift into something else. I did a nonprofit, then went into tech marketing, where I was introduced to Sales Ops. Over time, I evolved from Sales and Marketing Ops to RevOps.”
Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges that startups face, and how can RevOps help address them?
LS: “Most companies want to become data-driven but don't fully understand what it entails. Investing in go-to-market teams is crucial, but so is investing in operational functions. RevOps should not just be seen as an admin role but as a strategic function that aligns go-to-market strategies with business processes and metrics.”
Leore recommends starting with the Bowtie methodology to think-through if a startup is laying the right foundation to grow. While teams tend to be siloed looking at their own function, the bowtie methodology encourages leaders to think more holistically about the end-to-end funnel from marketing to sales to customer success to renewals.
Let’s take a quick look at how antiquated ways vs modern approaches are changing the face of RevOps:
The Old Way: Siloed Teams
Fragmented RevOps and SalesOps teams: Marketing, sales, and customer success working and measuring their impact in isolation.
Weak handoffs between teams: The hand-off between teams is slow and clunky. High-intent leads aren’t followed-up with in real-time. Deals close without CSMs available to start onboarding for weeks.
Conflicting metrics: Each team (understandably) only wants to be measured by metrics within their control. This results in finger-pointing. Sales blames marketing’s lead quality. Customer Success blames sales for over-promising.
Prolonged timeframe: Long, drawn-out processes and slow responses to market changes result in missed opportunities and delayed growth.
In a lot of ways, this old way was like running an Olympic Relay Race without stop watches and in pitch black darkness.
The New Way: Integrated RevOps
A unified RevOps team: Marketing, sales, and customer success all working and measuring their impact within a unified framework created and maintained by strategic RevOps leaders.
Seamless customer experience: leveraging data, automation, and content to craft a customer experience where prospects move through the funnel faster, building trust, improving conversion rates, and reducing CAC.
Cohesive and overlapping metrics: There are volume and efficiency metrics that help teams hold each other accountable and help leaders diagnose where weak points in the funnel lie.
Agile process: Streamlined processes and real-time data allow for quick adjustments, faster decision-making, and prompt responses to market changes, driving rapid growth.
For example: by having consistent qualification criteria, and by demanding that SDRs record the data in the CRM, we create structure around what constitutes a Sales Accepted Lead.
This gives marketing a quantitative feedback loop: they now know which campaigns are driving the most SALs and can adjust their focus accordingly. Additionally, by using sales intelligence tools like Gong, marketing can validate that sellers are leveraging the right content, talk-tracks and battlecards to close deals. And CS can validate that nothing was over-promised.
RevOps breaks down silos and puts the entire revenue engine on top of “data rails.” We’re now getting telemetry from every part of the engine that we can use to diagnose when something’s wrong and where it is.
Now our Olympic relay squad 🏃♀️🏃🏃♂️ is passing batons and the coaches have stopwatches and the lights are on. Coaches can see where batons are falling. And runners can see each other: allowing them to run with more trust and purpose, knowing their team is grinding too.
Identifying high-potential strategies with RevOps
Startups, in their eagerness to get to market and scale revenue, often hire sales and marketing folks first, who then establish clunky processes and hire “enabling” functions like sales ops and marketing ops.
Then, when they try to switch to being more efficient and data-driven, they struggle.
This is why Leore puts emphasis on three important things:
Invest in operational functions early,
Hire strategic RevOps professionals, and
Ensure they report directly to the CEO or CRO.
At Blink Ops, Leore shared that she piloted AI tools like Growblocks to support the SDR team. These tools manage revenue BI, generating insights that are a gold mine for revenue generation and improving efficiency.
Success in RevOps is measured by actionable data and meaningful metrics. The future will surely be driven by the integration of advanced technologies and the relentless pursuit of efficiency. Adopting a RevOps approach is not just about staying competitive; it’s about setting new industry standards. It’s about smarter thinking, faster actions, and adopting tools essential for staying competitive and responsive to market trends. Failure to do so would be akin to being like sprinters with concrete blocks strapped to your feet—you'll get left in the dust as the race to revenue heats up.
Follow Leore Spira on LinkedIn for more insights and updates on RevOps.