The biggest barrier to strategic RevOps is the passive head nod.
You might have agreement, but not alignment. Jeff Klein explains why this is dangerous. You’ll want to listen if you’re getting a lot of whiplash in your org.
In our latest episode of Boardroom RevOps, Jeff shares some examples of the danger of agreement, not alignment.
– You deprioritize a project that was agreed on… then someone pushes it forward through backchannel conversations, throwing off the team’s bandwidth and impact.
– You think there’s alignment, but then there’s frustration when a metric is missed, even though you talked about this months ago.
And just like that, RevOps loses credibility.
To drive real alignment, RevOps leaders need to do three things:
1) Be explicit about trade-offs
If we do X, we’re not doing Y. Say it clearly. Make sure everyone actually agrees.
2) Tie decisions to business impact
If a project’s off the roadmap, everyone needs to understand what metrics will suffer, and accept that trade-off.
3) Create accountability
If priorities change, the metrics need to change too. Otherwise, people will keep chasing their own goals regardless of what was “agreed.”
Because without active alignment, RevOps becomes a never-ending loop of firefighting and rework.
So next time you see those polite head nods, don’t end the meeting until you hear: “Yes, I understand what’s changing and why. Here’s how I’ll adjust.”
Agreement is passive. Alignment is active.
Jeff drops many more pearls of wisdom in our conversation. Take a listen and let us know what you think.
Transcript:
Hello everybody. Here we are again for another episode of Aim for Excellence, where we are breaking down strategic, operational, and career related best practices with RevOps leaders we admire. Again, I’m James, co founder of AccountAim. We’re the modern data stack built specifically to take RevOps teams from being reactive firefighters to proactive strategic partners.
Very excited to be joined by Jeff Klein today. Thanks for joining me, Jeff. Absolutely. It’s great to be here. Jeff has had a really impressive stint working his way up the RevOps ladder at a couple companies. But before I steal your thunder, Jeff, do you want to just share kind of your background in a bit more detail for folks?
Absolutely. I am a sort of self described career operator. I’ve been in this industry for 15 or in this role for 15 plus years. The exciting thing about it is, and I was chatting with somebody the other day we used to call ourselves something different, but it’s eventually landed on revenue operations, as sort of commercial operations, business operations, and it’s bounced around through different few things.
But but yeah and my principle, role through all of that has really been creating scale for companies. And really driving that growth, especially from the startup stance through some acquisitions and an IPO. So just a quick, brief background on me, but again, grateful to be here and can’t wait to get into this.
Yeah. Thanks. We’re excited to dig in. I think you touched on it, but I’m especially excited because you’ve grown with orgs and led, pretty sizable teams and skilled works to maturity. So there’ll be a lot of great learnings in here before we dive too deep. I like to start with some kind of some basic opening questions.
Everyone has a different. Different definition of RevOps, you already alluded to the fact that it started as something different, but, now that you’re maybe coming to terms or embracing the term RevOps, like, how do you define it? Yeah, weathered, the grays are weathered. I’m a weathered rev ops leader.
Yes. Revenue operations to me is really the connective tissue behind the life cycle of the customer. One may also describe that as like enabling sales to sell. One of the early lessons I learned in my career was the sort of customer forward or customer centered mindset, so that’s why.
Set it that way the first time, but, internally in a company, it is enabling sales to sell. And that comes in a lot of different form factors, but principally it’s driving efficiency. And again, like being able to connect all those stages of the lifecycle management within a company.
Yeah. And it’s not just so many orgs beyond sales standing, the connective tissue is like a great way to put it because you can be those octopus arms outside of every function from sales that’s still, sales requires to be effective. What kind of got you into this world of RevOps and kind of commercial ops more generally?
I think we all fall into it. I don’t think anybody wakes up and wants to do revenue operations. Let’s I mean, I think a lot of people say the same about sales. Some, sometimes you go to, college, university, whatever, with an intense or goal in mind, you go in for finance and you come out and be a accountant or whatever.
There’s no degree for revenue operations. There’s not really a degree for sales, it’s just a hodgepodge of things. But yeah, I was right out of college. I started as an operator for a small company, small family owned company. I will always tell people to cut their teeth in companies like that because.
They are the most malleable, flexible, but at the same time, hard knock and know how things are done. They know how to run businesses. It’s their business, larger organizations don’t have that, folks coming right out of school, jumping into a Google. Good. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I think that there’s a, there’s something to be said about that, the dynamic of a small business and even in a startup that’s really. Driving that foundation that folks need, but, getting back to your question, which I’ve now lost track of. So why don’t you repeat it? Just what got you into it.
But I think you answered it well, just fell into it as we all do. Maybe the corollary then, if you fell into RevOps, like what, what keeps you in it, what keeps me in revenue operations is really driving cross functional alignment and organizations. First and foremost, I think that relationship building is for me, very intrinsically valuable and then working with people to solve problems.
And those problems can be, today’s fires, which again, revenue ops is a daily firefighter, but they’re also air traffic control and they’re trying to avoid the problems at the same time. Having a great team, building a great team around you, working with others collaboratively across the company, again, to really aim at those strategic business objectives, the broader business objectives and where revenue operations fits in and, any more, and especially these days, revenue operations isn’t limited to the revenue.
It really is about, teaming up with finance about, forecasting and long term planning. It’s teaming up with your operations group for, efficiencies and customer, retaining and so on and so forth. But what keeps me in it really is, driving those relationships and, high level problem solving.
Yeah. And speaking of relationships and team building, that’s actually a good segue. So as we think about diving deeper here, I want to talk a bit about RevOps function investment. So as you mentioned, you’ve scaled with and helped scale a couple companies. You were there for a while. They both grew quite a bit.
And so as we think about the RevOps function investing as a whole what is the right time to hire the initial RevOps person? And maybe we’ll just start there and we can kind of progress with the company, but what’s the right time to have, should a company bring in that first RevOps person?
When they can afford one. No I know that’s a slapstick answer, but I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And let me dive into that. So I think several times I have spent the first year in any role, either undoing or redoing or fixing or driving. Something different, which altogether by any leader is going to happen.
But to a large degree with revenue operations, you’re really talking about foundational things, not cultural things like with, like a sale, head of sales or marketing or something like that, and not tactical in that sense, but very structural strategic things. What’s your CRM. What are you using for this?
What type of technology do you have here? What does your data look like? What does your data model constructing look like? And so I think the earlier you can get somebody that understands what the company looks like at a million dollars at 10 million and a hundred million dollars at 500 million, depending on your plan, how quickly you’re trying to scale, like finding somebody with the experience of going from zero to 10.
Is as valuable to get in there at zero as possible. And that way you have the structure, the infrastructure the sort of early team build that is required and needed to, get to that and break that 10 million ceiling as a startup. You see so many startups failing or bumbling as they’re getting into that 10 million range. And it’s really because they don’t know how they got there to a large degree. And to that end, it’s very difficult for them to show how they’ve made progress. And a lot of that comes down back to again, and I always go back to this as it’s data.
It really is the data and it’s the foresight of understanding what you need and how you need to collect it, how it needs to be acquired, how it needs to be organized or orchestrated, and then ultimately are you driving insights based off of that? And the earlier you can get that in the better.
I laugh when I say afford, because of course, if you’re if you’re, it’s what you, with everything else, you’re going to pay for what you get. So RevOps folks, and I’ve had this conversation even recently. It’s you see the pay scale shift. For revenue ops very dramatically from series C through D like below C it’s, it’s decent, but above C suddenly, like there’s this big importance to having a high caliber revenue operations.
You want to know why it’s because. The shit ain’t working right now, . And they need somebody of that caliber. And so for me it’s always and I’ve advised several companies of this even recently through Skydeck at Berkeley. It’s, the earlier you can bring on somebody of the caliber of the growth path of your business, the better it’s gonna be long term.
’cause you’re gonna avoid some of the pitfalls that are gonna happen to you as you approach $10 million, as you approach a hundred million dollars, as you approach $500 million. Yeah. And if you avoid those on the front end. Man, that’s just going to lead to so much more structured growth, predictable growth, and really help your business drive toward those ultimate objectives.
Do you think there is a challenge with the perspective of leadership when they’re hiring that first RebOps person in the early days, when you put another way, it’s one thing to talk about budget. One thing to talk about, finding the right Rev Ops person who’s seen 10 million, 100 million early. But do you think like folks even have the right framing?
So often I see that Oh, the CRM has become unwieldy. Let’s bring in Rev Ops and just throw them at it. What’s your perspective on how leaders can approach this hire? Yeah. If you’re bringing somebody in to fix something, they’re already on their heels. So that’s a difficult place.
Now I will say that is some of the most fun work for revenue operations. It’s you have a little bit of a loose leash and are told to just make it work. Sometimes that can quickly lead to scaling issues because you’re trying to fix as you’re running, which, you’re going to have scaling issues when we are the other, you’re not going to avoid them all, but.
I think it’s a lot again about having that foresight to really have that roadmap. And so again, I keep going back to early earlier, the better, but to, from a mindset perspective, how do we change the mindset, honestly, I don’t think it’s the executives that need the mindset shift I think it’s the RevOps community needs a mindset shift there.
I think there are two paths to getting into revenue operations. Either you fall into it, like most of us, or this is becoming more and more of the case. You come through it, you are a CRM manager or a you’re doing like projects for marketing that are in HubSpot or whatever, marketing system you’re using.
And then suddenly you find yourself in this leadership role without having any sort of I wouldn’t necessarily use the word acumen, but some might describe it as that for really the strategic side. So then you end up as this tactical resource. It’s Oh yeah, Jeff can go fix that. Just send it to him.
He’ll go figure it out. Which. Being that person is fine, but it’s also limiting. So as we, as a profession get caught in that trap more and more, we have to elevate ourselves into that role of the strategic thought partner for the organization. And if all you’re doing is responding to ad hoc requests for reports or a fire here or this, that, or the other, then that’s.
Yeah, we talked about that so much too. Yeah, I think that’s spot on. You have to be really mindful and proactive about why am I here and, what impact do I want to drive? How do I protect my time in a way that’s good for the business too, right? Okay, so we talked a little bit about the first RevOps Hire.
I know it’s different for every business, but like in your mind, like what’s your mental model for the right time to grow the team? And, you can take this any way you want, but as we think about moving from zero to 10 million to a hundred, like how should folks think about rev ops resources, division of duties and the like.
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I will not give you a one size fits all answer because there isn’t one. I think that initial assessment, when you take a role is incredibly important and what you’re doing in that initial 90 days or whatever your sort of initial onboarding period is you’re really setting the tone for the next, probably three years.
So you need to be very careful in those conversations about what you’re putting in a roadmap. So the roadmap, a lot of people look at a roadmap is like a technical roadmap, right? We need to add these systems and do this, and we need to hit these milestones with sort of data and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
When you overlay the resources for that, sometimes people then start looking at you cross eyed what do you mean? We need to spend money on tech, but we also need to spend money. Yeah, that’s, this is not all me. Can I do most of this? Yes. But that’s not why you hired me. You hired me to create this roadmap into keep us to it.
I think a lot of that comes with then being agile with the business. So when I’ve grown teams in the past, typically in, in every case, I’ve started as a party of one. Okay. So that’s a great place to start. I know that’s not always ideal for some people. They like coming in with some resources, though, I think.
Again, that initial assessment period but what you’re doing beyond that, then is you’re looking at your capacity. And you’re saying suddenly I’m spending 50 percent of my time on let’s go way off script here. I’m spending 50 percent of my time on commissions. Because it’s a mess and it takes me, 40 hours a month to do commissions, which that would be horrible, but let’s just admit that would be a problem worth solving.
So how would you solve that? You could continue to do that for 40 hours a month, right? And just try to make it better for yourself, maybe get a technology to help. But then again, like maybe you don’t have the resources to manage that. So you actually make the problem worse in some cases, or you go out and get somebody to do it for you.
So now you have a week back of your life. Not entirely, because obviously there’s some offsets there but let’s just keep the ball rolling here. You got, you get 40 hours back of your life and maybe that’s not a full time gig for that person because they’re way better at it than you.
And they’re going to implement a technology that can make it even better for them. Guess what? They probably have other skills. So let’s round them out, right? You bring them in as that, but there could be other things on their plate as well. And maybe you’ve got some other things that are, 20 hours a month or whatever, and you you start peeling off those specializations as they become, you start peeling off those, you start peeling off those specializations as they reach like a critical mass within the organization.
Now this can be risk aversion. If you’re a public company or going to be cut, become a public company, you cannot mess up on commissions. You can, there’s some grace there, obviously, but that’s a major thing, right? You got to be cognizant of how you’re paying and the controls of how you’re paying people when it comes to commissions.
But if you’re a startup and that’s very low risk, you can make mistakes and you fix it, then maybe a person isn’t necessary, at least at first. Now it still might take you a lot of time, but there’s that bridge. There’s that sort of bridge of risk too, that you have to take into account for. And for example, if you’re, if you come into a situation where your systems are relatively complicated, you might need to lean into more systems related people earlier so that you can have a better understanding and roadmap to an ideal state with a partner instead of just out of your brain.
So that might be part of it as well. I would say too, that when you talk about first hire, like. In most cases for me, that has been a CRM administrator, even if data was the main problem. Because if data is the main problem, it’s almost always because the CRM is actually the main problem. It’s masking the data problems or the data problems are masking the CRM.
So you either don’t have access to it. You’re not getting good acquisition of data. It’s incomplete. It lacks fidelity. There’s all these. Things you can throw out around that, but I think in general, there’s this that is, that to me is almost always the first hire. And then I think you make adjustments to your perspective once that person is in seed and you’re thinking more long term.
Yeah, I think it does, that hire would free you up so much to be a little bit more strategic, a little more high level to see the forest and get out of just the trees. So I think that’s really well put. I think you touched on a lot of things that we hear around, creating that roadmap, a customer journey to actually have the vision of where you want to go.
Yeah. Tracking time or being aware of where you’re spending time so you can raise that to executives and get by and for a resource to free you up to do other things. I think that’s really well put. I want to switch gears a little bit. So you spoke with my co founder Josh about the importance of kind of regular communication for rebels with the rest of the business, keep folks aware of what’s going on, keep people aligned.
To use the same analogy. So many routes, folks fall into the trap of being heads down and missing that forest from the trees. This is a pretty huge topic, but can you share a little bit more about kind of what type of communication you were talking about and like, why is it so important to a successful rev ops function?
Yeah. So communication can be one of the trickiest things, especially in an organization, because when you stick your neck out there and say, I’m dying on the vine, that can have unintended consequences. We’ll say I’ve seen it happen. I think there’s posts every day on LinkedIn about, I.
Complained. And now I’m not working right. It’s the tell age old story of that. And I think a lot of that comes down to how you’re communicating and whether it’s following some sort of rigor or it’s just complaining, right? And let’s be honest it’s easy to get caught in that trap. For those of you out there listening, if you feel like you’re in that stance where all you’re doing is complaining, I’ve been there.
I know what that feels like. We’ve all been there. So don’t feel bad about yourself. Come up with something that will help communicate the larger objectives and the larger priorities on a regular basis. What I have done that has been incredibly effective in my career is creating a cycle Of communication that is understood that is that people see coming and it’s consistent.
Yes, you will have fires come up every day. Yes, you will have things shift priorities. But if you have a centralized, like for me, it’s a deck and I make one every quarter and the cycle can be different. It could be monthly. It could be, biannually whatever the cycle is. And I am always showcasing the team has done and then what we are going to do.
And then in a regular check ins with your leadership, it’s always, what are we doing and what have we accomplished in this particular cycle? And then as they’re introducing things, you have a platform to go back to and say, here’s the screen that you all have seen quarter over quarter for the past five years.
It’s the same screen. And I know you’re sick of it, but this is what we’re working on. This is what we’ve done. This is what we have the capacity to finish. And I know it doesn’t have to be like, super pretty. It’s literally just four or five bullets a quarter, right? But these are the big fish.
These are what really moves the needle forward. This is what creates the scale and the growth of the new organization its not constantly making reports, not constantly dealing with commission issues. There are people for that and God helped them because they have an important role at the end of the day.
The four bullets on that screen are what drives the business, not the constant reports, not the fixing of commissions. So now they have a role to play in the greater strategy of increasing their productivity and efficiencies. And those are all part of those four bullets, but those are the core things you come back to.
And if somebody is like, Hey, we have this new thing we want to introduce. And we need, rev ops to be involved in X, Y, and Z. I am happy to help my team is 100 percent on board to, to help you with this. I will need to go back and take a look and try to get an assessment of what this is going to take.
But as a gut feel, I think that this is going to be, a pretty sizable project. So right now I’m going to pop this up on the screen and let’s talk about what we should take off. Or free up some budget and hire me another person, which that is always like immediately dismissed, which is good because then they come back to what you want them to focus on, which is reorienting the priorities and that’s okay.
And that’s part of the agile nature of communication is you’re able to say, here’s the screen that we talked about. A month and a half ago at the head of the quarter, we all sat down. We all agreed that this is what we’re going to work on. You’re coming in with something else. Totally. Okay. But let’s all walk out of this room with alignment on what those four things are now going to be.
And another point, don’t take agreement as alignment. Make sure you actually have alignment. That is a big difference. When you see people in the room, nodding their head and not responding, they’re agreeing with you. They are not in alignment, especially if their thing is the thing coming off. So you have to be the champion of those bullets and have to know what is the benefit of, to the business for that.
What is the measurable outcome or the measurable change to the business that we’re going to get? And if you can articulate that, then that is the easiest way to get alignment. Because it’s we’re going to pull this off, yes, it’s going to change. We’re not going to be able to get to our lead production goal because we’re not going to introduce this new widget or whatever.
Everybody has to be in alignment with that because otherwise you’re going to walk out of the room and that person’s going to go find somebody else to try to do that for them. Because that’s what they’re accountable for. Their metrics need to change along with whatever that prioritization shift is.
And I think that is the fair way to do it. Yeah, and that’s golden advice. And there’s so much I’d love to unpack if we had more time. But tell me just a little bit more about agreement versus alignment. I think it’s so true. But I want to hear your perspective on people are nodding their head yes.
Tell me more about what the difference really is there. Yeah, it’s funny because if you’ve ever sat in a boardroom and the CEO is talking or a main leader in the company is talking and everybody is just like nodding along, those people are in agreement, not necessarily in alignment.
And I always call that like bobble heads, right? And you don’t need to surround yourself with bobble heads. You need to surround yourself with people that challenge you and that will help you find alignment. Even as the person like setting the priorities, it’s for me, for my team, it’s should we be working on this?
Is this important to the organization? And I challenged them to make it important to me to go pitch so that I feel like I’m armed. So when I get questions as to, what makes you think that we should pull that lead project and place it in with this new idea that we just came up with here’s why, you rattle off, whatever that is.
And I think then there’s at least clarity. And as you continue to walk through that sort of Q& A, you have to get to that point of clarity. And I think once you have clarity, you can find alignment. But if you don’t have clarity and people are like, assuming or understand what you’re saying, but they don’t fully grasp it, that is what leads to agreement.
Agreement is toxic. And if you’re constantly getting agreement, your priorities will constantly change. So that is actually a, that is telltale toxic environment. If you’re in a position where you feel like that’s happening, take that as on your shoulder. Like you’ve got to shoulder that you’ve got to recenter the organization.
And that’s, that can be difficult. That can be very difficult though. Again, I think it comes back to that consistency of communication and really articulating clarity as to what those outcomes are, what those goals need to be. And with that, you can walk into an alignment state. That’s great. I view our mission to get a little bit meta here on the marketing front of AccountAim is to help rev ops leaders who are maybe middle or junior in their career, go from tactical to strategic.
I think the last five minutes of what you described as like the best five minutes we’ve had on the podcast yet of exactly that, like, how do you actually get out of the weeds and actually drive a business forward? And I think. Laying out the priorities, relating them to the value of the customer journey, using it as the trade for anything that folks are bringing up is like the formula for doing that.
So this is really great to hear. And I appreciate you laying that out. One other topic on communication I wanted to get to is, so you talked, I would say a lot of what you just described was the executive, functional stakeholder level. Tell me a little bit about communicating with the field sellers, marketers, sometimes Rev Ops feels like bad cops.
Sometimes it feels like process for the sake of process from the seller perspective. It’s not something I believe. How do you frame up the value of Rev Ops to folks in the field and actually work with them to get to the adherence that you need to run a good process? Yeah, it’s funny. I hear a lot of people say that if rev ops isn’t slowing you down or not doing your job, if rev ops is your friend, they’re not doing their job or something like this.
And I hear what they’re saying. I get that again, as a community, when you have that kind of stance and you’re on a sort of a negative healed footing, that’s not a great place to start. And I think one of the most impactful things that we, especially in the RebOps community can do as leaders is talk forward, not backward.
And so when we talk forward, we’re talking about, we are talking to people about what will improve their lives. And then somebody out here right now is going to go say I do that anyways. I know you do, but you’re starting on a stance of negative. You’re starting on a stance of I’m trying to not be your enemy by talking to you and trying to get your perspective.
How about I just get your perspective and be a champion for you, a champion, an ally. And again, that’s easy to say. It’s very hard to do. It’s very hard to do consistently. And that’s what you have you have got to make time. And again, I feel like I’m saying a bunch of stuff that is Oh yeah.
If we have all the time in the world, Jeff, sure we can do all that stuff. Yes. But again, it comes back to prioritization. And if you’re spending time with sales leaders, you will understand what is needed and by spending time with them. Be on, be in the moment, be on a call with them listen, be present, understand what it is that is keeping them from being more effective.
At the end of the day, sales leaders may be less so than sales reps directly, they want to earn their commissions and they want to maximize that as much as possible and CRM to make that happen, they’re going to do it. So we just got to make that as easy as possible for them so that we can still effectively do our job, but at the same time, like the more, a new Rev Ops person coming into a job, suddenly all these sales reps are like, Oh God, my life’s going to get so much worse.
What if it got so much better? Because all of a sudden, instead of giving you more to do, I’m giving you less to do because I’m using technology to help. I’m using automation to help drive. Information out of your brain into the system at a very low cost to you from an efficiency standpoint.
Let’s do that. Let’s be partners. Let’s be really strong, cohesive partners with our main stakeholders. And that is again, like you said earlier, marketing, and sales rep sales, leadership, marketing, leadership in and Rev Ops tapers into CX as well. So obviously that’s looped in here too.
So I, yeah, I think it’s a really good reframe and where every rebels leader should strive to frame the conversation with sales reps. I think it’s really good advice. I’m related. We’re running up on time here. So probably have a couple of minutes for this final topic and it’s a huge topic.
So forgive me on that, but. You’ve helped scale a couple of companies from, like eight digit revenue to nine. I think it’s a huge jump for other rev ops leaders who are, approaching this or trying to get to that point. What’s your best advice for them as tactically as possible. This could be people related process related tech and data related.
As you think about that jump, like what’s really important or what pitfalls might someone run into if they’re, should they be thinking about. A huge question. I know, forgive me. Yep. Huge question. We’ve talked about a lot of it, but one mistake I’ve made in my career is going about it too much on my own.
This is really good for efficiency. And I think there’s a saying out there if you want to go fast, go by yourself, if you want to go far, go with others, something like that. I’m sure it’s a parable or maybe biblical something. I don’t know, but a lot of my career has been defined by the speed of scale.
And sometimes that has meant going fast, which means. Largely by myself, like I’m going to, I’m going to chart my own course. I’m going to get it done. And I think that one of my learnings in my career has been the long game, the far game with others. And so I think any advice that I could give beyond some of the things that I’ve given.
Very tactically is spend time on your relationships and go far and wide outside of your areas of expertise. So what I mean by that is go find the guy on the FP&A team that’s racking your numbers. Be his best friend, send him beer or whiskey or whatever he drinks or she to say thank you and get their perspective on, if you’re.
Pulling together a quota model, run it by them. Don’t just deliver that to your CSO or CRO or whoever and say, I’m done. Run it by people and you will be surprised what you learn. And the more you do that, the more perspective you will get. And that will ultimately. Not only build your relationships, but it will also help you get a deeper understanding of what you’re trying to do and how that’s interconnected in the organization, because they might know something that you don’t.
And look, I’m not saying that in any given state collaboration is, needs to be a hundred percent your objective. There are some times where you just need to put your head down and get work done. But in the same vein, though, like I think. One of the most tactical things you can do is not do that.
And just talk to people and get their perspectives and really drive at that sort of organizational growth through relationship. And that’s a lesson that I’ve learned and I execute now on a regular basis, which is obviously one of the reasons I’m sitting here, because I talked to your co founder there, but yeah, to.
Just, yeah, talk to people, work with people and get as many perspectives as you can across an organization. Because then before you know it, your Door will start getting knocked on because people will want your perspective as well. And that’s, I think when it really starts to become fun is you have this shared balanced thought partnership relationship with a lot of folks around the company.
Totally. And what a great way to learn too. I think in the beginning of this podcast, you talked about, some folks might be stepping into a role without much like business acumen because of where they started their career. How better to get that full picture than what you just described. So that’s exactly right.
Yeah I, half the stuff in Excel that I know, and again, I’m showing my age here, but half the stuff in Excel I know because I’ve learned from other people. And not that it’s the only tool in our arsenal, but that’s just one that’s always, some people come in with a high school appreciation of Excel and want to create a forecast, and I’m like, do you know index match?
They’re like, no, let’s start. There’s always the best. That’s always the best. Yeah, that’s the test. It’s so tell me when you would use a multi select pick field and just wait, never is the only answer there. Yeah. But yeah, so that’s it. I love it. Jeff, this is great. I really appreciate the time.
This was I hate to be dramatic, but I think a masterclass on how to take rev ops from tactical to strategic. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us. We like to finish with a really quick rapid fire, a couple of words, one sentence, first thing that comes to your mind, so I’ll tick through these here and then we can wrap.
What’s the biggest myth about rev ops? That it’s tactical. If you could fix one challenge in Rev Ops, what would it be? The impression that it’s only tactical. Sounds like a theme. Okay, this will change it up, I think, a little bit. How would you describe a great Rev Ops leader in three words? Oh my gosh, talk about rapid fire and then sticking your, getting stuck in the mud.
Most guests do, so don’t feel bad. Three words describe a RevOps leader. A great one. Creative, scientific, and funny. Funny. All right. That’s a new one. We’ll leave it at that. No explanation needed, but Jeff, thanks again. We’re out of time here. This was awesome. If anyone listening has any questions for Jeff, feel free to send it to me and I’ll track them down for you.
Of course, if you have any questions about AccountAim and reach out as well, Jeff, thanks again for the time. You as well. so much. Very grateful to be here.
