Climbing the RevOps Ladder: A Conversation with RevInfinity Founder Hassan Irshad

James Geyer: [00:00:00] Hello again. We are back for another episode of boardroom RevOps, where we’re bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make it to the C-suite. Again, I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim, the next gen bi solution for RevOps teams. I’m joined by Hassan Irshad today.

Hassan Irshad: Thank you for having me.

James Geyer: Hassan has climbed the RevOps ladder all the way to head of RevOps, which is why he’s a great guest for the conversation. And is now the founder of the RevOps consulting firm, rev Finity. Hassan, do you wanna share your background in a bit more detail for folks?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Hassan, I’ve been in. Revenue operations for about a decade. I started sales operations at a startup called Cover Wallet, and naturally people remember 10 years ago, nobody knew what Revenue Operations was, but.

At a startup with a lack of resources, I was asked to do marketing operations. I was asked to do CX ops. I had a little bit of background in being a founder. so I start picking it up and eventually somebody coined revenue operations.

And from there on was, the rest is history. I worked in various different industries at various different scales. So diversity is my [00:01:00] skillset of experiences there. Worked at, be backed, VC backed, worked at. Startups, scale ups, as well as post IPO companies. And currently I am running revenue, sorry, rev Infinity, which is a revenue operations boutique consulting firm and work with various different clients.

James Geyer: Awesome. Thanks for that. I’m excited to get into all of the diversity of experience, as you mentioned. But just the, in the beginning, like you were doing kind of all of this ops work and eventually got rolled together and coined as RevOps. Perfect segue for the first question I ask everyone is how do you define RevOps personally?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, absolutely. So for my take, I think a lot of times, like we are in a world where if you Google what is RevOps, you’ll get probably like 10 different answers. My approach to that is revenue Operations to me is a strategic approach that kind of aligns your go-to market motion into a revenue engine, right?

you’re bringing your sales, your marketing, your cx. Maybe even product in PLG motions altogether to hit that goal of revenue acceleration. And while you’re doing [00:02:00] that, in the meantime, you’re aligning all these cross functional departments to meet the company’s needs.

So that’s how I define it as an approach, versus a lot of other definitions out there.

James Geyer: Yeah, and I’m glad you said strategic because I think in my personal opinion that I hold strongly as a RevOps can be the most strategic function in any company because it does touch that entire customer journey.

It’s so impactful in creating a delightful customer experience in an efficient motion. But revs is also very tactical, right? So like you use the word strategic as well, like what does it mean to be strategic in RevOps? Yeah, absolutely. So to be strategic, I would say, and I’ve absolutely, as a young analyst, made that mistake of not being that.

Hassan Irshad: So I’ve learned it the hard way is as leaders, you have to take a step back, right? And see every. Tactical step that you’re gonna take, is it aligning with your overarching company strategy? Do you have a plan for your, short term, long term revenue operations department?

So I think, like for me, being strategic is getting to that kind of level. Laying [00:03:00] out solid foundations before you start on your technical journey. And it’s super easy for revenue operations departments to actually get into that from day one.

So being more proactive than reactive to me is like being strategic in that role. I love the proactive and reactive call out. I also liked how you framed kinda short term versus long term something we hear from many RevOps leaders about how to be strategic. How do you do that?

James Geyer: Tactically, for lack of better words, like you’re coming into a company or you just got promoted to head of RevOps. What’s your kind of framework or model for then laying out the short term and long term?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, absolutely, and I’ve published like a 30, 60, 90 plan on like how you can approach it again, like I’ve, since I’ve applied it to various different industries, I’ve collected what kind of works in.

As a general framework, to me, overarching, and it may different, business model to business model. To me, the first phase is mostly about discovery, right? It’s mostly about learning the KPIs that drives the departments you’re gonna work with, learning what the overarching [00:04:00] strategy is and why the RevOps is there in the first place, right?

What need is that? Actually solving. So the discovery phase allows you to give a lot of knowledge that you can actually jot down something I call like a lay of the land document. So like gathering all of the data points that you can, as much as possible, building those relationships with the cross-function departments.

And while you’re doing it, probably knock out some quick wins to gain that trust. So that’s the first phase that you discover. Talk to people, get to that point. Second is where you’re starting to get a little bit mature in your understanding of the business, right? You’ve taken some demos, you’ve talked to salespeople, you’ve shadowed some people.

Now you’re moving to towards alignment and control because you know where the cracks are a little bit when you start your alignment and control phase. That’s where you can start basically patching those holes. That’s where you can start putting a little bit of strategy towards how this is going to look like in the long term.

And while you’re doing that, again, double down on what you did on the discovery phase, right? [00:05:00] Better understanding, more in depth product knowledge to, to go where you want to go. And then the last phase is where, and again, phases can differ if it’s a 30, 60, 90, but I think this phase approach at least still gets you there.

And the last phase that you would be talking about is your vision and execution, which is where you start drafting what your long-term strategy looks like, right? So if you break it down into these chunks, I feel like that’s a pretty natural progression towards having a six month RevOps roadmap or a year long RevOps roadmap and constantly revisiting that every quarter to see if you’re actually, you know, hitting the goals.

James Geyer: Yeah, that’s great. And I can see a lot of use cases for having that roadmap too, in terms of like trades of when someone wants you to pick up something else and something has to give. I think it’s a great way to stop yourself from working an 80 hour week if you can.

Hassan Irshad: Oh, absolutely. And some saying no to people as well.

People

underestimate the power of No, and if you have a clearly laid out roadmap. Just like product does, right? If you bring something to a product team, [00:06:00] they’re like, Hey, we have a roadmap to follow. Unless it’s going to impact the revenue in that kind of urgent manner, we’ll put it into the roadmap and it will happen,

Proactive than like just reacting to every request that comes.

James Geyer: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about the long-term strategy part of what you just described. I think what you laid out is perfect and really tactical and helpful for discovery and for alignment, for getting quick wins and such a great playbook.

You, you ended with, then we can create the long-term strategy. We just talked a little bit about like trades and how that helps guide quarter to quarter, day to day even. But how are you like using that long-term strategy?

Like which stakeholders are you working with? how can you possibly plan 1, 2, 3 years ahead in revels with how fast everything changes?

Hassan Irshad: absolutely. leaders need to be careful. of course things are gonna change and I worked in startup environment.

Things change very rapidly, You may have a turnover in leaders a good revenue operations system needs to be, adaptable to these changes. Be ready to be flexible in order to mold your strategy towards it. as you’re establishing this, you’re establishing very [00:07:00] clear goals.

KPIs for your team, but also, as revenue operations works with all these departments. If you are not tied to any of these KPIs that these departments have, you’re again, siloing yourself and your goal is to break those silos with everybody else. So one time one of my leaders asked Hey, like what’s the KPI for revenue operations?

All of the ones that you see for sales, for marketing, for cxs are my KPIs, right? Because I am aligned to that. I wanna make sure all of these teams win. So if I’m far away from it, it does not work. So getting to that point, having your long-term, if you’re working in tech stack, like what is this long-term tech stack strategy, a lot of times people get lost in there as well, because you own a tech stack.

You like work with 10 tools. Are you gonna consolidate that in the next six months or a year? Where is this going? If you have a hiring plan, you can’t align because revenue operations is in that position to work with the HR team, work with the finance team, the sales models are the hiring is going to be, is your system [00:08:00] scalable enough or not down the line.

So I feel like asking all those questions in your discovery phase allows you to hit home the, vision and execution part, and that’s how you can build out for the next year, even two years down the line.

James Geyer: That’s great. I think that’s really helpful. We jumped right into the weeds, which I loved kind of the whole goal of this conversation.

I’ll pull us back briefly. I wanna hear your best advice for getting a seat at the table with leadership. It’s one thing to be strategic. I think you can be a very good strategic RevOps leader, but still not have that seat at the table, not have that, that say, and what’s happening with the company.

I feel like you’ve done this in your experience, so any advice on that front, how you can make the jump.

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, absolutely. And again, going back to, I’ve learned it the hard way. So I’ve been in positions where, RevOps is doing all this work, but it doesn’t really get seen.

You just get instructed like, this is the direction we’re going. But in order to change that, you need to start speaking the language of the leadership you need to, like for example, if, operators making that mistake a lot. Like sitting [00:09:00] in, meetings with C level, trying to tell them what flow is broken and why is broken and what field we are gonna change.

that’s not the conversation. Leadership. Is looking for, If you wanna move towards that. So in order to do that, you start having conversations based on revenue, conversations, based on scalability, conversations based on what the board actually had asked.

So you now you’re like, Hey, is somebody keeping me in check in our company because that’s our targets? And going back to what the organic growth looks like bring me something for leadership is bring me something. That I don’t know about, right? That’s how revenue operation can start generating enough value to get seat on the table, because now you have shown what you can bring.

So it’s almost like earning the seat at the table. And again, like going back to, if you are more proactive in your approach and looking at the larger picture from leadership’s lens, you’re able to actually have those conversations much better, and that’s the pathway.

James Geyer: In a world where RevOps [00:10:00] is often under-resourced and so busy, like what does it take to have the time or the bandwidth to be proactive and maybe to reframe the question, if that’s not clear enough, like how can folks actually find these problems and like kind of surface solutions for them, like on their own?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah. So

I

would say, one of the things, revenue operations is the ultimate problem solver role, right? So you have to be able to be in a position to look for problems and try to solve it, right? That’s just the nature of what revenue operations should be doing. How do you get there? Again, you can always have, let’s say, a quarterly analysis of Hey, these, I worked on five different initiatives, right?

How many of those were actually proactive initiatives that we had started? How many of those were reactive? I had done this like on a quarterly basis with my team going back to, and you’d be surprised to know when we started that we were like, Hey, we are doing 70% reactive work, right? [00:11:00] 30% is what was queued in.

How do we change this? How do we change this proportion to be owners of this field, which we are owning, right? And we are bringing that value. How do you get there? So I would say constantly revisiting the strategy is one of the key areas too. And always find the champions within your organizations that can help you get there and remove some of those roadblocks because teams are gonna come to you for, all their problems.

they’re gonna dump that and they’re gonna wait. How you react is what makes you a good leader as a revenue operations and careers generatives that value.

James Geyer: Yeah, really well put. I think I wanna move on to talking about a couple other topics, before I do your 30, 60, 90 day plan was great.

One thing I didn’t ask you is common pitfalls for a RevOps leader joining a new company. It’s probably the antithesis of the 30, 60, 90 day plan. I’m curious if you have anything else to add on kind of the negative side.

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, I think a common pitfall that I’ve seen is getting too distracted by solving the [00:12:00] issues immediately.

It’s hey, jumping in. And trying to create a solve, that’s great, but you should focus on quick wins rather than solving a mammoth of a problem day one and starting working on that. Like you, let’s say you joined and there’s a CRM migration that is on the cards right now, starting your migration from day one, without knowing the business, without knowing the selling process, just taking that on is an amateur mistake that I’ve done before too.

Once I was able to be in a position where like I joined the organization and we were moving from HubSpot to Salesforce, for example, what I did for the first month was just learn, soak it all in, create my plan because sharpening your access more important here, and I was able to execute a migration of A CRM under three months.

Now had I jumped in immediately and tried to solve, I would’ve been overwhelmed because now I’m not being strategic enough. And I think that’s a common pitfall [00:13:00] that, a lot of revenue operations leaders and young professionals are getting in and making that mistake.

So again, with the solid framework, you’re able to avoid that.

James Geyer: Yeah, that, resonates strongly with me. you mentioned a couple of mistakes you’ve made in your career. That’s one I’ve made jumping right in because I’m wanna prove myself as a doer. Bias for action two weeks later. Wait, what am I actually solving for?

Switching gears a little bit, so you mentioned in your intro that you have worked across many different stages of companies, many different types of ownership. Curious. I guess two part question. One, how does RevOps differ across stages, if at all, and how should RevOps teams be preparing to move across stages as their company grows or matures?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, it, I would say it’s absolutely differs on how, basically going back to why RevOps is brought in and what problems they’re solving at that stage, right? So leadership says I’m gonna invest in RevOps, maybe I hire consultants, maybe I hire full-time, but they’re trying to solve something, right?

So first thing I would say is like trying to figure out. What that is like. So for example, if you’re working at a Series A, a lot of [00:14:00] times what you’re doing is putting in the foundations in place. One common. Problem that I hear every single time I work with that scale is like we don’t have visibility into what’s going on, right?

It’s because some of the basic foundations are not there. Now, that’s not the problem we hear at a relatively scale up or a post IPO company, right? It’s like sales reps are not inputting information. Like we don’t have a proper like cop model. So a lot of that work happens at a younger stage of a company.

When you start moving towards scale up, now you’re talking about territory plans. Now you’re talking about solid comp plans. Now you’re talking about, how your sales methodologies that have been implemented, how are you actually, doing lead scoring? So a lot more in depth analysis starts happening.

So again, and I say this to CEOs that I’ve worked with as well, it’s like you also have to give RevOps that grace. Do not expect an overnight change if you’re a larger organization because it’s a big machine that’s gonna move, right? [00:15:00] No one’s gonna overnight just fix your problems.

Also make sure that you give enough upgrades to RevOps, that they will move fast and break some things. And they, this is a iterative process. They will understand what works, what doesn’t work to put a solid foundation. So give them a little bit of room to develop that and yeah, post IPO companies, I would say that’s now the machine is built and what you’re making is minor tweaks, right?

So you’re making sure forecasting accuracy is increased. You’re making sure pipeline coverage metrics and all the KPIs are actually. Reliable making sense. So all of that, I would say it differs from where you start and where, what purpose you’re actually trying to solve.

James Geyer: Really helpful layout from a career advice perspective.

Let’s say one of the listeners is, I don’t know, RevOps associate or manage, maybe it was a couple years of experience, or maybe they’re just brand new, trying to get into RevOps. Those are very different skill sets at both ends of the spectrum that you described.

What would you recommend. Where would you recommend someone start if they’re trying to like, cut their teeth and [00:16:00] RevOps?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, I would say, all of that like spectrum. Requires RevOps to still be analytical and constructive thinker. So I would say, either of those, to get into revenue operations is perfectly fine because what you’re trying to learn is a portion of that machine, how it works,

Day one is not where you need to be, all over the place all the time, right?

You can absolutely learn that you work with them day to day. You sit, maybe sit on sales meetings, you understand their behavior. You work with marketing on a regular basis. If you want to look at lead funnel. Again, learning. There’s no one stopping you from learning within an organization or even outside.

Right? There’s enough resources, I would say always be curious and then move towards it. And starting point should be pick up those analytical skills on how you approach, be a problem solver and move towards that.

James Geyer: That’s great. Yeah. If there’s enough team members to go around, or even if it’s not the case, like people always want an extra pair of smart hands.

And so I love the quote that, there’s no shortage of learning, especially in a [00:17:00] growing company. Last question on kind of the stage related topic and back to the company level or the RevOps function level. Do any key milestones from a RevOps perspective stick out to you as you think about company growth?

Like for example, if a company didn’t have X at by series B, they’d be in big trouble or any, anything like that folks should be thinking of?

Hassan Irshad: There’s all the time. I think, so this may slightly differ what I mentioned, like working with the PE backed and a VC-backed companies with VC-backed, you’ll probably find like more aggressive targets in terms of Hey, we need to be there in terms of a RR by the end of the quarter, by the end of the year.

So I would say towards that, because again, you know what the company’s entire goal is at the end of the day. As RevOps, as good RevOps, you always go down and bake in a little bit of cushion to make sure like you’re going to hit that with the PE-backed companies. A lot of conversation happens within Hey, how are we gonna work towards getting the EBITDA we want, the efficiency we want, and is our system set up [00:18:00] for a merger on an acquisition?

Because again. Think of what PE firm is looking for in that investment. Same thing, what VCs are looking for. There’s growth, error, market share. So I think like a lot of times that kind of differs in what your North Star is, but if you start from there and trickle down, you’re able to create enough KPIs for people, like work towards that.

And that kind of creates a lot of leadership buy-in.

James Geyer: Yeah, that’s great. I think that leadership buying is so important so you don’t get your priorities changed every month Final topic now. You and I talked a little bit about team building before we hopped on this conversation, so I wanted to dive in there.

Maybe I’ll start broad, like what do you look for in Ralph’s folks when you’re hiring for your teams?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, and I think we talked about like how I’ve basically hired people that did not have a revenue operations background. Yeah, i. Again, going back to, you can go through a ton of like bullet points on a job description, right?

But what is the essence of the person that you’re looking for, right? This person needs to be owner of that domain, [00:19:00] right? So if you show ownership, right to me, again, you know you’re a good fit. If you think like an operator, you think process So you can tell Hey, this person’s persona.

Is an operator, right? And getting like always looking for efficiencies there. How do you judge that again, at the end of the day, like once you start asking questions, are you a problem solver? I love to throw in like a couple of questions there just to tech check, like how the brain works, right? Are you a constructive thinker?

If I threw you in a problem you did not have data with. What are you gonna say? Again, you don’t need to be a RevOps expert to answer some of these questions. And then do you, once you’re in, do you show a sense of urgency? Are you coachable? Do you learn and improve and work towards that excellence?

If all of that is true, everything else can be taught. So that’s how I’ve approached at like early stage companies. Of course, once I worked in later stage companies, I was looking for [00:20:00] more seasoned people who would fit that profile, but also have that some experience under the belt.

James Geyer: You mentioned you could train people up. How do you train folks that ops experience? What’s your playbook or philosophy there?

Hassan Irshad: Yeah, I think so. I, and something like, again, for revenue operations, it’s very hard to find or define KPIs around, right? Because it could be a little bit like, great.

So what I like to do is give it a little bit of more structured approach there. So projects are, for example, ranked like, how did we do in terms of projects, how did we, again, and that what I do is collect feedback back because. If you’re a good revenue operations leader or any leader, your goal is to get the max out of your, direct reports and help them realize their potential, right?

That’s, and I take the analogy from maybe soccer. Right now you’re a coach. What are you trying to do? You get a star player, but this, star player doesn’t know their A star. Maybe you do. That’s why you’re managing them. But you have to coach them to get there. And how do you do that?

You help them realize where their strengths [00:21:00] are, help them show where their weaknesses are and improve and be the coach. Hey, these are the frameworks that you can use to improve that. Constantly learn, right? And celebrate their wins, encourage them towards it, help them flourish.

And that’s where I think it’s a hallmark of any good leader.

James Geyer: Yeah. Put, we’re almost at time here. Final question and then we’ll go into a quick rapid fire finish. Any advice for people who aren’t in RevOps that are moving into the space? This could be tactical. It could be philosophical.

Hassan Irshad: Yeah. I would say, again, going back to the earlier point, there is an ocean of knowledge out there, right? What you wanna build is, again, pick a problem. And go deeper in it. Try to understand what tools are at your player, because again, it’s at the end of the day, it’s problem solving, right?

If I give you a problem with no tools, no data, nothing, how are you gonna approach it? So pick problems that are around you as you’re working. Take a more strategic approach and then see where your tactics go. Bring in tools from outside that maybe you discovered that [00:22:00] nobody knows about. How are you going to get from point A to point B in the most efficient manner?

So I would say anyone who’s starting and are in RevOps in, in those younger roles. Try to build that muscle. If you build that muscle, again, that’s a scalable scale that you can apply again and again, and that allows you to be world class.

James Geyer: That’s great. We’re just about out of time here.

We’ll do a quick rapid fire finish, first couple words, first sentence that comes to mind. I’ll tick through a few here. The biggest myth about RevOps,

Hassan Irshad: that they are the CRM admins.

James Geyer: If you could fix one challenge in RevOps, what would it be?

Hassan Irshad: I would say attribution, probably. It’s a hot topic.

James Geyer: That’s a good one. Very tactical. And then how would you describe a great RevOps leader in three words?

Hassan Irshad: A great RevOps leader. I would say strategic, data driven, influential.

James Geyer: I. That’s great. I love it. That’s all the time we have. Hassan. Thanks so much for joining us. This was super interesting and helpful.

If anyone listening has questions for Hassan, I assume it’s fine to reach out [00:23:00] directly or you can funnel your questions to me and I’ll track them down for you.

Thanks again. Hassan was great.

Hassan Irshad: Thank you for having me.