How to grow into RevOps leadership: A Q&A with Franco Anzini

James Geyer: 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. Got James here, co-founder of AccountAim, the RevOps BI platform. Great guest today with Franco Anzini joining us to talk about career in advancement in RevOps.

Uh, great to have you on Franco.

Franco Anzini: Thanks for having me. This is always exciting to talk about. Great topic.

James Geyer: Of course. I don’t think your resume could have any better proof points for your ability to chat. RevOps career growth. Um, you’ve been VP of RevOps at a number of great scale ups including Malwarebytes, Alation, and you got even further than just RevOps, you know, having been COO at LeanData and now SVP of Go to Market Strategy and Ops at Provus.

I may have just spoiled your intro, but what did I miss, Franco like, what else should folks know about your background?

Franco Anzini: I think, uh, a couple of of things to note is that like most people, I, I fell into RevOps by accident at a very, uh, early point in my career and just kind of progressed, right? A lot of it is right place, right time, and uh, as you said, some companies that had great scaling stories and then some, some companies that were already at scale that wanted to be public or have a, an exit and so kind of seen it all and, and tasted all the different flavors of ice cream, as they say.

James Geyer: Yeah. I imagine that goes a long way in kind of getting your new role too, so you can tell like the growth story having done both too. Is that right?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

James Geyer: Cool. Well, let’s dive right in then to career progression. So I guess like reflecting on your career, this is maybe the, the broadest question I’ll ask you, but like, what do you attribute to, to your career progression to VP Bread once and beyond?

You mentioned having a good fortune of working for a number of great companies, but what else from like the, the “You” standpoint.

Franco Anzini: Yeah. So I think the, the opportunity is first and foremost, right? You, you have to, sometimes you have to be in the right place at the right time, but sometimes the place that you’re in, you have to position yourself such that you, you have the potential to advance your your career, right?

And that’s always a tricky one ’cause I think people are. Sometimes very myopic about, they just put the blinders on and they’re like, what’s the next step? What’s the next step? And, and we know that RevOps means different things at different companies of different sizes. And so instead of having the blinders on, like if you open the aperture, you see places on the side that you can get involved with that just, you know, maybe the, the career progression takes a bit more of a scenic route.

But ultimately it, it’s focused on helping the business and, and that’s what gets noticed by executives and, and leadership teams. So I’d say that that’s first and foremost. And then the, the second one, which is almost equally as important, is you need role models or examples of what the next step in a career looks like.

I was fortunate early in, in my career, my, my first job in RevOps, I, I had a great manager who’d been doing RevOps for, for a long time and, and had this great breadth of knowledge. Very quickly you start. To realize that’s what the next step looks like. So I’ve gotta be as good as Mike, right? And, and, uh, uh, that, that just carries through in, in your career.

And I think RevOps, certainly there’s different ways to navigate it just because of the, the way the role manifests. But as you wanna start moving up from RevOps to different leadership roles, you, you need those role models or, or exemplars that you can model your yourself after.

James Geyer: Yeah, it’s a really good point.

I’m hearing, um, you know, join a great company with a lot of surface area for impact. Find someone great to work under who can be your role model. Obviously not everyone, especially in this hiring market, has the luxury of like picking and choosing where they end up. But if someone was kind of going through an interview process right now, like any tips on how folks should assess the, the, the chance that those things in the company they’re interviewing for?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, I, I think a lot of it depends on the company, the space they’re in, the scale that they’re at. Because there, there are, you know, plenty of, of great companies that maybe they’re just not scaling right now. And so a RevOps role there is just keep the lights on and kind of optimize the plumbing, right?

Whereas maybe a smaller company or a company in a newer space, dare I say, AI and, uh, they’re, they’re building the plumbing as they’re building the house, right? And all kinds of opportunity to really get involved in the business. So I think as cliche as it sounds. If you’re looking for ways that you can impact the business, then it, it starts to, you can start to visualize the flow and the different areas, right?

So if you’re looking for a role in RevOps and, and you know, you read the job description, you talk to people, and it sounds like a system admin, like that’s where you want to ask the questions, right? Like, is this really just a system admin or is there, you know, different systems and like. Who, who owns the systems?

Is that moving and, and kind of play it out to see, right? Like there’s nothing wrong with an area of specialization, but you don’t want to go, uh, a mile deep and an inch wide, as they say. Right?

James Geyer: Yeah. Any advice? Maybe it’s a hypothetical example or an example you recall from maybe a bit earlier in your career where to your first point you opened up the aperture a little bit and were able to get involved in something broader than maybe a traditional like narrow scope of RevOps.

Like how could, how should folks think about doing that?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, I think people need to look at what the company is trying to achieve because I think no matter the stage or the maturity of the company, organizations are constantly pivoting and you have to know kind of where they’re pivoting to. Right. And, and I’ll give you an example.

Earlier in my career, I was at a company that, that just had a ton of transactional data, but they weren’t doing anything with it. And, and it sat over with the product team. And then I went to engineering and like nobody knew what to do with this. And, and it was something that I was able to look at and say, the, the future growth of this company is tied to leveraging that data, but nobody’s doing anything with it.

So can I do it? Like, give, give me a crack at it, right? And, and let me see how I can tie it together with what I know about the go to market motion and, and the different sales channels. And, and that was something where. You know, you, in those days, you, you wouldn’t think to give RevOps access to that kind of data for obvious reasons.

But the space that we were in and the way we were scaling rapidly, that unlocked all kinds of different opportunities and different discussions that we could have about the way the company was going to market, the different sales channels, how we wanted to staff things. What was this data starting to show us the beginnings of A PLG motion?

Like all, all these different conversations, right? And back to the original point of make sure you can impact the business. Like those are the discussions that leaders want to have. Like they don’t care about how you de-dupe data in a system or whatever, right? Like, how can we get more revenue? How can we save more expense?

What mar you know, areas are we missing? Stuff like that. It’s much higher level, much more strategic conversation, and that’s what, you know, every RevOps person in their career says, at least I’ve heard, right? I wanna be more strategic. I wanna be more strategic. Well that like that’s how you do it.

James Geyer: Yeah.

You took the words outta my mouth exactly where I was going next. It’s like I hear that so often from folks at the mid-level RevOps and I empathize with it, but the advice I hear from folks like you and other VPs is really proactivity in terms of what the business needs. And that’s kind of exactly what you said.

So it’s good to get another data point there.

Franco Anzini: Yeah.

James Geyer: It’s not always the easiest thing in the world. For some revamps folks to step out of the weeds, kind of develop that business acumen, zoom out on the business, you know, they’re really busy, sometimes don’t always have that mentor. Do you have any other advice on how folks can do that?

I think the mentor piece to me is like the biggest one, but is there anything else that you did or have seen in your career that can help folks?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, I, I had a manager, you know, 10 years ago maybe now. Who had this really cool saying, and it speaks exactly to this. And, and he would always say like, if you wanna know what impacts a business, get close to where the money changes hands, right?

And so sometimes in our RevOps world, like we’re dealing with IT people and, and you know, marketing and, and all these folks, and sometimes you don’t have that mentorship or that example to strive towards and you’ve kind of gotta build it, which is a great adventure to have, but you need to get complete.

Visibility of all the other parts of the business, right? So like if, if you’re in RevOps and you don’t spend time talking to sellers, go talk to sellers and see what they’re saying and what are they hearing from customers. If you have a partner, go to market motion. Like, and you’re not talking to the partners or the partner, the, the, you know, business development teams.

Like go spend time with them and learn about what they’re doing to impact the business and, and how they think about things. And so, speaking to all these different constituents, you start to build this mental model of, okay, this is the way our business works and these are the big levers to pull. These are the smaller levers, and you can start to navigate it that way.

So getting outta the weeds is probably the, the. First piece of advice I give people when they’re trying to, I want to be more strategic, right? Get out of the weeds. Go talk to people in the organization that you don’t normally talk to, like learn about the business.

James Geyer: Yeah. And ironically, that can actually make your life easier too.

If you have a million things in the weeds on your to-do list, we then go talk to people and realize that they don’t care about these things. Yeah. You find something people do care about and it might even be less work for bigger impacts. I think it’s wind all across the board.

Franco Anzini: You’re, you’re right on talking to different constituents and stakeholders that you might not regularly interact with.

Helps you prioritize things in your, in your world, immensely. I can’t tell you how many times you go through the, the list of stuff that you and your team are doing and then you go talk to people and you come back and you look at the list and you’re like, why are we doing this? Nobody wants it and they don’t need it.

Like, why? Why? Right. Get it out of there.

James Geyer: Yeah.

Franco Anzini: And, and so yeah. You’re you’re right on.

James Geyer: Um, it’s, it’s so funny how that happens. It happens to everyone too. Uh, so I’m glad I’m not crazy ’cause we, you know, it happens in AccountAim as well sometimes. Oh yeah. Let’s move forward a little bit. So you and I spoke in the past around like, you know, your experience managing teams.

So you’ve run some pretty big teams, you know, both RevOps and Chief Operating officer. What’s your best advice for a first time manager?

Franco Anzini: First time manager, depending on, on the scope, right, of resources that are under your purview. So if it’s a first time manager with, you know, two direct reports. Or it’s a first time manager and you know, you happen to have, you know, four direct reports and they’ve each got teams.

Like, it depends a little, but I think as a first time manager, the similarity between those two is you wanna be very clear to assess what you’ve got and what you don’t got in your team. Right? And that could be in terms of skill sets, attitude, aptitude, you know, career, vision, like just know, know what you’re working with.

And, and um, that, that’s kind of where you start. And then the second piece is the hardest part for first time managers, which is you have to be a little hands off. And that’s the part that people struggle with the most, right? Because I used to be the CRM administrator and I would worry about all the system integrations and the data.

Well, now I’ve got a team and I’ve gotta let them do their thing. If they struggle, I’m ready to jump in and help and, and assess and, and, uh, you know, advance it. But now you’ve got people, you don’t have to do that anymore. The example I I give to a lot of RevOps people who are in maybe some earlier stages of their career and, and smaller companies is CRM reporting, right?

When, when you’re an individual contributor, you, you are reporting on everything in your CRM system. When you’re a manager, don’t write a uh, don’t write a report. See what happens. Right. And that helps you circle back to this assessment of, oh, I’ve got super competent people who can do this and, and they’re better than I was oftentimes, you know?

So you gotta get outta the weeds a little bit. And, and it’s not so much getting outta the weeds, it’s like people do their thing. Right. And, um, it’s the hardest part for a first time manager of being a little more hands off and you’re, you’re observing, you’re not doing right.

James Geyer: Yeah. How about the, kind of like other end of the spectrum sort of.

When you, you know, as you grow in your career, you’re probably going to be put over functions that you don’t have direct expertise in. Maybe enablement, maybe data and analytics. I’ve seen those two common things for RevOps fall under. Curious if you have experience like adopting an org that you hadn’t actually worked in before, and how does that work?

Is it a similar model where you kind of just have to trust them? Like, that goes a little bit scarier to me. ’cause you might not know what good looks like.

Franco Anzini: Yeah, well, so you’re right. You, you don’t necessarily know what good looks like and, and you do have to trust, but trust and verify. Right. I think that that’s the beauty of, of being a manager in a new space is it scratches the itch to learn something new and you can really dive in.

I had to do that several companies ago where, where there was online paid marketing function that I had never really dealt with hands-on. But you gotta get smart about it real quick, right? And, and we’re in a world where there’s a ton of resources available. But again, go talk to people. Right, like in, in that space, go talk to your ad vendors, talk to, you know, marketing agencies, like talk to the experts and, and get smart about it.

You’re, you’re never going to be as smart in that as quickly as the people who’ve been doing it for much longer than you. But you get smart enough, and again, if you circle back to why are we doing this? What impact does it have on the business? You get smart enough to know which questions to ask. Right, and you know which trends matter, you know, what the KPIs are, what the, the critical metrics are, and then you can start to, to shape the, okay, I’ve got people, the metrics are telling me a story, like now it’s all coming together, right?

So it’s, it’s a series of kind of checks and balances, but, but you do have to verify and you have to do that by just getting smart. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a successful manager who’s absorbed a brand new function that they knew nothing about. And, and, and they just leave it alone, right. Never.

Right. You, you gotta, you gotta get smart.

James Geyer: Yeah. Uh, makes sense. How about this? Maybe like some inside baseball, maybe the answer ends up being really obvious as you’re growing in your career, you’ve taken on a lot of these functions or sub-functions, I’ll call it. Like, I think some people that I talk to, it makes ’em a little nervous, right?

It’s like, I haven’t done this before. You know? I don’t match everything on the job description. I’m curious like. How those conversations have gone in your experience when you’re like getting a big team increase, functional increase, how you’ve, you know, what people were asking of you, how you thought about in terms of taking it on?

Are there scenarios where you shouldn’t take it on? Like how do you think about all of this?

Franco Anzini: I think it depends on the scope and the scale. I think if you’re taking on or being asked to take on oftentimes something that’s new, it’s, it’s okay to ask what support is in place. Right? And because it’s, it’s not always like the people.

And the resources that you absorb, but there’s like tangential help, right? And it’s like, what, what does the, the support structure look like for this? I think that’s one. The other thing is really getting back to basics a little bit where you’re in the job. But the scope is expanding and it’s totally fair game to ask your manager, the, the regional leader who, whoever’s in charge, what does success look like if I go down this path, right?

Like, you’re asking me to absorb these teams and, and I’m, I’m happy to do it and it’s great for career advancement, thank you very much, but what is gonna make this a success in your eyes? And, and that kind of short circuits it right down to the. You know, here’s the problem that, you know, either the last person didn’t do, or you know, this group is, is not cohesive and they’re not tied to the business.

Whatever, you’re gonna find out exactly what you’ve gotta go, you gotta go get right. And oftentimes it’s not a skills issue, particularly if it’s like a large team and it’s being bolted onto another large team. It’s all about alignment. There, there is so much that gets achieved just by communicating between different teams and different functions.

Because by that point, like you’ve, you’ve got enough skill sets in house to do the job and you know, maybe there’s a function that, you know, they’re not all a plus players, you know, they’re b, b plus, but like they can do the job, but let’s get ’em all aligned to make sure that. What they’re able to do gets you to where you, you need to go.

James Geyer: Yeah. This could probably be a whole 45 minute episode in of itself, but a alignment is like the proverbial, you know, challenge, like any very abbreviated answers on how you’ve tackled alignment. And in those situations that you mentioned, is it just bringing, does bringing under one umbrella usually help to have someone like Franco connecting the dots or,

Franco Anzini: it so depends on the way the organization is structured and the way the rest of the organization is aligned.

So years ago when, when, you know, RevOps was gaining steam, the answer was, well just put it all into RevOps and it magically happens. Not always, right? Like if, if the, the rest of the organization or different parts of the organization that rely on this support function are not aligned and like all you’ve done is move the problem from one hand to the other, right?

So alignment is, is huge. And, and I think the way you overcome that is go talk to people, right? Go talk to your stakeholders. Learn about what matters to them, the problems they’re trying to solve. And then you can take that back to say, okay, how, how is my team tied into that? How can we support that? How can we help them get ahead of it?

And, and it’s different in every organization. Now, if, if you’ve got. An organization that is super aligned at the leadership level and it cascades down then some small organizational changes, it just flows within the culture and the structure of the company. And off you go, right? Like everyone’s already aligned, but you, you’ve gotta make sure that alignment happens.

’cause otherwise you’re, you’re just, you know, moving the coconut shells as they say.

James Geyer: Yeah, makes sense. Definitely helpful and definitely easier said than done. I’m sure. I’m sure through you as you’ve lived there. Always. That makes sense. We’ve take, we talked about like career growth a lot, you know, growing teams expanding quite a bit.

We kind of took as given in that discussion a RevOps person’s perception in the business, and I think you touched on this in the beginning by talking about, you know, be open, go talk to people, have good role models, but like, I don’t know if ops folks are always the best of branding themselves. So like how should folks think about like positioning themselves within their company to continue climbing the RevOps ladder?

Franco Anzini: There, there is, this is not, you know, blanket or umbrella, but more often than not, there is a phrase that RevOps can use that really unlocks the second part of the conversation that gets them where they need to go. And that phrase, when you’re dealing with different stakeholders is, how can my team help?

Like, just ask that question, put it out there and, and let’s go. Right? You’re gonna learn so much about. The priorities and the different items and, and projects and initiatives that people are working on and really what they care about and what they don’t. And that allows you to have the conversation of, we can help with that.

We can be helpful, we can be useful. We don’t have the skillset to do that, but I can find it. Right. And like now you’re having a conversation where stakeholders and leaders leave to say. You know, boy, that RevOps leader was willing to do whatever he or she could to mm-hmm. Really help us out. And, and they asked insightful questions and, and they didn’t kind of come with one solution to, you know, one size fits all.

So like, how, how can I help? Is this phrase that, you know, there, there’s a handful of them in life, right? Like that’s one of them in the RevOps world that really. Opens people up and, and you just kind of really figure it out quick.

James Geyer: I love that. Yeah. And kind kind of similarly as we think about internal positioning, you and I talked about this a little bit a few weeks ago, like, how can you, you know, mid-career RevOps kind of assess how others view you?

Like we talked about, you know, if you’re seeing just as a Salesforce admin is limiting and maybe just being open with how can I help, helps break that perception. But how can you kind of, before that even understand like how you’re being viewed and if you’re kind of maybe on the path for potential advancement?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, I, I think there’s always the usual methods of, uh, regular performance touchpoints with your manager. 360 reviews are fabulous for that, and, and the larger the organization, the more formal that review process is. But again, it’s asking like, ask the question to, you know, your manager, a stakeholder, like, how, how am I doing?

Are, are you, you getting what you need? Like, what areas can I improve in? It, it again, much easier said than done because human beings just have a, a difficult time asking for feedback and, and when you open it up to how am I doing? You don’t know what’s coming. It could be the good, it could be the bad, right?

Like it might lead to a, you know, this is a performance conversation now, which like, that might be okay. Right.

James Geyer: Better to know than to not, right?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it’s, it’s funny kind of how that works, but, um, I think. That’s, that’s really one way to, to do it. The, the other, which is, is a little more kind of behind the scenes is if, if you’re in a RevOps space, maybe at a company that’s big enough, you can do some benchmarking.

Right with, with others in the space. Like if, if you’re, uh, you know, leading RevOps at a hundred million dollar company, well how, how are we comparing to other companies in the space and, and, uh, you know, there’s plenty of, of, um, social groups and, and uh, you know, formal networking functions. Like you can start to get a pretty good idea of are we way off base here, or are we on par with.

How others are doing it and how they’re thinking about it. And some of the projects that they’re leaning into there. There’s totally external view, right? ’cause every company’s different, but it, it can give you kind of an informal checkpoint.

James Geyer: Yeah. That’s great. Sadly, we’re almost at time here. I have one or two more questions for you.

And it’s about making that kind of like final jump to VP of RevOps. And actually maybe, hopefully it’s not final, but that’s what a lot of people see as kind of like the pinnacle. Um, I wanna start by just like. Company fit. And so I, I think not every company actually needs a VP of RevOps. So in your perspective, from what you’ve seen, like when does a company start to need a VP of RevOps and what does that role even kind of like entail versus say, director, senior director?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, it’s, there’s no good answer. It’s gonna differ wildly from companies, right? Based on their size and, and their scope. I have seen plenty of people who are the VP of RevOps and they’re at a $20 million company and they have one analyst who works for them, and they’re the VP of RevOps, right? And, and that’s great for that company, but could that VP of RevOps go to a $400 million company and be a VP of RevOps and succeed?

Not sure, right? Be an outstanding individual. Might be a unicorn, but those are the exceptions. Um, so, so I think truly what you start to build this model of, okay, when does a company need a, a, a VP of RevOps and someone at that level. Number one, they have to be big enough where they’re working strategically with the business leaders, right?

Sales leaders, marketing leaders, customer leaders. But there needs to be enough specialization. Underneath them that their superpower at that scale becomes tying the whole thing together. So we’ve got an enablement function, we’ve got a deal desk function, we’ve got analytics, we’ve got systems and process, we’ve got training and onboarding and, and it’s like this is the person that brings it all together.

James Geyer: Mm-hmm.

Franco Anzini: At the smaller company that VP is the, the one person that does all those things, right? Mm-hmm. So you kind of have to play it out in this kind of structure and, and part of the difficulty is. RevOps means different things to different people at different companies, right? Yeah. So not every RevOps function at every company is gonna have enablement, analytics, deal desk, or commercial systems, right?

Like. Sometimes you, you’ve only got two, sometimes it’s deal desk and systems, right? And, and that’s okay. If the company is big enough and, and scaled enough and there’s enough stakeholders and, and there’s, you know, enough volume or, or whatever the metrics are, like, could you put a VP on top of that? Yeah, you could, right?

Mm-hmm. You’ve gotta kind of feel it out, right? But it, it’s generally a question of scale and specialization. Those are kind of the two vectors you end up with.

James Geyer: Okay. I wish I would’ve asked this question to start with, because I think it’ll actually be really fascinating. You may have to have you on for a second podcast next year or something, but you, you talked about at the $400 million company, the VP of RevOps needs to be the person that kind of brings it all together across all those various functions you mentioned.

What does that take? Like, is there a certain skillset, experience, maybe even, you know, if you toot your own horn a little bit, which I imagine you won’t because you’re very humble, but like, what does it take to be good at that? Is it supreme organization? Is it something else?

Franco Anzini: It takes, uh, a lot of empathy because the, the bigger the company, the more moving parts there are and, and the more, uh, constituents and, and stakeholders that RevOps has to, has to work with and support.

So it takes a lot of empathy. It, it does take some experience to some point, right? You, you can’t take a, a head of RevOps from a $20 million company and drop ’em into, you know, a $200 million company and expect the same thing. Uh, back back to what we were talking about at the outset, like having a role model, an exemplar, like something that you can, you know, work towards and, and you kind of, you have to know what it looks like at that level.

And, and it is vastly different, right? When, when the head of RevOps at a multi-hundred million dollar company, you’re not writing any reports, right? You’re not digging into maybe some, some analytics. You’re not checking, you know, the, the marketing click through rates. Like you, you’ve got teams and you’ve got people, but you’re bringing it together, working with the business leaders to try and, and formulate or present the insights.

Right? Like all this work that’s happening in the engine room, like what are we noticing and, and what do we think you need to know about, you know, whereas at a much smaller company, the head of RevOps needs to make sure the data’s doodoo, the reports are there, all the automation, right? Like it’s just, it’s a different type of adventure.

James Geyer: Yeah.

Franco Anzini: And the different skillset. So you need to be able to come outta the weeds. Keep talking about the business and how you can impact the business and then have some resources to do it, right. No, nobody can do everything.

James Geyer: Yeah. Cool. I think it’s a great place to leave it. I wish we had another 30 minutes, but Franco, thanks so much for coming on.

I thought this was a really interesting conversation.

Franco Anzini: This was great. Thanks for having me. We’ll talk again soon.

James Geyer: Of course.