“You can’t add a spine later. Start with RevOps.”
If you’re building RevOps at a scaling startup or trying to uplevel your impact as a strategic operator, this conversation with Yoni Spitzer is gold.
Yoni is VP of Operations and Head of RevOps at Coro, a Series D cybersecurity company. He shares how he went from no RevOps (or tech) background to supporting a 200-person revenue org from scratch, and the hard-earned lessons he’s developed along the way.
In this episode, we get into:
- What early RevOps hires actually need to focus on
- Centralized vs decentralized RevOps teams — and why Yoni fights for centralization
- Why RevOps should never report into Sales
Especially relevant if you’ve ever found yourself asking:
- “How should I build my RevOps team?”
- “How do I improve my influence?”
- “Where does RevOps actually fit in the org?”
Give it a listen, this one’s packed with great advice.
Full Transcript:
Hello everybody. Time for another episode of Aim for Excellence, where we break down strategic, operational and career related best practices with RevOps leaders we admire. I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim Super excited to be joined by Yoni Spitzer today. He’s the VP of operations and the head of RevOps at Series D backed Coro.
Thanks for joining me, Yoni. Thank you for having me. Do you wanna share a bit more detail in your background for folks listening? I do. I did not start from, rev Revenue Operations. I. I started, my background wasn’t legal. I was at a law firm, worked a law firm, decided that law is not for me. I don’t like lawyers.
Studying law and then deciding I don’t like lawyers is great. To continue working there. So I shifted. I decided, okay, what do we do now? This is going back to 20 16, 20 17. What do I do now? High tech sounds interesting. What do you need to, what qualifications do you need for high tech? I was told you either need to be an engineer or nothing.
Great. I’m a lawyer. Let’s go into high tech. Became a analyst, a lawyer that becomes an analyst. Again, what are your qualifications? Becoming analyst. None. But let’s be an analyst and learn what you need to do and I’ll succeed. So started being a recess analyst for the marketing department at a very small company called Cornet, Coronet Cybersecurity.
20 people or so, maybe even less, based out of Tel Aviv. No sales team, just marketing. They had a half baked product that they were trying to sell. Came in, worked with marketing, and then slowly I was realizing that there is a lot of components that were missing if we wanted to continue to grow. So walked in into the CEO’s office and said, I want to help.
I have a background from the military. I was an operations officer in the military. I know operations is, I know how to get shit done. And I wanna do this. He said, okay, great. For right now, I don’t have a budget, but let’s see what you can do. And then just elbowed my way in and started touching things in sales.
Let’s take HubSpot. We’re talking about 20 17, 20 18 when HubSpot was still very much marketing sort of platform and said, okay, how do I break this to help us turn it into something that could help sales? And then started doing that and touching and learning and teaching myself how to do everything there.
And then. Starting with a sales team, no salespeople. What is a sales methodology? How do you sell? What is our product? What is the process? And basically from the ground with no experience, just pure logic and knowing what to do in operations and going and being very close for the CEO and other founders.
Slowly but slowly, putting in the foundation, the building blocks that will eventually become a 200 sales team over the next seven years. So really coming from no experience at all and going towards that area. Because not only did I not sa law, but I hated sales. And if you don’t have experience normally you go into sales, I don’t wanna sell.
So what is it? What can you do that is not sales, but can totally assist and get you very far and very successful, but still involved in sales? Which is basically the most important thing in a company you need to sell in order to survive. Okay, let’s do something in sales operations. So that was my shift from totally coming out military learning and studying law, moving over to high tech and diving into the world of sales operations and then into revenue operations.
Such a great story. That’s why I love startups. ’cause you can start as employee 20, work your way all the way up to vp and also why I love RevOps. It’s actually, your story is very unique, but at the same time, it’s. Common and that a lot of RevOps folks get their start by just doing. It’s I don’t really, no one ever planned to get into RevOps, but let’s just do, and then see where we end up.
I find a similarity between many people on a RevOps that we’re super focused. I call us super focused, A DHD people. So that we are very prone in what we need to do, but we do everything and we wanna do everything. And if we’re not in every single meeting, which is a products or marketing or sales or finance, and we are thinking of all these things at one time, which is very A DHD, we get very annoyed and it annoys us.
We weren’t part of that process of thinking and planning forward. So yes, people that come from that world and move over, they need to love doing many different things. Totally. I’m really excited to dive into this conversation, one to hear about how you elevated yourself through coro over the years.
You touched on it a little bit. It’d be great to get in more detail and two, because, and in a conversation that led us to getting you on the podcast here is you have some really strong opinions that I think are really good around like how red team should be structured. So we’ll dive into both of those.
Before we do, I ask every guest we have, how do you define RevOps? I define it. I think there is a very generic answer that everyone uses. On what a RevOps is, and I think it’s true though. It’s the backbone of an organization. If you’re looking at a department that is in the DNA and very, like the spine of an organization, it’s RevOps You need to be very strong and in center of an organization. Connected to every other limb or department in the company. And if you’re not, if you’re not that spine, people don’t always think about it that way. They think that, it’s a good department to have, let’s add it on some time but you can’t add a spine afterwards.
You have to start from that, and then you get involved with everything and then it just becomes natural to everyone. The company that goes through RevOps, and you need RevOps to survive. And I define ’em the backbone of the company, and it ensures that every department in the company will work in sync.
Not always does it work, but you have the infrastructure that once you build up and you have enough good people, you need to keep hiring good people to realize that are the same way of thinking that they’re very centralized, but very A DHD, that they wanna do many things but want to focus. If you keep on hiring those sort of people that will say, yes, I want to connect the dots, that is the core of what you need in the company.
Yeah, and I think, the customer journey is the company, to your point of you need sales and RevOps should own the customer journey. And so it should be the most strategic organization there is. I also love like the spine definition is so good and you can’t really exist without a spine to your point.
So like when should an early stage startup, in your opinion, like bring in RevOps for the first time here again, I think we can have a long discussion with many different startups and different sort of startups when you bring the RevOps. I think the good answer is there is never early enough, bring them in as soon as possible.
But many companies will argue and say, okay, I don’t think I need RevOps till I have a sales team, or I need a fully, grown out and healthy product to bring in RevOps to start connecting the dots. I don’t agree with that sort of aspect. I think that you, maybe you won’t be defined as a RevOps department.
From the get go. But you’re thinking in a RevOps sort of way, you are, you’re coming and saying, okay, what do we need to do that eventually will take all these components and different departments and different products that will eventually generate US revenue. So I think the earlier on that, founders of a startup or any company that I, that is growing the earliest on that you can think about, how do I now.
Integrate people that are thinking of revenue operations, of connecting and not building something and then say, damn, I didn’t think about this when we got down the road, and now I need to go back and start building away is a very good start and very healthy fee for the company. Yeah, maybe using Coro as an example, or even just RevOps more generally.
From all your conversations with folks in the space, like for that early RevOps hire, what are some of those things that they should be thinking about? I hear you on, you don’t want to hire them too late because you might forget all of these things. Is there a tactical list that, like punch list that you think about for that early hire?
Yes. I think for the early hire you need to be ready to get to, to dirty your hands. You need to be ready to not sit back and then say, I need this to be done. I need that to be done. Product create for me this marketing. I wanna see that. You need to be very much dive in. Go sit with your VP of product or if you have a VP of product or go sit with your customer success.
If you’re already at that stage, get your hands very dirty. Learn the business. Don’t just be a spectator sitting on the side and saying, okay, I’m just gonna look at everything. And then analyze. We’re not analysts. If you want analysts, you have a different department that will also be part of RevOps eventually, but you have to go inside, dive in, understand fully what the company is, what are the problems, where are your strong points, where are the issues that you might think ahead as a RevOps person, that you want to be in.
So the people that I wanna hire, or I am hiring over the whole term, people that are hungry. They’re they have experience, they can maybe transition out of sales ops. ’cause it is good also to have that experience with you. And they’re very, technological. They under, they understand to ask the right questions.
They’re going over to VP of R&D. They’re going to product, they’re going to marketing, they’re to see the whole picture as a whole. That would probably be the sort of the first typecast of people that I would hire later on down the road when you’re already a bigger team and you want to sit back and you want not, you’re never gonna sit back, but you wanna sit back and think, how do I handle this as more of a.
Macro team and different departments and different projects, different scopes, that’s a different stage. The beginning get people that wanna dirty their hands. Is there in the early stage, one or two things, maybe common pitfalls that companies might overlook? Hey, we didn’t do this RevOps task, I don’t know, CRM data structure, something else, and it really bit us in the butt a few years later.
Data. How do you keep the data. You keep it or you do even keep data. Many of these companies, they say data, they throw it around as such an easy thing, but then they look at it and say, okay, is this data? No, it’s a dump yard. You just put everything inside and then to understand what you even just threw inside here will take you two years with five analysts and you don’t understand it.
The earliest on that, you build some sort of infrastructure with a data engineer and a data analyst and bi developer. Even part-time. Bring someone like that in to really think about how you wanna hold your data, not just your data. ’cause it’s not my data. I don’t own any data, but I’m the master of data out of all data.
That is something that if you don’t think ahead, that’s gonna bite you in the ass very badly. Now a few examples, and this goes towards something that we discussed even previously about centralized and decentralized. This is very much going towards. How do you hold your data in a company? Do you let your marketing department deal with their own data?
They say yeah, I’m connected to Salesforce, but I’m gonna deal on my own dashboards and I’ll show you how I influence you and how I succeed in sales. Or do you have product data that are looking just, okay, what is the customer doing? What are they clicking on? What? What products or bundles or add-ons are they actually enabling in the system?
And if each one tells their own story, then you have a very good story. But it’s different episodes and maybe different timelines and you just be very hard to connect the dots and very hard for you to make the correct decisions. Or if I don’t make them, but I need to feed them to someone that will, if you don’t have that centralized from the get-go or plan that infrastructure from the get-go, it’s gonna be very difficult moving forward to make those decisions.
What’s, yeah, we’ll get decentralized and decentralized nature of the data for sure. But what’s like the right. Framework for early RevOps folks to think through the data. Like how should, let’s say, some early RevOps people aren’t data experts, is there a way that they should be thinking about making this decision of how the data’s captured and stored or even defined one?
I always recommend for someone that isn’t a data-driven but wants to be. Go and consult with someone. It, we have such a big market of people that understand us and done this so many times and are geniuses in data of maybe not analyzing data, but how to hold the data. And that is something that if you don’t really understand it, it’s fine.
Bring someone that consult you on just how to save the data for I. Another day that you can then utilize it. Maybe you don’t have anything to do with it now, but it will be worth gold when you’re going to a round B or series or whatever and you wanna show something of growth or conversion that happened and you wanna start connecting with people that do know and understand data.
But if you don’t save those, that data and you don’t understand, it brings bright people into help you, you’re gonna be blind. Yeah. So I think the best way is to understand the data. Going back to practical terms, again, diving into the department and understanding what their process. So go to the marketing team and ask the right questions.
Be a pest, be annoying. What do you do? How do you target? What are the third parties you use? What are these tools? What websites are you monitoring? How do you do ads? Then what is information? What information are you collecting? Where do you collect it? Where you dump it? What are the flags and identifies that you wanna look at in the marketing world?
And then you need to think, okay, marketing’s marketing, but everything again, your revenue. It’s gonna make me money. How does it make me money? How do I take that marketing data and then align it and connect it to the sales team and say, okay, marketing has influenced X, Y, and Z. Maybe not first touch, but influenced or marketing as generated X, Y, and Z for the sales team.
And then you can start connecting that and you have that data to start with. So you need to be well prepared and start early on using that data. Yeah, that’s I think really well put. And actually a lot of insight in there. The two things I take away from that is, one, just understand what the heck is going on with every team.
Like what do they care about? What are they collecting? And two, tied to the customer journey, that revenue floor, how does all of this actually contribute to the decisions were being made and how do we want to view in an ideal world? And then to your earlier point, how do we make sure everyone’s speaking the same language?
So I think, easier said than done, but that’s how I summarize the response. I think it’s actually a really helpful framework when you say easier said than done. That’s where RevOps comes in with a different hat, RevOps. They need to make their opinion heard and be taken seriously. So there is a place where RevOps leader needs to be a little bit of a bully because at the end of the day, if you are not showing the right information to the right person, which most of the time is the CEO or Chief Revenue Officer, someone that is a VP of sales, and you’re not bullying the person that needs to give the data and making sure he’s putting it correctly or defining it correctly, or looking at the right dashboards, you’re gonna have a very.
I would call it a not good relationship with these different departments. So you need to bully ’em in a nice sort of way to make sure they do exactly what you want and they set it up the way you want, and then you can collect it the way you want. It’s so important, fastest way to lose trust is to have poor data quality and practices.
So you mentioned centralization versus decentralization earlier of kind of data as a whole and maybe even the RevOps function. We talked a little bit about this before. Can you just share your perspective on kind of what this even means as a trade off, and then what your ideal purview is for a RevOps leader?
So from my experience, this is not something that I thought for many years, this is something that, dawned me the last two years and I’ve started executing in the last year and I’m still having my challenges. Still, the leaders in my company are fighting me on a daily day-to-day basis. ’cause I am I three momentary.
What means, why am I fighting them? But what does it mean centralized versus decentralized? So we talk, let’s talk about the Revenue team First. Revenue is not just sales. That is the biggest mistake that people think. They say You are revenue, you’re sales, you deal with sales. What? What? Are you relevant or connected to anything else?
Why do you need other people or other hires that have a marketing in front of their name, in their title? Why do you even need to work with ’em or why do you need to own them? So I have been advocating for a very long time that RevOps needs to be a department that underneath Revenue Operations, you will have also marketing operation.
You’ll have a touch into product operations, and the revenue operations needs to be the owner of that whole process. For example. Many companies very naturally work with the people that they’re comfortable and with on business that they know. So marketing will bring a marketing operations person and they work with them and they work exactly what they know.
They know how to set up their HubSpot or Pardot or whatever, and they say they, they did their job great. And then they create their leads and they throw it over to sales and they don’t understand why. It’s never connecting, never aligning. The BDRs say, I don’t understand what this lead is, or, it’s such a, it’s a crap lead.
And that happened too. Too often I’m taking marketing, for example, because I think that’s a widespread problem across the whole industry. I came along and spoke with the CMO and told ’em, listen, don’t need most of the marketing team, but I need two people from your team that are marketing operations. One that exists and one that doesn’t exist yet.
We’re gonna hire. No, I need them. No, you don’t need them. I will give you the service, whatever you need in marketing operations, which is connected to systems and tools, processes, and data, I will give you. Why? Because I’m looking at sales, I’m looking at product, I’m looking at finance. I’m looking how much money we’re investing and what we’re throwing at marketing.
And now I also look what you are doing inside marketing and people that we are gonna hire together, not just me. You are gonna be with me in the interview. We’re gonna hire the right people. They’re gonna work for you. They’re gonna, I’m gonna tell ’em what to do. I’m gonna align exactly their processes.
They’ll know the sales process by heart. They’ll know every process that they need to be being part of the revenue team. But their expertise will be in marketing operations. So when we go out to campaign and start a campaign, it won’t be Marketing’s Doing Campaign and good luck Sales Operations. It will be Revenue Operations is doing a campaign with marketing.
Building it for them from the landing page to the forms that they’re submitting, the way they get into Parado, the way they, or HubSpot, the way they move into Salesforce, the process that happens that goes to A BDR, and how they answer or don’t answer, how they qualify or disqualify them, and how does it go back to marketing to nurture them all the way down the funnel until they close or not close.
And then once you connect those two together on the dashboard that you’re showing at the next management meeting of what marketing does. It is gonna be 100% aligned because the story that he’s gonna be telling, it’s not gonna be history, it’s gonna be the sales motion story of what marketing did. To influence a sale?
When did it happen? And I can 100% with confidence say, yes, this data is now correct. The number that what he’s showing is correct, which is a challenge, and I’ve seen this so many times, I’ve speaking to so many of these leaders in other companies that every time they come, the marketing says, yeah, we’ve generated $6.9 million this revenue.
And then the sales team goes, I don’t understand. We only like close 1.3 this quarter, and we only generate four. Where are you bringing those numbers? So once you put those two together, centralized. One, you build confidence with him. He feels now a lot more calmer ’cause someone is taking care of him and actually showing real numbers and approving his numbers.
And I’m feeling a lot calmer ’cause I know exactly the process of what he’s doing that will make sales succeed. So that is just the centralized version of that. Centralized is exactly the opposite. Telling you do your work, I’ll do mine. We’ll do a handshake somewhere in the middle, and hopefully we hope for success, which I haven’t seen almost ever succeed.
Very only specific company that are so big, they don’t even need a marketing team. They just say their name and people buy them. Those are the companies that succeed, on that sort of a method. Yeah, I mean you’re really speaking my language here and a lot of what you described is like the whole reason we built AccountAim to solve exactly these problems.
If there are more yonis in the world, you might put us out of business because it, you’ve got this kind of down pat a super compelling like business case for that. To me, it sounds like you got to a point where in your hypothetical example, the head of marketing is very happy with it, but how did, how was that reaction in the beginning?
Was there some friction and how, was there anything else you had to use to convince them or with that kind of thought process from the beginning, was it pretty easy? Don’t make a mistake, there is still friction. It’s never gonna end. There’s always gonna be friction. When you put a target on a department, there is stress and there’s always gonna be friction.
So that is something that is not gonna, and you always need to. Speak them again and calm them down. And this is happening. I’m telling you on a daily basis that they will write an email and say, I want these people back in my, and you’ll say, no, it’s fine. We’ll take care of it. Yes, maybe you are not used to not getting your tasks done within a day.
It’s gonna take a day and a half or two, that’s fine. But it’s gonna be done the proper way. It’s gonna be done efficiently, correctly, and you’re gonna see a lot more. Advantages outta this process, even though it took another day and a half. Eventually you’ll be a well only machine. It’ll take it a lot less time.
But until you get to that stage, there’s only advantages to this process. Yeah, that’s great. With this structure in mind, like who should RevOps report into ultimately? So I’m a big advocate that I’ll start all the way around who RevOps should not report into now. There’s always the top, people, the top heads of the department that say, don’t report to finance.
Definitely should not report to the CEO. I am a big advocate that RevOps should not report to the CRO or VP of sales. Should not at any company, be underneath those departments. You need a revenue operations department, whether it’s small or big, to be neutral. To be objective and have objective way of thinking and a view of everything that’s going in the company and not be tied to a target or the stress that a specific department has.
So if I connect and say, revenue Chief, revenue Officer, revenue Operations has the same name in the title, we should put them together. No. Chief Revenue Officer is in charge of making sure we close money, we make money, we close business revenue operations. is there to assist the revenue officer to make sure that he can do it the most efficient way.
It’s the best way to give him information on how he does it, and also to tell him where he’s wrong. You have to be able to have those kahunas to tell him, guy, I need to do something else. This is not the right way. The data shows it, and that’s the only way you can prove it if you don’t have your data ready and speak the language in.
Revenue In efficiency in time cycle of closing a deal. You don’t come with ’em already. With that prepared, you won’t have a connection with him. But if you come with him very specific and the way he speaks and given that information, he’ll be your best friend and partner and just trust you in every single thing He’ll say, you own all the reporting, you own the processes.
Tell me what we need to do. What is the best sales cycle that I need to do now? Because you can own it and you see exactly what’s working, what’s not. Yeah, it’s so great. And that’s exactly how you become a strategic partner in RevOps. So many mid-level folks get stuck in the tactical day to day.
They’re, I’m not gonna say not adding value, they’re still getting valuable work done, but they’re not actually being a strategic business partner. I think being able to productively highlight risks and maybe to use your words, call out, leaders of revenue or marketing, actually extremely productive.
And when you have everything buttoned up to your point, they actually appreciate it. Because it’s making them better at their job. And so it’s a win-win for everyone, including your career. Correct. Now, who do you report to? Because we said who we don’t, you report to Revenue operations needs to be backed by someone in the in if you’re not strong enough in the company needs to be backed by someone that is pretty strong in the company.
I said, not CEO, I said not C-R-O-C-O-O or VP Operations is a good enough title and a good enough person that deals this with the same A DHD ’cause the CEO, that’s exactly what he deals with the whole day between finance and real estate and HR and making sure we’re in time with everything that we need in the companies and our auditing and everything.
To have a department underneath the COO or some sort of operations department, they speak the same language. They can get backing from the CO that he will, he’s an, he’s a C, he’s a C level person. He knows how to speak with the other C levels of the company. He knows how to tell most what to do and they will listen to him.
If so, if revenue is not strong enough to stand a song, legs, intel, the C levels what to do, it’s always good to be, I think in my point of view underneath some sort of organization is operations built. Yeah, I think that’s great. It makes total sense with the centralized structure. The underpinning of that structure was really around data.
There were a few other things, but data was the core. Tell me how you set up kind of your data team at Coreo, why you did that, what the team looks like. I. Okay, so this also came down the road, so I’ll explain what I own at Coro, part of my responsibilities, and I’ll explain why did I also bring the data team.
So part of VP operations and head of RevOps, I don’t just own advising and setting up dashboards, but I also own the systems and all the tools and the implementation. I saw somewhere Postal Link, then someone replied that the moment you give up the CRM is the moment you are free to do what you want as a RevOps leader.
And I, I saw that. I said absolutely not that is. No, don’t listen to that advice. Do not give up the tools. You are the ones that own the tools. You can listen to other people, what to do with the tools and how to define ’em, but you need to own all the sales tools and all the sales processing and own it so you can shape it and create it in the way you think based on the data and based on the sales leaders that you have in the company.
How do you set up a data team? So part of also the responsibilities coming with all the tools, also analyzing the data. I don’t want a data team on the side that will, I’ll need to send to and wait for them and give them data and tell me to build out dashboards. I want a team that is reporting directly to me that I can with a click on a finger and tell ’em, okay, ad hoc we need to create, generate dashboards or not even, sometimes I generate dashboards sometimes just to generate the raw data, which is correct, and give it to, for example, fp and n finance so that they can do a different sort of data set, maybe So a little bit more complex what they need to do that to show investors, for example.
So in my team, what I have today, I have. Two data analysts or bi developers. I have two data engineers. So the two data engineers, they work the whole day of just connecting the systems. When we said centralized, what are the tools that we’re using? What is the data that are in all those tools and how are they, what is the infrastructure of those tools, of holding the data and then making sure that they’re fed into one data lake so you can then build data warehouse out of that data.
And that’s what they’re always backing. They’re writing code, they’re making sure they’re up to date with everything that is being updated in the data. They need to always speak to someone in r and d. ’cause if they change something in the product, they need to know about it and update their APIs to collect that data.
And then I have two data analysts or BI analysts that I can then take that data and they are very close. The engineers and the analysts are very close with the RevOps people. So the RevOps people tell what they wanna see and how they wanna analyze it. The data analysts understand the business, and then if they don’t have it in the dataset, they tell their data Engineers create something else from me or pull something else from a different tool.
Then together with me sitting in the middle looking at what they’re creating. And then us also sometimes even telling ’em no, like I’m not a data engineer, I’m not a data analyst, what on the level that they do. But I can tell ’em and write them the exact logic, what I want to see in the end and the ifs and the alls and what’s gonna happen and from what year till what year, and what system you want to connect more.
And then they go and they start doing their magic. And eventually you get to a stage that your data engineers build infrastructure. Data analysts create the dashboard in Tableau or look or whatever else they’re using. And then you look at that data, is it correct or not? And as a RevOps, you always have that intuition and the inkling of, is this are you way off, or is it correct?
And sometimes I look, I say, no, something’s wrong here. Something’s very wrong. Go back to the code, see what you wrote. And they say, oh yeah, you’re correct. We wrote something wrong in the code. And they change it. So you always need to be very in tune with what you are expecting to see. Sometimes be ready to be surprised.
And then that team knows the journey from me and that saved me so much time. In the CEO waking up, he’s in the United States, he’s always hours behind. He goes to sleep at 1:00 AM which is, seven 8:00 AM here, sends an email. I need this by beginning of my day, so I have now eight hours to generate anything he wants by either building the dataset, infrastructure and then creating the dashboard, making sure the data is clean and correct.
By 4:00 PM my time, which is 8:00 AM his time to get him ready, that. Dashboard and say, this is correct. This is what you wanna see and this is the insight and the decisions. Or you can now make a decision based on what I’m writing. It’s so great. I so strongly endorse this model and it’s kinda what we used at past company I was at with my co-founder, and a big reason we started AccountAim was to bring this power to the slightly less resourced company.
So I think, what you’ve done there is really awesome model. We’re running up on time here. I wanted to just touch on a few more points around your career path real quick while I have you. So you’ve covered it implicitly, throughout this conversation, I think, but you’ve done what many kind of beginning or mid-level revs folks are aspiring to do, and that’s make the jump to VP of ops more general or even just like the VP level, which is really great.
Not often seen for RevOps folks. So other than kinda what we talked about today, like anything else, you described your success kind of climbing the ladder at Coral. Yeah. So one, you need to speak the language of leadership. Don’t just speak. If you wanna climb, you want to exit that sort of revenue operations role.
You wanna grow into something a little bit larger, which is a VP level. So you need to speak the language of seniors. I. It’s not just you need to do this to be able to sell, you need to start thinking company wide and then they take you a lot seriously on the company level what you need to do as a company.
So I grew out of sales Ops. We did sales Op, understood that we need the Revenue Operations team and that sort of division at Core. And then eventually came to stage saying, I want to do a lot more with the A DHD, which I talked about the whole time. We wanna do many different things. I want to really touch everything in the company.
And I’m not giving up the revenue operations. I think that’s just an add-on. It’s an addition and an advantage. Am I 200% more busy? Yes. Do I have less time in the day? Definitely. Am I awake till one, 2:00 AM answering emails and work? Yes. Yes. Do I go on a holiday and bring my laptop work? Yes. Am I fulfilled and happy with that?
Definitely. It’s interesting. It keeps me always connected and curious and wanting to do more for the company because you’re connected to everything in the company. Yeah, I think it’s, so well put any like tactical advice, I really speak the language of leadership. Totally agree with it.
For someone listening that might be like, okay, I don’t know how to do that or what that, what the language of leadership even is. Is there like a second layer of detail you’d advise folks on to accomplish that goal? Yes. One are. Weapon. Our spear, I would call it, is our data. That’s the main thing.
You come to leadership and you own the data, you own the conversation. It could be data anywhere. It could be data. If I’m talking stepping out of my revenue operations role and going to the VP operations of moving between two different, a two different buildings that we’re moving offices and showing that it’ll be cheaper or more expensive, it’ll be more cost efficient.
It’ll be closer to you own the data than the conversation is around you. You can then define where you wanna take this whole conversation. If you were to come, gonna come and say from intuition, I think I know. I heard they’re not gonna take you seriously. Maybe once or twice they’ll be lucky and you are on it.
But after three or four times that maybe you are correct or not, you won’t be part of that conversation. But every single time they pick up the phone and say, okay, we can’t make a decision. Get yoni on the phone, gimme the data. I wanna see that it’s correct. I wanna see what exactly what’s going on. You own a conversation ’cause they’re not gonna make us.
Any decision or make a step without you saying yes or no. And this happens everywhere across the company from, do I now invest more money into marketing? Are we gonna generate a product with product Because do people even wanna buy this product, our sales? Do we want to change the sales methodology and process?
Do. They’re not doing anything without, or even, can I even bill or sell a product? Can I even bill it in the billing system that I own too? So they don’t move forward without making sure that you are part of that conversation. And if you’re part of the conversation, you have come with data and eventually they trust you enough.
’cause you show many, so many times data that you probably know the data you’re swimming in, the data that you can probably speak a lot more naturally with these, with leadership. And they’ll trust you just for what you say without always showing a dashboard. Yeah, I think that’s great advice. You get brought to the table because you’re the one that has the context and you own the data, and I think ownership is the theme there.
That’s great. My, my last question for you before, one final kind of rapid fire is you’ve written a little bit about the need for RevOps to be strategic and proactive rather than reactive. I think you’ve demonstrated that through a lot of what we talked about today, but I’m curious, like what are the root causes of reactive RevOps teams and like how can folks get through it if it’s anything additional to what we’ve talked about so far?
Reactive teams normally happen when RevOps are brought late to the table. And again, you’ll find it all everywhere that, revenue leaders are saying it, they’re putting out fires that is reactive. They did, someone in the company did something without thinking it through all the way till the end.
It is 90% successful. That 10% is such a big fire and it’s taking up so much time and consuming most of my day that I’ve wasted so much time in not doing anything else, which I should be doing with the rest of the company. So you need to be part of the conversation. Bring the data. Be ahead of what they’re planning.
And if you’re ahead of what they’re planning you, you can’t always catch a hundred percent okay. That’s fine. I’m ready to admit that I’ve screwed up many times and not saw, the little detail in that screwed up the whole campaign. That’s fine. You learn, you get better and the next time you don’t do it.
But if you’re part of that conversation, you’re thinking ahead and you know the checklist of what you usually do of what, and every single department, you go back to your team, you delegate what you need to do. You can’t do everything yourself. You need to delegate. You are gonna be doing this, you’re gonna be doing that.
You need to do now, accompany this whole campaign for the next year. Then you are moving out of the reactive sort of picture of what people imagine RevOps doing of just cleaning up Salesforce and making sure it’s clean before end of Q order into, we are now going and kicking out a new product. What do we need to do and what is the checklist?
RevOps bring us a checklist. What are the steps that we need to do? How do we inform customers? How do we inform prospects? What marketing do we need to do? How much money do we spend on it? What does finance need to do and how do we create contracts? You have a whole checklist that over the years you build your own checklist of how you are now proactive instead of reactive and little examples, you created a product, you’re starting to sell a product.
Then you forgot even to create a template that will match the product A to seller, and you went through the whole sales process, you kicked that on Salesforce, you created an item, and you come to create a quote. No template doesn’t exist for this specific new product that you just did. Small, tiny things that you’re not thinking forward as a RevOps leader that how do I now from A to Z close that whole motion and how to make sure that it’s frictionless or as most as possible as we can, and that you can help everyone make more, everyone more efficient and close money faster.
That’s great. So much insight here. We’re unfortunately on time. Got one last rapid fire question for you. It’s all we have time for. You mentioned what you look for in a RevOps hire, but how would you describe a great RevOps leader in three words? A great real ops leader in three words. So one, speak the language.
It’s not me. Three words, I’m sorry. Speak the language of leadership. Be proactive and not reactive. And then earn trust through the data. Those are your three places that if you own them, you’ll be a great re ops leader and you’ll be taking seriously and you’ll be brought to the table sooner than you think.
All right, Yoni, this was awesome. Appreciate the time. We went long here. There was so much insight. Love the perspective around date. I think it’s really great. I’m excited to continue the conversation in the future. Anyone listening, have any questions for Yoni, send ’em my way. I’ll funnel them his way and get answers back to you.
