What Are Revenue Operations? How Do You Pursue a Career In It?
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Revenue operations focuses on bringing customer experience teams together to grow a company’s revenue. Many career backgrounds like marketing, data analysis, and finance can prepare you for a revenue operations career. Use your resume to highlight your skills, how you’ve applied them in past experiences, and how they qualify you for the job.
By Lora Korpar
One goal companies have in common is making revenue, so many are employing revenue operations professionals to help manage it.
Revenue Grid, a revenue operations and intelligence platform, says revenue operations’ goal is “bringing sales, marketing, and customer service together to drive revenue growth for a business.”
Aligning these three factors helps companies streamline their operations for efficient goal achievement.
Pursuing a career in revenue operations requires skills from various disciplines. So the job applicant needs to be well-rounded.
“It's a relatively new discipline, and so I think there are people that come from all walks of life and all kinds of different prior experiences,” said Chris Fezza, the co-founder and CEO of Admin Within, a revenue operations consulting firm. “Having a willingness to sort of roll your sleeves up and get done whatever needs to get done and flexibility in how you're willing to work will go far for folks in these types of roles.”?
What Are Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations platform Clari says revenue operations focuses on three main factors: people, data, and processes.?
“To me, revenue operations is the central function that supports all aspects of the revenue team,” Fezza said.
Mat Rodriguez, a senior revenue operations architect for Admin Within, says revenue operations became more popular when businesses realized sales operations teams did not have a wide enough scope to support go-to-market teams like customer service, sales, and marketing.
“All these other departments need operations support, and they need the same resources that the sales ops team could provide,” Rodriguez said. “So that's kind of where the term ‘revenue operations’ came from. You're not just a sales ops team. You're a revenue operations team and a go-to-market operations team. It encompasses all of that.”
Revenue operations professionals work with the teams integral to a customer’s journey through the company.?
“All of those [teams] are supported by revenue operations to make sure that there's a good process throughout, there are no gaps or inefficiencies within that, and that the processes will be scalable and capture the right data along the way,” Fezza said.?
Revenue operations jobs are often high-paying. SetSail's 2023 RevOps Salary and Career Guide says revenue operations specialists make an average annual salary of $80,000. This sum increases to $120,000 for directors of revenue operations.
Which Skills Do You Need for Revenue Operations Jobs?
Revenue operations degrees don’t exist, so professionals looking to enter that field have many options.
“Commonly, people have a bachelor's degree, but in the case with RevOps, certifications or industry knowledge is a lot more important,” Rodriguez said. “I've hired people without any four-year degree, but they have a ton of startup experience… It's a lot harder to attain that for most people because you have to have the experience, work your way up the ranks of startups, and be dedicated to that specific type of business.”
“I would say most of it is on-the-job learning,” Fezza said. “But there is a rise of some types of online courses that can be taken. There are ones hosted by Pavilion as well as Winning by Design that are sort of high-level courses that provide some type of certification.”
Many people looking to enter a revenue operations career transition from a similar field.
“The first path is you have a go-to-market role itself, whether you come from sales, marketing, or customer success, and you just happen to lean into the process in the numbers-oriented parts of the role,” said Jeff Ignacio, the head of marketing and sales operations at Forethought.
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Some people find their way to revenue operations coming from a technical and data-driven background. People with business and finance backgrounds are also well-suited to revenue operations roles.
Fezza, Ignacio, and Rodriguez said some useful skills to highlight on a resume and in an interview include:
“I think knowing how to be able to take insights from the data [is useful],” Fezza said. “So not to just create reports and dashboards from the data, but really understand what the data is telling and how to adjust the company's approach based on that.”
Also, do not discount the value of people skills in this field. Rodriguez compared communication skills to being a middle child between two siblings. Sometimes you have to mediate conflicts, so it is important to keep a level head.
“A lot of times people know there's a problem, but they don't actually know what the solution is, or even if there is a solution,” Rodriguez said. “And so the ability to essentially say back to them what they're saying in a different way, confirm that’s the requirement for what they're looking for, and then executing on that [is important].”
Ignacio says the most useful skills depend on “the level you’re operating in.”
“If you're an individual contributor, I would lean more toward technical skills in the form of process design, policy enforcement, and systems architecture,” Ignacio said. “And then if you're operating in more of a leadership position, the skills fundamentally change more toward business alignment, strategy development, and then working through developing the operation of the business.”
Top Tips for the Revenue Operations Job Search
As with any job search, it is important to demonstrate how you have applied your skills in the workplace. Don’t just list “sales” under your resume’s skills section. Use the work experience section to detail how you used your sales skills to improve a customer’s experience.
“In your interviews, you might use a STAR format — situation, task, action, and result,” Ignacio said. “In the resume, I would reverse that. I would go over the action and the results and then provide the situation and the task during the interview itself.”
Use the resume’s summary section to articulate what your experiences qualify you for and what job you are searching for.
“Depending on if you’re looking for an [individual contributor] role, speaking to the specific technologies or the coverage models that you've operated under will give companies a lot of sense for whether your previous experience is a good match,” Ignacio said. “Then if you're going for a stretch role, if you're trying to interview for a different industry or a company that has a different set of technologies they're using, you might want to talk about your problem-solving abilities in the cover letter.”
Ensure your resume has concrete examples of how you helped your previous employer. Use as many numbers as possible. An example Fezza gave is demonstrating you increased quota attainment from 80% to 87% instead of just saying you “improved quota attainment.” And tie a dollar value to that increase. If a 7% increase equals an extra $3 million for the company, that is an important metric to highlight.
Rodriguez suggests emphasizing CRM and data skills on your resume. He said “there is almost nothing you can't do” if you learn these two skills.
“You can almost always teach yourself things on the job or tap into a network and be able to ask questions,” Rodriguez said. “We ask each other a ton of questions. I never know all the answers, but I know somebody who likely could help me. And so the networking piece of asking questions and giving back also when you can provide answers is huge.”
Top Takeaways
How to Land a Revenue Operations Career
Sales Business Analyst | Achieving Revenue; Delivering Growth through leveraging Data-Driven solutions
1 年This is my exactly my current situation and a great article I can relate to as I am currently transitioning from Sales Account Management roles and continue my search for Sales Ops in the Uk - top tips always welcome!
Marketing specialist and Business Development
1 年Quite informative.