Navin Persaud: Pace, Not Perfection: The Real Secret to Scaling SaaS

This is business. Business. This is business. Ah, that sounds all right.

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fullcast and Silicon Slopes. I am so excited to welcome today Navin Persaud, VP of RevOps at 1Password. How are you, Navin?

I'm great, Amy. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us today. It's so fun to chat with other, you know, very seasoned leaders learning more about RevOps and your functions and what you do. And I just appreciate your time.

Glad to be here. Glad to share some wisdom and learn along the way.

I love it. Thank you. So tell me a little bit about your background.

Um, I've done a few of these and I think it's always shocking when people hear that I carried a bag and started in sales.

And— Oh, I love that.

Selling is hard. And I realized I wasn't cut out for selling, but I was cut out for everything around selling, the planning, the data, the systems, the forecasting, the numbers. I grew up as a kid collecting baseball cards. I was always fascinated by turning them over, looking at the stats. And to me, I think that's just a natural connection. I'm going to be the truth sayer, the one with the data and the process supporting sales. So I won't score any goals, but I hope to have a lot of assists.

I love that. I think that's amazing. And in my opinion, you cannot have a, you can't have a sales star without somebody giving them the assist. So I really love that. That analogy. I, I love picturing you with your baseball cards, looking at all the stats, and that's really fun. I was never a baseball card collector myself, but I was a musician. And so in the same way, the data, the notes, the rhythm, all of that aligns so well with my personal work with RevOps. So tell me, like, as you went through your career, what were some of the things that made you realize Like, what was there a turning point for you when you were carrying a bag and you were like, you know what, I just don't like this part of it, but I love all the backend part of it.

Yeah. So early in the career at IBM, I was in channel sales and it's a tough market. It was competitive for sure. But at the same time I was asked, hey, how do we forecast our business? How do we understand the influence of what we're driving in this business? And back then they were using things like Lotus Notes and like really wonky databases. For whatever reason, IBM in the day did not want to adopt mainstream CRMs. They wanted to build their own. So, as a bit of a side learning, I decided to go and help and understand and build my own. It eventually became the tool we would use to forecast our business and automate a lot more. And—

Wait, are you saying you, you built IBM CRM?

No, no, no, no, no. We built a module in a Notes database that we used to forecast our business. I found myself more fascinated and enjoying that work than I was on sitting on weekly pipeline calls, talking about deals and things of that nature.

Absolutely right. Oh, that's so interesting. So then when did you, you know, have the courage to make the shift and say, hey, I want to go into RevOps?

I didn't have the courage. I think the courage was made, the shift was made for me in that along the way IBM sold a business unit and I was part of that sale. And that was the inflection point in my career to decide, do I want to go double down on this ops thing? Or do I want to like go to this other company and kind of continue doing what I've been doing? So I chose the door that was, you know, a little harder. And I took my first sales ops job at a SaaS company. And I had to learn everything. I had never seen Salesforce before. I had never, you know, worked that closely with sales teams, never sold software. Didn't understand sales methodology. So all these things were net new learnings and I had to be a, a sponge. And I found that the best way to do that was to like sit in the middle of all of the sales teams. So I sat in what was called the pit at the time, which was where all of our BDRs worked. And I sat in the middle of that listening to calls, understanding frustrations with the CRM, with process, what mattered to them, how they got paid. Why we lost things, why we won things, et cetera, and sort of took off from there.

Oh, that's fascinating. So when did you realize that you were like, you know what, I feel like I've really mastered this? And I know there's no such thing as completely mastering the RevOps function because everything changes so much, but how long were you in the RevOps function before you thought, you know what, this is where I belong, I got this?

I left, I started that company 11 years ago. Wow. 2015. I started as a sales ops manager and after 3 and a half years, I left as a VP of sales and marketing ops. I would say at that point, I knew enough about what good looked like because I had seen so much bad that I felt comfortable. But like you say, there's, there's no mastery of this thing. It, it changes. I feel like now I'm in a world where I'm the epicenter of everyone's ICP when it comes to selling revtech. I love it, by the way, the, the impact of what AI is doing and, and just the overall thirst by leaders, especially data-driven ones, on performance, on metrics, on conversions, on forecasts. Like, it never ends, and I'm glad it doesn't because it puts revops in the center of all of that.

I love what you're saying there because, you know, it is the thesis of our entire company at Fullcast to assert that very thing, that RevOps is the strategic center of a go-to-market piece of your business. And if you ignore the RevOps center, then you pretty much are ignoring the outsized growth that you could get. And right now, as we know, efficient growth has never been more important. So, my next question for you is like, you mentioned that you've seen what good looks like in a box. Seeing what bad looks like. So from a perspective of like, if somebody is listening to this and saying, hey, how do I build a RevOps function in my own organization? What does good look like in terms of what does it cover? Like, what are all the things that RevOps should cover in that department?

Today, my remit includes the go-to-market analytics, territory management, sales incentive plans, the entire go-to-market tech stack, our partner operations function, and our deal desk function. So those are like, I like to think of it as front of house, back of house. Front of house on terms of everything forecast analysis where the entire go-to-market org is our customers. Back of house is like here, all the systems, here, all the data, all the integrations. We have a deal desk team to make sure everything's clean as we go through it. And I think the collection of those things, and then some companies also have marketing ops brought into there so that sales and marketing aren't doing this, they're doing more like this when it comes to the narrative, the performance of the business, because you've interjected or inserted a truth-sayer that is just looking at the numbers and removing emotion and speaking about the opportunities and the risks in the business.

Yeah, I love that. When I think about it from a diagram, and this is in our book, I think of the RevOps function covering marketing ops, sales ops, customer success ops, data ops, and sales enablement. Would you say that is right in your organization to sales enablement fall within RevOps, or is it more of a sales function?

It, it really depends on the org. I mean, we're 1,500 people. Our go-to-market org is close to 500 people. Sales ops, sorry, sales enablement needs its own leader. It needs its own function. We are just that big where we're constantly putting out new product. We've rolled out a sales methodology. It's not something that I think could fit within like a, a RevOps scope. Smaller companies for sure. I think you, you need to start somewhere and it generally starts with, I got a bunch of tools, they don't talk to each other. I got data all over the place. And I got sales teams that don't want to use a CRM. You've got to get like that rodeo solved first. Then you could start building as you sort of mature. Ideally, companies who figured out product market fit quickly, then go get a RevOps function because as you mentioned earlier, it is going to become your immediate limiter on future growth if you don't figure out the operational muscle pretty quickly.

Yeah, that makes sense. How, how big should a company be before they're like, we need a dedicated RevOps person?

It's difficult because it's really around scale. So if you have product market fit, if you have the opportunity at least to start with a single individual, maybe you're outsourcing a bit of that work. You just need a plan that includes it. But if your plan is, you know what, my sales leader will sort of own that, or my tech team will sort of own that. Those are both recipes for disaster, but for different reasons. Your tech team will build something that's perfect and no sales teams will want to use it. Your sales teams will not have the neutrality that they need to apply for your business to be predictive and to actually demonstrate what's really happening.

Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. Let's say that you are a $30 million organization. And you want to scale well, you're growing quickly, you understand you need a revenue operations department. How many people should be in that department? Does it start with one person that's an execution person and then you, you layer on strategy, or, or how would you build it?

Generally apply a ratio. I think the ratio we operate under right now is around 10%, so 10% of the entire go-to-market org sits in RevOps. So I'm going to be around 40 people-ish, maybe by 50 by the end So 10% or some kind of ratio is probably the best. It all depends on your leadership bench within your go-to-market function. You might have people that operate in dual roles, so you have the ability to sort of defer on some of the things you might ask for RevOps a little longer, but eventually once you have inbound and outbound and partner and CS and onboarding and professional services and a global sales team, you start to realize pretty quickly that everyone is swimming in different directions and you need to bring them all all into the fold through unified strategy, data, KPIs, etc.

Interesting. And when it, when it comes to go-to-market strategy, do you put revenue operations at the center of go-to-market strategy, or do you, do you lean on the CRO? Do you lean, do you pull together the CRO and the CMO, or how do you typically want to work that way?

I generally love working on providing like input to strategy. But at the end of the day, CMO, CRO feeds that strategy down so I can go execute it. I need clarity of vision and we'll go make it happen. And I think that's where companies fall down a bit in that they don't, they don't have that decision tree locked down. They pivot too much. And I think of pivoting as like an oil tanker in the ocean. It takes a while to turn that thing around. So you think of making a pivot mid-year, you might have to change incentive plans, you might have to change territories, org structure. You only have 12 months in a year to get your number. And if you're going to lose 2 and 3 of that months in terms of a pivot, that's a hard bullet to swallow.

Yeah, I totally agree. Interesting. Well, I think that the way that you have articulated this RevOps function is, is very much a best practice for companies and they should be. I never had heard the 10% before, and I'm going to take that with me. Me is it something new to stick in my pocket for knowledge about RevOps. So thank you so much. Is there anything else that's kind of a hot take for you on things that companies that are building RevOps functions should or should absolutely not do?

Um, I would say until you really have to leave your go-to-market tech stack with your RevOps teams, eventually companies reach the maturity or public nature where Separation of duties record is important. I totally get it. But while you're growing, maturing, and learning, you need to be nimble, you need to be quick, and you need to develop pace, not perfection. And I think too often companies realize, I'm going to go build perfect and then I'm going to ruin pace. So that would be important number one. Important item number two, I would say in RevOps is go find that leader early on because they're going to set the drumbeat for the rest of your business. They're going to tell you where all the skeletons are hiding. They're going to tell you like, or give you, or ensure the systems provide the data by which you can then generate the strategy. Poor strategy is usually through a lack of data.

Absolutely right. Well, thank you so much, Navin, for your time. I'm— clearly you are at the top of your game, and I would say that, you know, I know that there is no mastery, but I would say that you're You've mastered it anyway. So, thank you so much for coming on. And is there, my last question for you today is, how do you stay on the top of your game? Do you do yoga? Do you read books? Do you talk to other RevOps professionals? What's your strategy?

I try and learn from the best. I think you have to be humble and you have to be curious. Ironically, those are traits I look for when I hire for people on the RevOps team. I need people who sort of fit and align, have a servant leadership mentality. I want to do good or want to, I want to do right rather than be right. My network is gold for me. I think it has afforded me the opportunity to join 1Password and two companies prior to that. I think it's just, you know, staying in tune with like the vendors in your stack. I use, I call them vendors, but some of them are partners. Some of them are, you know, really trusted in terms of where I go, they go, I use them, I know what I'm getting. And I'm kind of like that. If I go and eat at a place and I like a meal, I'm ordering that same meal the next time. And that's how I like to think of the people I work with and the vendors that I partner with.

I love that. Well, thank you so much for your time, Navin. It's really great to have you on the show today. And good luck with everything at 1Password.

Great. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Business. Business. Business.