Nick Robin: The RevOps Balancing Act: What Should (and Shouldn't) Be Centralized

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 Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I'm so excited to introduce Nick Robbins, a revenue operations leader who has worked with companies like Box and Segment and Branch. How are you, Nick?

I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me today, Amy.

Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it. And I know we're being pretty casual here in our homes, and it's, it's a really nice day to have a chat about RevOps. I appreciate it.

You know, that's, that's the way that our work has trended over the last few years. You know, you kind of work from wherever you work from, and as long as you get your stuff done, I'm happy to be doing it from here.

I feel the same way.

I love it.

Well, Nick, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get to work with such amazing companies in the revenue operations role?

I kind of fell into it. There was no grand master plan by any means. So I joined Box coming out of business school. I did an internship there between my 2 years of business school and I loved the company. I loved the culture. What Aaron and Dylan built there was just incredibly special. And so I spent the first 5 years of my career there after business school. I was in management consulting before that, and I really kind of fell into it. I was in a team called Strategic Planning and Analysis at Box at the time, and I was supporting the sales and marketing organizations. And what I didn't realize is at that point in time, revenue operations hadn't really become a function in the way that it has today. And so when I was doing that, I would say probably 50 to 60% of the stuff that I was doing in that team traditionally lives in an FP&A team. And the other 50%, let's call it, has now really started to live in a revenue operations function. And so that's kind of what set the course for my career into this area, but I didn't really realize that's what was happening at the time. And so I had a great 5 years there and then Segment called and said, hey, we would love for you to come be Director of Sales Strategy and Operations. And I was like, tell me more about what that role entails. And it sounded great. It was like the parts of my job that I loved the most and building that function. And I was lucky to have mentors there and a great CRO and Joe Morrissey who gave me more scope and more opportunity to build more of that function. And then Branch came calling and said, hey, would you like to build this function from scratch here? And then I spent 3 years doing that and it was awesome. And so it wasn't really thought out. It was just kind of following what are the things that I enjoy doing? What's interesting about this work? And Fortunately, this function got kind of built and became more of a thing that was recognized and looked for. And so that served me well.

That's amazing. I think it's so interesting how you kind of came out of the FP&A portion of it. And you mentioned half of it belongs in RevOps and half of it belongs in finance. So what are those parts that just you absolutely need to have in RevOps? What are the non-negotiables?

Yeah, I mean, I'll talk about it in specific to like, kind of where do I see delineations between FP&A and revenue operations, but then also more generally around, hey, when you're building a revenue operations team, from my perspective, what needs to be in the team for it to be truly revenue operations, and then what can be in the team but can also live elsewhere. And so with regards to FP&A versus revenue operations, I think some of the key distinctions that I think about is detailed capacity models that you use to run territories, how many people you're hiring, what their quotas should be, what your capacity expectations are. That was something that I spent a lot of time on when I was at Box. And traditionally now very much lives in a revenue operations organization. And I think finance teams will always have a more kind of like abstracted capacity model because forecast for the whole company and you need some component of that, but it's usually a lot higher level. It's not going to be the thing that you're using every day as a sales ops team, as one example. And there's a few different pieces like that in terms of like what should live in finance, what should live in revenue operations in terms of the work product. But when I think about revenue operations more generally, for me, if you don't have sales operations, marketing operations, and customer success operations in what you call revenue operations, you kind of just have sales operations by a different name. And that actually doesn't like provide the benefit of what a revenue operations organization is supposed to do.

Absolutely. A revops leader can still be just as siloed if all you do is sales, right? Correct.

That makes sense.

Yes. And I love how you delineated also between the FP&A with territories as being kind of like those detailed capacity models, the territory management and how you go to market. That's super interesting. What were you going to say?

You said it really well when you said you can remain siloed. And in my view, that's one of the big benefits of how revenue operations has been built as a function over the last, say, 5 years is it is really there to break down silos across your go-to-market organization and be a neutral central operational function that is meant to optimize all of go-to-market end to end. And oftentimes there are going to be choices that a RevOps team has to make Or like the definition of success is if every part of your go-to-market isn't 100% happy. If you can sit around a table and it's like marketing leader is 90% happy, sales leader is 85% happy, customer success leader is like 85% happy with whatever the solution was, you probably did the best job that you could as a revenue operations leader. And those kinds of trade-offs, that kind of neutrality. Doesn't naturally happen unless you have something like that, in my experience.

That's so interesting. So do you feel like some of those soft skills like negotiation and communication, how important are they as you're building this RevOps function out?

In the field ops part of my organization for sales ops, marketing ops, and CS, CS ops, it's the number one thing that I test for in interviews. It is the non-negotiable because you can be two things. You can be technically super strong, if nobody will listen to you and you can't influence them, it doesn't matter. That's problem 1. And my opinion on number 2 is I find it significantly easier to teach technical skills to someone versus take someone that does not have good emotional intelligence and try to teach them that as a business partner. You can do it. People can change and that is a learned skill, but it's significantly harder to teach someone on the job in my experience. And so I always try to, or orient around, hey, who's good at that and has good experience there? Because I will have an easier time teaching and coaching that person on some of the technical pieces of the job that they might be missing than the other way around.

That totally makes sense, and I found that in my own experience as well. When you can find someone that's smart and pleasant to work with and a hard worker, you can pretty much teach them what they need to know.

Exactly.

Yes. And also someone who respects processes and wants to follow them. Yeah.

I mean, you have to have some desire to, to build a machine that functions like a machine versus everything's a special snowflake. Like no knock on folks that are wired that way, but you probably won't enjoy working in RevOps very much if you're wired that way.

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So tell me a little bit more about how you structure your team. You mentioned that for that particular role, you hire someone with a lot of emotional intelligence. What are some of the other roles that you hire? And when you built these out, how deep was it? What were the main functions?

Yeah. So after those kinds of like core CS Ops, Marketing Ops, and Sales Ops roles and teams, I should say, depending on size of the organization, I'm a big believer in having a centralized go-to-market systems function. I would say until you get to be a significantly larger company, usually that's going to be in your revenue operations function. At some point, you probably get to a place, and like this was the case at Box once it was much bigger, where you have a centralized CIO or IT function with an enterprise systems team and all of that lives there across the whole business. And that's reasonable once you get to a certain size and scale, but when you're smaller, that doesn't exist. And so you're really dependent on your tech stack and optimizing that and having a central ownership across all of go-to-market across those functions. For your tech stack, I think is a really good way to build it. Because especially today, technology is changing rapidly and there's lots of places where you can have overlap or duplication if you don't have that centralized, if you don't have that good point where it's like, hey, okay, marketing is interested in bringing on this new tool, but actually we already pay for this tool over here in sales for a different use case that actually can probably support that need too, and we can get it for a fraction of the price. We should explore that. Having that kind of check and centralized view view into all of it, I think helps a lot. So that's—

So much sense. I love what you even like focus on in some of the value points with like tech consolidation is, is just one like that will pay for a revenue operations leader 10 times over just to consolidate some of that, you know, phantomware that we've got going out, right?

So that's one piece. Then another piece that I always like to build in is go-to-market comp and specifically comp design. So this is one of those areas where it's like, what should be in RevOps and what is more negotiable? I firmly believe that comp design, comp strategy should be a function within revenue operations. And why I believe that—

Yes, tell me more. This is getting controversial.

So why I believe that is what you put in a variable plan for a sales rep, or I've seen organizations where marketing leaders are on a variable component, or for your CS team, or for your SDRs, that's one of the most strategic levers you have at your disposal as a go-to-market organization to drive behavior and to drive change in an organization. And I fundamentally believe that if you look at revenue operations and what you're trying to use it for is overall optimizing how I go to market, how I generate revenue, and how quickly I can do that as efficiently as possible. If you take comp plan design out of that, you're kind of fighting with one hand behind your back in a lot of instances.

Right. You can't, you don't have the other piece of the puzzle.

Exactly. And so then that's, that's the one that like, I really think believes it, believe belongs in a RevOps function when you build it. After that, as far as who owns the comp system, who owns plan administration payouts, etc. I've seen that function really well in an accounting organization. I've also built that all the way end to end in my function. A lot of that depends on what's the maturity level of the organization in some of those other areas and what does the resourcing look like. I think that's the point at which you can have it live in a couple different places and be successful, but it really depends on who all exists in the organization, what's their skill set, what does it look like.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's a very holistic viewpoint as any good revenue operations leader should have, right? And, and I love how you connected all of the pieces that are needed for a business revenue engine to function really.

Yeah. And so the piece that we haven't hit on yet that I really believe in, there's a couple more. So in terms of how I've built teams before, when stuff either doesn't exist or there's a need for it, I'll also have go-to-market data science and analytics. As well as deal desk and a renewals desk in this function. Now, I have also been in organizations where deal desk was part of finance and where there was a central go-to-market data science and analytics team that supported the whole business that was just part of like an overall data science and analytics team. I have no problem with those models. This also comes down to, is it resourced appropriately? And are we solving for what the business needs? Let's take data science and analytics as an example. That's a resourcing function. And does everybody work well together? It can be centralized. It can be part of my team. That doesn't matter so much. It's incredibly important to running revenue operations effectively, but the function just needs to exist and be there and resourced. In the case of DealDesk, I think it actually matters a lot on what product are you selling? How complicated is it? What are the margin considerations? How complicated is that math? Like in the case of Segment, DealDesk lived in the finance organization. And I thought that that was actually a really intelligent choice because there were a lot of different considerations in how you structured a contract for that product. And there were various components that if you didn't structure it correctly, you could have really bad margins on that customer. And they were small things. They were not obvious things. And so having finance be the checkpoint in deal construction So that margin was always at the forefront of how am I building that contract, really served that business well in improving gross margins. Like, I think it was over 20 points from when I started till like a year later. And all credit to our finance team on that. And so I think that one is really business specific as to what is it that you need to solve for in a deal process and what role do you want a deal desk to play.

Super interesting. So there are a couple. So if I understand correctly, the comp design one is, you say, essential, absolutely non-negotiable.

And in my opinion, yes.

No, I think this is absolutely fascinating. And then in the Deal Desk and the data science, you're okay working with a couple of people in different departments if we need to, to get the function.

Totally.

Okay.

Totally.

Well, this is absolutely fascinating, Nick. It's, it's clear you are at the top of your game. So what do you do to stay there?

Ah, I'm a very, very big believer in having peers and mentors and folks that you can call on to kick ideas around. I think that's one of the fun things about revenue operations and where it is and where it's gone over the last few years is how do you bring this all together and how do you build this is still relatively new to the industry. And so having other people I'm in some shared Slack channels with groups of like 5 to 10 folks that are peers of mine, as well as just like, I have my list of folks that it's like, hey, I know that I can always just send them a ping, send them a text, be like, how do you handle this thing? That's just, just weird. This is causing us problems. Like, just get a new idea. I think that kind of free flow of ideas and kicking stuff around with people that are at similar stages or a little bit more advanced to you. Is invaluable in doing this. And so that's probably my number one piece of advice to anybody out there that's like trying to figure that out. Go find your people. Go find like 2, 3 people that you can kick stuff around with, that you can talk shop with whenever and about whatever. That will serve you like many, many times over.

Absolutely right. I do the same thing with marketing leaders where I'm like, hey, is this platform working for you? My email deliverability just really drops Right? And so it's just so nice to have somebody do like a gut check with you.

Totally.

And especially as this market is emerging and this role is emerging and the business, like as business is fundamentally changing because of RobOps, which is so exciting, you've got to have your people. And I think about you and others like you as really being those champions of business, future business, where you're navigating between like the bureaucracy of the yesteryear digital transformation, but still doing something beautiful and streamlined and actionable in today's business life cycle. So I'm a big fan. I'm your number one fan here. It's really amazing what you guys are doing. So thank you so much for joining us today. It was such a really interesting and fun and thought-provoking discussion. And good luck with you and all of the many businesses that you're working with.

Thank you, Amy Cook. It's great being here, and thank you for having me.

Thank you. Business, yes, that's business. Business, yes, that's business.