#75: Revenue Operations (RevOps) Deep Dive - Why B2B Marketing Leaders Need To Partner With RevOps To Win

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a Salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Zapier. Zapier is an awesome company and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring Exit 5. They are one of the secret Go to tools maybe not so secret anymore that I've seen B2B SaaS marketers use over the years and I'm thrilled to have them as a sponsor. Zapier is easy automation for everyone by connecting with more than 5,000 of the most popular apps B2B marketers are using, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, literally thousands more. Zapier lets you automate almost anything you can think of without writing code, which is especially good for people like me. And with Zapier's easy to use workflow templates, you can start saving time and impressing your boss Fast. More than 2 million businesses automate their tasks with Zapier including top brands like Shopify, Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk and more. They choose Zapier to streamline their work, save money, and find more time for what matters most. And that's more important now than ever. That's the reason why Zapier rhymes with happier. Bet you didn't know that. Now you know how to say it the right way, too. Every day, Zapier customers save more than $10,000 in time per year. With Zapier, you can move new leads into your CRM. You can automatically reach out to new leads. Get slack notifications for important emails. Auto Generate emails with personalized content based on form inputs. Seamlessly synthesize data from multiple sources, reduce human error and increase accuracy. You can try Zapier for free. That's one of the best things about it. Go to zapier.com exit51 word, that's Zapier. Z-A P-I E R.com exit5 zapier.com exit51, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

Exit. All right, so we're live now. That means there's just thousands of people rolling in from everywhere. Lindsay and I were just backstage and we were saying, don't change how it was backstage. Lindsay was. We were just talking about living on the East coast versus the West Coast. And I'm envious of her consistently 66 and sunny and sunny days. But we're here now. I'm Dave. This is Lindsay. Thanks for joining us. Here's what I want you to do before we get rolling. Go into the chat. Please go in the chat and type your name. I'm going to do too. Make sure I go to public chat. Type your name and where you're writing in from. So I'm Dave. I'm in Vermont. See if anybody else is out there. There we go. All right. Thank goodness. This is how I always check that it's working. I was like, is anybody going to be out there today? Nicole's in Connecticut. Yasmine is in. There you go. Steve's in San Diego with you. Orlando, Rhode Island. Brazil. Austin, Texas. Nashville, Georgia. Sweden. Boston, Berkeley. Mumbai. Tampa, North Carolina. I just do this because it's amazing. Every time it gets better. So people are here for all over and I was just talking. First of all, before I go off on a little tangent, this is my guest, Lindsay. Lindsay, why don't you do a quick intro. Who are you? What do you do for work?

Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to be here. I'm Lindsey Roethlisberger. I live In San Diego, California with my husband, our dog and our three year old son. I am the director of Revenue Operations at Zapier. I've worked in marketing and marketing ops for the majority of my career and transitioned last year into leading RevOps. So have some perspective in working at startups and large enterprises. So have learned a lot along the way.

How did you get into RevOps? Before we get into this, my guess is you didn't go to college and like or somewhere or whatever, enter the workforce and say, when I grow up I'm going to be a director of RevOps. What's your quick path to get here?

Yeah, I think mine's actually a really common path. I think a lot of us ops folks say we fell into ops. So what happened in my case is I worked on a demand gen team so in B2B marketing many years back and I started to kind of become the marketing automation expert on the team. So I was the one who leaned more heavily into the analytics and lean more heavily into the building and the workflow flows and the process and I got a lot of joy and fulfillment out of that side of the house. So that was sort of my entry point. Then transitioned to a marketing ops role and then RevOps now just encompasses even a lot more across the entire funnel. But there are still a lot of similarities between my first marketing ops job and what RevOps looks like today.

So this is the highest registered session that we've done. I think this one just beat out the session with Jasper on AI, which I thought if you had asked me before, what's going to be more popular, a session on AI or a session about Rev Ops, I would have 100% sent AI. And then like two months ago this is completely separate thought. But two months ago we do a podcast on ABM. I'm like, everybody's already talked about ABM. We do a podcast with ABM. It becomes the most downloaded podcast instantly ever. And I feel like the more I dig into like what content people in and around the Exit 5 world are interested in, it is really the, the trend stuff is cool, but they like the nuts and bolts stuff. And RevOps is so key to what's happening inside of a company today. And I think the more you unpack it, it's like there's all the thought, leadership and cool, sexy things in marketing you can do, but ultimately it comes down to like company strategy, being aligned, having clear goals, having clear measurement. And I think Rev Ops sits at the center of that. So when I think about it from that perspective, it's not a surprise that there's 900 people that registered for this. But what's your reaction just really quickly to why is there so much interest in this topic?

Yeah, you know, it's funny, I was just reading an article From Forbes that RevOps is the fastest growing job title in the US but it's defined very differently at every organization. So they had trouble sort of narrowing in on like the key responsibilities. So I think that just kind of goes to show that there are a lot of ways to do this and I think people are really interested in trying to figure out the best way for their org.

All right, well, let's do it. Lindsay has a great deck. It's not just going to be, we're not just going to flip over and just go into deck mode right now. I've seen this content, it's great. I'm going to interrupt at put questions in also. So while Lindsay's going through, I'll continue to play host. But go in the Q and A section, we're using Goldcast. Go in the Q and A, put your question in there. And if it's related to something that like pops up on the screen, I want to stop and we'll, we'll hop in and out. And so I've seen this content. What you're going to get is a great deep dive overview about like what Rev Ops is, why it matters, how to think about it. And it'll be a nice little crash course for you or a refresher or if anything you're going to realize Zapier is a high performing company and we don't do it this way and we got to make some changes to how we do things. So turn it over to you, Lindsay.

Cool. I'll jump in right in, Dave, but definitely interrupt me. I'll start. Just another pick of me and my son here, but I kind of dug into my roots here in San Diego, my background in marketing and marketing Ops and now RevOps. I want to go quickly through just what we'll cover today to kind of set the stage for everybody. First we'll start with marketing ops and RevOps role in the organization and what sort of like different types of RevOps teams might do and frameworks for growing your RevOps or your Ops org into a more strategic stronghold in the org. We'll also talk about how we measure success in RevOps at Zapier and some of the guiding principles that we use. We'll touch on top trends in Ops in 2023 and what to really look out for. And then we'll talk about how to decide whether to centralize or decentralize ops. And I think there's a lot that goes into a big decision like that that's a major org change. So want to share why we did it and some of the learnings along the way. I'm just going to jump through into just a quick overview for everybody about what exactly is RevOps to set the stage here. So according to HubSpot, revenue operations is an automated business process that aligns sales, marketing, customer service and or success orgs to make decisions that drive predictable revenue and promote growth. RevOps can look really different at different organizations and we'll talk a bit more about what our RevOps team looks like when we get to the centralization discussion. But typically RevOps is composed of the traditional sales ops elements like deal desk, comp planning, sales analytics, CRM administration. Also with the marketing ops elements like marketing automation, analytics and dashboarding and reporting, utms and tracking and lead management and all of that kind of combined under one roof. Any questions so far?

Yeah, there is a question, but it's. I don't know if you want to jump into your deck or not. So I think Rachel put in our Q and A. They want to know what's your definition of RevOps first, like what that means inside of the team at Zapier, but I think you're going to get to that.

Yeah, I am going to get to that. So we'll hold off there, but a lot to share there as well. I want to just briefly talk about the role. That's okay, Rachel. All good. We're excited. The role of RevOps in the organization. I have sort of a maturity model to kind of demonstrate what a RevOps team kind of strives toward. I think it's really important though to recognize that every business is different. So you know, there's not a recipe for building a strong OPS function that's going to apply to every single business challenge. But what I tried to do here was map out the basic evolution of an OPS function and this can reply apply to marketing ops, sales ops or rev ops. But typically when, when you have your first OPS hire, they're going to be very reactive and request based. So for example, they'll create a new triggered email series or they'll set up an automated workflow for lead management. So they'll likely be measuring their success by like the new things that they create and so can tend to be pretty short term focused and just trying to get the basics set up. But this won't be the case forever. You'll start to add new processes and make it easier for other folks in the org to self serve building campaigns and executing. So that is just not on the ops folks and you start to have shared goals. So ops has shared goals with sales or with marketing. And this is really starting to build the foundations towards scaling past one off programs. Once the foundations are in place, you might have some formal processes, you have the basic technology so you can really start being a partner to the marketing teams in terms of where they should invest and should they try new marketing channels and how do we sort of operationalize that and how do we decide whether or not those channels are working past innovation? I have strategic and at this point this is when the OPS function is really central to the why of the organization and what you're doing to solve your customers problems. It happens when the systems and capabilities that you have on the ops side really match and are tightly aligned to your strategy and your org overall. We use this maturity model really just to frame the way that we structure our team and how we prioritize. So it doesn't mean that early on you can't solve big strategic problems or anything like that, but it's helped us sort of prioritize how to make progress toward the right end of the spectrum where we're really partnering with the marketing or partnering with the leaderships and leadership and go to market to influence the strategy and help set up the mechanisms to then measure and validate that and scale it.

I have a question on this. So maturity of an OPS team starts off reactive, goes to foundational, goes to innovative, goes to strategic. That is like the dream state, right? This is the goal. Why do you think a lot of companies get trapped where ops becomes very much stuck in the reactive bucket? You're kind of only dealing with tools and technology and you're not able to find your way into strategically what's going on in the business. Because I feel like, especially when you're thinking about the marketing ops side of this, I think it's easy to get stuck in that trap 100%.

And this is actually really common in rev ups because when revops is a centralized function, what can happen is you become a team of ticket takers and you're just building the best process for every new request that comes through. What a really good ops team can do to start to make progress here is to be able to decide, okay, what solution is okay for us to have an MVP to get something out the door. Quickly so that we can stay really focused on some of these foundational builds. And so it all comes down to prioritization. But I think OPS folks who can really make smart decisions about how robust of a solution to build. Yes, thank you, Emily. So minimum viable product is sometimes okay. Like sometimes ops people can get in sort of like process perfectionism where they're building this very robust process for something that just doesn't need to be very robust. It's okay to be scrappy in some places and like understanding those trade offs and making the right decisions there will really help propel ops teams forward. I also want to talk about just a few other ways to start to make progress toward the right end of the maturity model here. Of course I have to talk about automation because I work in RevOps at Zapier. So as you can imagine, we automate everything. We automate our entire lead capture and lead management process. That's kind of a given. So I decided to focus here on some of the ways that we actually automate our RevOps team workflows in order to make our team more efficient. One of the quick ways on the far left here, we stay in Sync as a RevOps team with our priority bot. So in an automation we share our weekly top priorities. We have a change log zap so we can actually react to a Slack message and it will note that message which contains changes to our CRM in a CRM change log. That way everyone on our team can see, oh, change to HubSpot was made on this date and we sort of have a running record of that. We use it to alert us when data issues arise. So if we have a large increase in contacts added to our marketing automation system, we have to go check. And that just gives us peace of mind in sort of like any sort of firefighting that we could potentially get pulled into. And then our request process. So we use Zaps to manage our RevOps request process and help us stay organized so that we're making sure that we are prioritizing proactive projects in an equal form next to those reactive projects. So I think trying to think about the things that cause you to switch context frequently or that are disruptive, those are all things that likely a computer can do and with AI even more so the next thing. And I think if ops people are watching this, I think this is the one that they will nod their head to the most, really going deep with stakeholders in marketing and sales and really understanding what they're trying to accomplish and not just what what they're trying to accomplish. But why? So I think a really good OPS person goes super deep with their stakeholders and asks a lot of questions to find out not only like, how is this program going to benefit them, but how is this program going to benefit the customer? Because this really starts to build that partnership that I mentioned between ops and then go to market teams.

Just as a quick observation of this, I always feel like at either companies that I've been at or companies that I've seen, it's always like the day before the big company meeting, it's like the CMO and the rev OPS person are spending three hours together whiteboarding or planning, you know, working on something. And I've seen this with the CRO, I've seen it with the CMO where actually seen it with the CEO where this rev OPS person becomes almost like the right hand to these company leaders in the revenue function. And so I think it's so easy to get into the tools and tech right away, but ultimately nothing matters unless you're aligned with that exec. So I like this advice of going deep with stakeholders and I just wanted to share that as an anecdote.

Yeah, absolutely. And it just helps us so much when we're brought in early to ideation stages of projects because we can really help figure out like, okay, how do we make this work operationally and partner together on the level of effort too.

Cool. All right, let's keep going. The questions are kind of like all across the board and so I'm going to actually save them and we'll rip through them all at the end because I think some of them you're going.

To answer, cool, I'll just quickly go through a thoughtful roadmap. I think one thing that makes OPS folks really successful is having a roadmap that has clear themes that ladder up into company level metrics, that really sizes the impact and the opportunity of every project that is thoughtful with regard to prioritization and that it communicates the impact. So not just we standardized our UTM structure for the marketing team, but communicating something like this new UTM structure allowed us to identify that ebook campaigns drive higher quality leads than video ads or something like that. And then again, embracing the minimum viable product. Not everything needs to be perfect. But what is enough to get you the results that you're looking for? This is the one that I think a lot of people are probably interested in too. What's the best way to measure success? Most obvious one, impact on revenue. So RevOps plays a huge role in sort of measuring and helping to increase things like average deal size, the lifetime value of a customer, net revenue retention. So of course, RevOps is a super strong partner in building the mechanisms to really drive that predictable revenue growth. But the one that we've been really focused on too, as a RevOps team at Zapier is efficiency. So what that means is having a really predictable volume of qualified leads and making sure that we're spending, we're putting dollars toward the avenues and the channels that are going to drive the highest quality leads and then things like monthly revenue per rep. So we want to make sure that our reps are all achieving a predictable amount of revenue. So how can we fix their process? How can we dig into what they're doing day to day and just make them as efficient as possible? Conversion rates are also just super important from a foundational perspective. So we benchmark all of our conversion rates and that allows us to really diagnose where in the funnel are we having issues and where in the funnel should we invest our resources? And I'll talk about this in the centralization piece, but RevOps really can have that full view of the entire funnel, which is really helpful. These last two are great for ops teams that are really early on and so maybe haven't made a ton of progress in that maturity model quite yet, but just increasing the number of data points that you can capture. So a really good lead and deal management process, really the whole point of that is that you can actually measure how customers are progressing and whether or not they're getting what they need at the right time. So just simply being able to measure and predict revenue is a huge early, great early goal for ops teams and then just the use of tooling and process. So if we bring on a new tool, like are people using it, Are people getting the most out of it? That's another really easy measure to employ. Like early on in the maturity. I know people want to talk about the centralization, so I'll also just talk briefly about top trends that everyone in OPS or with an interest in ops or even in marketing should be thinking about. So changing gears a little bit, I believe it's going to be super important to really pay attention to AI right now. Of course, I think y' all probably feel similar early here. So we've already started seeing a lot of SaaS tools incorporate AI.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But, but over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot. And they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic or would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs, it's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing. To help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than.

Something like Google Analytics. I love it.

We use it on our site. I've used it for exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to exit 5 from AI search, 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today, go check them.

Out into their functionality. So I think you'll start to see the option to interact and use AI quite regularly in the SaaS tools that we know and love today. So being Able to not only identify opportunities to use AI to help you reach your goals easier, but also even just writing good AI prompts like how do you provide the right level of context for it to be successful? I'll give an example. So, on our RevOps team, we've actually started creating zaps with HubSpot, Gong and OpenAI to summarize our sales calls and identify a key use case. And so we share that with the rest of the org to keep them really aligned in terms of what's going on in customer conversations. And we're also using AI to draft email replies to leads. So we've just started experimenting with that and it's been really, really impressive. So I think just figuring out how to use AI to help with all sorts of administrative tasks is going to be key. Zapier just released an open AI plugin. So that actually means you can use ChatGPT to perform tasks in an app that you already have connected through zapier. That allows you to kind of not switch context and switch between different apps to make changes or query leads or send emails to leads or other folks on your team. I will jump into the next one here. Specialized tools. So I think all of us have noticed that there are just a growing number of really specialized tools popping up on the market. So do things that personalize websites, chat and product messaging tools, sales intelligence tools. So learning how to both assess those tools and whether or not your organization needs them is going to be really important. And then also just figuring out how to connect and integrate those into your tech stack is going to be increasingly important for Ops professionals to get really good at. And next up, I have centralization. Okay, to centralize or not? The ultimate question. So I actually have some reasons to centralize and then I can sort of translate into why we made this decision at Zapier last year. I want to first call out that not every business should centralize in to a RevOps model in my mind. So I'm going to talk about the specific cases in which I think it makes sense. So in our case at Zapier, we were struggling to maintain a consistent customer relationship and consistent experience for customers across our marketing and sales funnels. So for us, we have a subscription and a usage based revenue model. So we're a product led growth company and that means that every lead or every customer could potentially be a lead because we're also looking to expand and increase usage and that's what fuels our revenue. As you can imagine, there are just a lot of handoff points between Marketing and sales and support and customer success. So someone can kind of bounce through that funnel rather quickly and then route back through. And so it got really difficult to manage that for customers and create something that was seamless. One of the other big benefits related to this is that a RevOps team can actually see areas of opportunity then across that entire funnel. So for example, should we focus on product market fit because our top of funnel conversion rates are low, or should we focus on rep enablement because our win rate is low? So having that higher level view was a real benefit for us. In traditional B2B models with really long sales cycles, it might not be as compelling because there's sort of more structure to that process. Another big benefit for us was being able to drive more exchange of ideas on our team. So oftentimes you'll have one marketing Ops person or one sales ops person. It can be very lonely. It can be very hard to figure out solutions totally on your own. And so it's been just amazing to see this RevOps team come together and really work together in solving problems. RevOps can also help drive alignment across go to market teams. So for example, we've created a really cool feedback loop mechanism so sales can actually share insights with product and marketing. So the way that we do this is we have a large scale walkthrough that we record each week and we share it with the rest of the zapier. Org. So RevOps is sort of able to play that role in aligning the rest of the go to market strategy.

Oh boy. Sales gets to share ideas about what they want from marketing and product. What a joy.

I know, I know. I think in marketing we've been trying to crack that code for a really long time and RevOps could potentially be the answer there. It's been really interesting to see.

I just wanted to make a joke for the market. I would be flooded with messages.

Yeah, I totally relate.

All right, keep going. You're on fire. Keep doing it.

At zapier, we use a ton of third party tools. Centralizing Ops gives us ownership and oversight over those tools. Before we had revops, someone might bring on a call recording tool for products research, but we already have one in sales. And so centralizing that allows us to really make the best use in investments in tooling. Lastly, I know when I was in OPS and a team of one or two have a lot of single points of failure, there is a lot of information in those brains of your OPS people in terms of how things work. And so having the assurance that you Have a team that kind of understands the basic mechanisms for how things work. Just it avoids a lot of risk. On the right here of this slide, I should have mentioned this up front. You can see the org structure for our Revops team. So we decided we needed dedicated tools and tech team because of the complexity of our data and the way that our tools are implemented. So we have two people just focused on tooling administration. So that's the CRM and the marketing automation platform. Then we have our OPS folks. Those are sort of the day to day builders. Those are what we call our automation heroes and they're building all the workflows, the lead management process, thinking about sales efficiency. Our planning and analytics team really tightly partners with go to market leadership. So they're the ones working on forecasting. How do we get predictable revenue, where are the gaps in the funnel and where are the conversion rates? Maybe not measuring up to benchmark. And that also comes with comp planning and things like that too. And then we just started doing sales enablement within RevOps and it's kind of cool that we have that nestled under planning and analytics because those two kind of go hand in hand. Like where are the parts of the funnel where we need more enablement and we focus those efforts there. I'm going to move to the next slide. When you shouldn't centralize. I gave a lot of thought to whether or not we should centralize OPS at Zapier. It's a big change. It can be cumbersome. You've got to teach people how to work with you. So I definitely did a lot of thinking around the pros and cons. Sales, marketing and customer success are fairly mature. If they're not doing a lot of new programs, if they're not doing a lot of experimentation, if their benchmarks are pretty set, if you've got really strong product market fit and you're not testing new product launches like and things are pretty stable, that could be a reason not to make any changes. The other big thing and sort of my fear with the centralized model initially was are we as RevOps going to start to get too far away from the goals of our marketing teams? Like I really wanted to make sure that we still deeply understood what marketing was trying to accomplish. And if you separate them out as a function, you've got to figure out how to bridge that gap. But if that alignment is just really more important for you, you want an OPS person that is really embedded in that marketing team, then you should definitely keep it that way. Yeah. And I just Saw the question, can you give examples of what a centralized versus decentralized. So sorry. Yeah, definitely. So decentralized is when you have a marketing ops team or person that reports into the CMO or reports into the demand generation team. So it's sort of embedded in that team. And then likewise with sales ops, you have ops folks that are directly reporting into the sales organization. And same with customer success or support ops. But in our case, our rev ops function reports directly into the CRO, the Chief Revenue officer who leads all of go to market. Is that helpful?

Yeah, no, it's helpful and I can add some more context on it. Typically, one of the things that happens, and I've seen both sides of it, is that a marketing. So let's say you're the CMO or you're the VP of marketing. You have a marketing ops need, you hire a marketing ops person. Now, marketing ops is kind of on your team, and you're often presenting on revenue and things that touch sales and customer success and other places in the business and finance. And then the sales leader hires a sales ops person because they need a person. And now it feels like it's my person versus your person. And we can often argue over which data is right, what story is right, where the theory is that if you align them all on the same team. And so even though the marketing ops person might sit with the CMO like day to day and basically work on her team, she actually reports to like, ahead of ops, who oversees the sales ops person and the CS ops person and the marketing ops person and the Whatever. Ops person. That's how I've kind of understood it.

Yep, that's right. So on our org structure here, on our operations team, we have someone who specializes in sales ops and someone who specializes in customer success ops and marketing ops. However, those three have very similar skill sets and they do understand how leads progress through the whole funnel. So they can jump in and they work together really closely just to make sure that whole experience is tied together.

Beautiful. Okay, so I think we answered that one.

Yeah.

Question for you. What was it that was happening at Zapier that drove you? Like, did you just, like, listen to a podcast and you're like, yeah, you know what, let's centralize ops. Like, what was it that drove a change at your company?

Yeah, and I want to, like, caveat. I think in the beginning, when. When we were first starting to see rev ops pop up, a lot of ops people, I think, were a little nervous because they were afraid. And I think this does happen. As well, where you might just still have one ops person who's now responsible for the entire funnel. So you have, you're essentially just taking on more work. And so I just want to call that out as maybe why in some orgs you might see ops folks kind of not be totally sure if this is the right move for them. But the big forcing function at Zapier was that we are in a fast growth stage. We're experimenting a lot, we're trying a lot of new marketing programs, we're rolling out new lead sources, we're playing around with high and low touch sales motions. So for us, we were at a point where it was really difficult for ops teams to be completely embedded in the functions that they support. And we're fighting that. All of us talking to each other was the only way to make this work. So because of the complexity of our go to market motion and also like I mentioned, the product led growth element, where there's just a lot of handoff points in the funnel, for us it was an easy decision. And since we made that change, it's just been an incredible change for us. I'll touch on a couple more reasons not to decentralize, not to centralize. If you require really niche ops experts for specific product types, you really might want to have them embedded in that org versus centralized or another reason, Sorry, I skipped number three here. You have strong technical teams like biz ops, data and engineering that oversee your whole tech stack. One of the big reasons for us in centralizing was also because of the tech stack. And having it owned under one roof was really important for us. But in some other organizations that's not always owned by ops. So it's important to consider like that might not be a benefit you would get from centralizing if that if that's the case for you. And then again, like if things are working, like moving to a new model can be costly and cumbersome. So I think it's really, really important to think about how your business needs translate. There are a lot of trends and I think it's important to really put things in context. My next slide is just about, okay, you think that centralizing is maybe the right thing for you to do. So how do you get leadership on board with this idea? And these are the things that I think what I've seen matters most to leadership. Start with the value to the customer. So if you can walk through what the experience is like for the customer now, it might be a little disjointed. Maybe you can create something More seamless by centralizing your ops. Another big deal for us, we can mob, well, we can mob high impact work. So that means if we are supporting a big new campaign launch or if we want to overhaul a sales process, we can put a lot of effort on solving that one problem and just getting it done quickly. If it's a high priority, less risk because you can cross train teammates. Like I said, ops folks get very busy and sometimes forget to do that really important part of their job, which is documentation. And so things can get lost in terms of how things work. And that can be really hard if you ever lose that person, if they leave the role or you bring on somebody new. And then the biggest one, I really think the biggest, most compelling one is that full funnel perspective on revenue. And you can share with leadership that the centralized model allows RevOps to play such a key role in pinpointing those gaps across the whole funnel. So at what point where should we invest the most? What areas could we be more efficient? How should we adjust spend based on things that we're learning in sales conversations? And just having RevOps to play that central role is a great selling point for leaders. And that also going back to the maturity model, that's really what this strategic end of the model is all about. And So I think RevOps lends itself really well to making progress in a framework like that.

That's a great slide, the getting the leadership on board piece, because it is, you know, you also do have marketing ops needs and you might. The very first person you hire in marketing ops might be more of a tools systems integrator type person. And today, given how tech driven marketing is like you need that. But I think as you grow and marketing grows and marketing wants to be a revenue driver for the business, you need somebody on the marketing team or in that org who can own this more from a rev Ops standpoint, I think it's a great trend. It makes a ton of sense. Almost like getting rid of the term demand gen, which we could do a whole nother topic on. I think shifting from just marketing ops to RevOps is, I mean it's what I would want as a, as a marketing leader. A strong RevOps partner would be like arguably the most important early hire you could make.

Yes, a hundred percent. I have, I think one more slide on this which is pretty meaty and I have a lot of opinions on this. I think that you can do RevOps. If you do decide to make that transition to RevOps, I have some ways that you can do it. Well, based on lessons that we have, the first thing up top here, carefully design your team structure. So like I said, we have our ops team and they're the main interface with marketing, sales and customer success business leaders. So they sort of have their swim lanes but then they use the rest of the RevOps team to help them make decisions about how to spend their time. They provide both strategic support to those teams, but also very tactical and execution focused support. Our analytics team really partners with GTM and finance and then our tools and tech team. Their core stakeholders are IT engineering and data teams. So they can kind of translate. I see them as the translators. They take the go to market needs and they translate them to the engineers and the more technical folks that we rely on quite heavily nowadays in ops. Position revops in your org. So be direct. Share content about how to work with you. Create a single RevOps roadmap. We talked about that for sure. Sorry, I'm hopping around to these. Automate wherever you can. Use AI wherever you can to improve the things that you're already doing. Invest in the right talent. It's not an excuse to understaff your ops team. Please don't do that. Make sure that you have the breadth and the depths of skills on the team across the different specializations that you need. And then this is the biggest one that I left for last. Empower go to market teams. I'm a big proponent of not over centralizing your ops. So we talked about centralizing the team. However, a really great operations team is built on systems that run themselves. You really don't want RevOps to become a bottleneck. You really don't want to become a ticket taking team where there's just an over reliance on RevOps to execute all things. Like you want to empower go to market teams, to use the dashboards that you create and to self serve insights and to self serve execution where it makes sense. So really strong enablement for go to market teams is crucial if you move to a RevOps model as well.

Here's a good question from Carl which will answer a bunch of other things. How are you measured? What's the major KPI and who do you report to?

Yeah, so we, I report into the Chief Revenue Officer, my team in particular. Right now we have different goals for different projects that we work on but our big one right now is sales and marketing efficiency. So how are we improving lead quality through decisions that we make around lead definitions. Like what is a qualified lead versus not is an example of that. And then sales efficiency. How Are we making sure that we, we are doing everything that we can to help them meet a predictable revenue forecast? That's what we're focused on right now. But our focus can change.

What's the goal setting look like at Zapier? Like, do you do company goal setting and then RevOps gets assigned like a part of that or there's a key initiative that you own? How does it actually go down in the company?

Yeah, so Go to Market has specific goals. So like our sales team has specific goals and our marketing team has specific goals. And so we view ourselves as really connected to those as well. But it's hard for us to have full accountability for those. So that's where the efficiency piece comes in. So we sort of layered on these RevOps specific goals that complement the. That complement those higher level revenue goals for the Go To Market team.

Yeah, like basically if a company were to go do a marketing plan for the year and they say, hey, our goal is to get to 10 million in revenue. And here are the key objectives for the company. You can probably go and ask. If you just keep going, if you keep like double clicking on each item, it's like kind of like Rev Ops is at the core of that. Okay, well, how are we going to get to 10 million? What does that mean from a booking standpoint and a new standpoint, like RevOps has typically owned that kind of operating plan for the revenue teams at the company.

Exactly. Yes. You articulated that much better than I did.

Thank you. Matthew Sarson says lots of questions in Q and A. Dave Wink, which probably means his question is in there and he wants to answer it. So let's start on a bone. Can a technical head of Demand gen easily transition towards a RevOps director? A good career question for you.

Absolutely. I think that having that experience in Demand Gen provides context that makes actually a really awesome Rev Ops leader. Actually, that's my, that's my experience. So definitely, I think the ways in which to do that maybe are if you have a Rev Ops team pairing with them on projects to get more exposure to that world and taking ownership of maybe special projects that do rely heavily on operational excellence and technology could be ways to get exposure early on.

I've also seen this as a career path. A couple people that I know were. Well, one of them was like burnt out of a Demand gen role and like her core function was her, you know, her core skill set within Demand gen was very like ops focus. And now she is a focus on Rev Ops. And I know another person who was a Head of marketing that was very like demand gen focused and now he's head of marketing ops at like a much bigger company. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

All right, let me mark that one as answered. Holy smokes. There are a lot in here. We kind of answered this one from Rachel. What's your definition of rev ops and what does that mean at zapier? This question is from Darren. What technical skills are absolutely must have for revs, a rev ops leader versus those that are nice to have or can be learned via experience?

You know technical skills are interesting. I think that when we think about technical skills a lot of people gravitate toward like a specific technology. So like oh, someone needs to be certified in Salesforce and know like how data is processed in and out of third party tools. I would say understanding how data is processed in in and out of third party tools is important to understand and the, the ways in which to do that. However, I am not someone who thinks that like you have to be a Marketo expert or a salesforce expert to be successful in revops. I think if you are a really good problem solver and you can translate the technical parts of operation to non technical people, those are the skills that are actually the most valuable. Based on what I've seen.

You can probably always hire the marketo specialist type person, right?

Yeah. And somebody who is a marketo specialist, I guarantee you can pick up Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot very easily. Like you know, they have the acumen.

I think you make an interesting point though which is you might not have to know Marketo specifically but I, you have to have a philosophy on B2B SaaS, companies or most of the people that are listening are coming from that world. Like data is so essential to the business. There is no business without the data and marketing data and sales and revenue data. And so like if you don't have a understanding of like how all that stuff flows and like okay, a customer gets, you know, we do this on the website, then a customer does this thing and then sales does this thing and then you have a meeting here. But they actually have, you have to have a basic understanding and philosophy of that. You don't maybe don't have to have a particular like playbook around it, but you have to be well versed in like how all those things work. What do you think about that?

A hundred percent. Yeah. And like what types of things you need timestamps for so you can actually measure conversion rates and things like that versus what types of Things can just be daily sinks of data versus things that you need in real time. And then how do you translate that and the impact of that back to business leaders? I think is something that can be challenging, but really great if someone can master that.

Cool. All right, we answered that one. That was a good one. We answered this one, which I'm talking to myself now. This one is from Christopher. How do you structure your team with roles and responsibilities? Are they separated by mops and sops?

Oh, I love this question. We started by separating our team goals, but we actually learned that was not working well for us because we were very. It was keeping us siloed. So we actually have projects in RevOps that touch all of the different teams within Ops. Let me try and think of an example. We're overhauling our lead management process because we're rolling out a lot of new lead sources. And so the person who is the driver of that, so what we call the dri is on our operations team and she specializes in marketing ops. However, that project touches sales ops, success ops, and our analytics team and our tools and tech team. So we have her as the core driver and the core response for responsible person for executing that. But she works very closely with all members of the OPS team essentially to deliver on it.

Sounds like a Dr. Seuss book. Mops and sops and totally. Lindsay, what are the RevOps basics as a series a SaaS business should have and that a series a SaaS business should have in place? The current internal resources are CRO, two BDRs, an AE and one marketing person focused on demand gen.

Yes, great question. So the goals I would have in that case, when you're pretty early on in your OPS journey, make sure number one, you can track and report on the things that you want to track and report. So defining the foundations, like what are the lead and deal stages that you need and how do you align the org around consistent definitions for those so that you can start to create benchmarks? So those are like the what do you want to measure? How do you define those foundations? What are. What are those stages for your customers? And then how do you just start benchmarking and collecting that data to be able to say whether you're improving or not? That's really like the first place to start in my mind. The other thing is just around ops, like are you speeding up campaign execution? Are you shipping things that are going to have a big impact versus is just be kind of incremental so early on. Those are the other things that I think are really important to look at in terms of goals.

We kind of covered this, but let's do it again in a different way. What would you say are the key skills and attributes of a Rev Ops director or even broader? What skills and attributes do you require across the whole RevOps team?

Yeah, so the people who gravitate toward problem solving, the people who are invigorated by problems and not who don't tend to shy away from them or not address them. Strong business acumen is really, really important. So are they able to identify those big swings versus little improvements? Like, because we have to make a lot of trade offs in terms of what we're working on, Analytical people who like to tinker with new technology is great. I think we have to also just make sure that as a Rev Ops team, we have frameworks for how to do that in a way that's productive. But we love all, we all love playing and exploring new tools, knowing what problems are worth solving and then solving them with the right level of effort. So again, not every problem needs to be perfect. Rev Ops folks. Ops folks, we can tend to be process perfectionists, like I said earlier. So we have to rein that in and apply business acumen alongside that to make it successful.

This question's from Caitlin. What's a process that you can put in place when checking on processes that you've implemented to see if people are using it and getting what they need from it?

Oh, that's a really good question. That is one of the hardest things to do. This is really straightforward. But we've talked about, we haven't done this yet, but we've talked about doing sort of a survey or a poll for internal users. Like, how much value are you getting out of this? Almost like a Net promoter score for our internal Rev Ops team. That's just one idea. Yeah. I'd have to give this some more thought, but it is tough, I think. Just are the campaigns that you're launching utilizing tools effectively? Yes or no? Like maybe that's a good place to start too.

Yeah. It probably depends on the size of the company too. Like if you can all meet and have a regular meeting. Are you getting feedback in those meetings? If you're at a bigger company, you might not have a direct line direct point too. This is from Holly. What if your company has no formal ops roles? Where do you start? Is there some sort of playbook right now? Different people dabble in it? Wouldn't you say that most common kind of starts off as a demand gen thing?

Yeah. That is what I have seen you want to make sure that you have skills on your demand gen team that do lean operational and there are folks comfortable with building automations. I think this goes back to those other things, like what are the things that you want to measure and how do you build the workflows and the processes to measure them is like a really great foundational place to start. Once you really like start scaling, that's when you're going to want to make sure that you have someone who can be dedicated to that. Because if you're early on in your experimental and you're trying a lot of things, I think it's okay. But once you really start to scale those programs, it's going to get hard if you don't have some standardization in the way that you roll things out.

All right, let's end on this one. This is from Emma. As a marketing ops leader, I worry that centralizing could mean that marketing gets the short end of the stick on support, especially with how fast marketing wants to move. How can you avoid that in a centralized model?

That is a really good one. This was my worry too. You know, I'm a marketer through and through. I love supporting marketing and so I definitely had a similar experience. I think at the end of the day you can use that roadmap exercise to just bring visibility to how your team is spending its time. And if a lot of the projects are sales focused, maybe that is the priority for the business and that gives you a chance to kind of learn more about that end of the go to market funnel. But at the end of the day, I think prioritization and just sharing, bringing visibility to what the things that your team is spending their time on will just at least give you some peace of mind that that is the right decision. Or maybe it's not.

All right, Lindsay, we have 700 other questions. We could spend hours and hours, but you got to get back to your job leading Revops at a great company. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for the time a bunch of people joined us live here for the Exit 5 live. This will come out later as an episode of the Exit 5 podcast. So thanks. If you're listening on that, everybody else will get the recording. We'll post it in the community. If you registered, you'll get it. We will do more sessions like this. I think Revoff's Part two Deep Dive is going to be needed after all the questions after this one. So Lindsay, this was great. Thank you so much and we'll talk to everybody later.

Thank you Dave. And thank you everyone for the great question. Take care. See you later.

Okay, good job. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2, half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today. Which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing. And that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dol. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region and it's built by a marketer made for marketers and right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026.

It's not a sales pitch from them.

But this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark but you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com officehours that's paramark.com office hours.