In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin talks with revenue leaders Darrell Alfonso and other panelists about how to build and scale revenue operations (RevOps) as organizations grow. The conversation emphasizes the need for centrally accessible, well‑defined processes to move from founder‑led to professional sales, and how technology can automate repetitive tasks while delivering real‑time prospect intelligence. Darrell introduces the "tightrope" metaphor to illustrate the constant balance between speed and quality in process design, sharing a case where an overly restrictive marketing review process hindered performance. The panel discusses the importance of setting appropriate KPIs and service‑level agreements (SLAs) for inbound leads, using data to hypothesize and iteratively refine expectations. They also explore how to identify broken processes—typically misalignments or inefficiencies—and fix them through simplification or innovative approaches, such as upskilling subject‑matter experts to become self‑sufficient. Finally, they caution that SLAs alone don’t guarantee alignment with broader goals, stressing the need for shared vision alongside operational metrics. The episode wraps with sponsor acknowledgments and a call to join the Rev Genius community.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
I'm curious, sort of the third leg of the stool of this question is, what do you think you guys should be doing to build revenue operations and really make it run on all 8 cylinders as the team really starts to scale and as you have a larger sales and marketing team and customer success team?
Yeah, I think one of the key points that I think about when it comes to just scalability is like just centrally accessible key processes and really, really starting there, right? If you don't have that, your organization is always going to rely on an individual to the business running. And generally, as you're making that transition from founder-led sales to professional sales, like, the CEO tends to be, tends to be that person because of that knowledge. So the more you can really centralize and define processes and use that in enablement, just the better. And like, as you have more advanced process maturity, you're going to spend less time gathering data, shorter prioritization cycles. You're just going to be able to achieve goals quicker because you have that centralization and definition. So I think that that's really key as you start to scale the revenue operations, and then obviously the data and the technology start to align to that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Darryl, what do you think?
Yeah, those are, those are really good points. I'm a, I'm a big advocate of the centralized processes. When I think about, when I think about scale, I think about 2 fronts. One is scale from a technology standpoint, and then the other one is scale from a process standpoint. And technology, especially today, can be really helpful because you can automate a lot of the repetitive tasks and I think serve up the data that people need to do their jobs really quickly, especially from a sales standpoint, especially from a marketing standpoint. I mean, if you can serve up customer prospect intelligence to a salesperson sort of in-flight or as they're doing their jobs, That offers incredible scale and saves a lot of time. But you can't always do— sometimes the technology is not there, whether it's a budgetary thing or a technical resource thing where you can't actually have that. For example, at AWS, we build a lot of our own stuff. Sometimes we don't have the resources to build something specifically in a given timeframe. That's when you have to move to the process side. of scale. And when I think about process, I think that you're always balancing quality and then speed. So, and I liken it to, when I think about scalable process, from my experience, it's always actually like a tightrope. So you're like walking along this tightrope of, you're always either leaning toward the direction of it's too constraining or it's too— a little bit too empowering, which can translate to chaos. So, so, so for example, um, you know, we have this marketing process, um, that I implemented where every single campaign required a sort of objective third party to review it. to get it out the door, you know, to kind of bring some sort of objective expertise to the campaign. This, I think, and I still do think, is a really powerful thing to do, especially from a customer perspective, being able to step outside of yourself and not be sort of beholden to internal goals and internal, you know, sort of pressures. However, you know, based on feedback, and we have over 1,000 marketers at this point trying to produce these type of campaigns, this ended up being a too constricting type process where, rather than end up being a net benefit for the customer and for goals, it was a detractor because it slowed things down too much. So that, I think, is a good example of this whole idea of this tightrope, and I really like the idea of the tightrope too, because you can never really get comfortable With sway, and you're always going to be swaying in one direction, again, empowering versus constricting, and you always have to pull it back just a little bit. And that's what you'll do regularly over time. Like once a quarter, you revisit the processes like this and really ask yourself, hey, is this, is this doing what we wanted it to, or is it having consequences that we didn't foresee?
I love that idea of the tightrope because it really addresses the idea that like your outcome is your activity times your effectiveness, right? And so the more activity you have, the less effectiveness you're generally gonna have because you're putting less time and effort into it, whether it's a marketing campaign or it's a cold sales call or it's the way you're handling an inbound lead. You know, if you're spending hours and hours doing research, perfecting that pitch, that messaging, et cetera, before it goes out, it's going to be more effective. But I think that we've all seen that you can spend too much time on it and then the activity levels aren't high enough that you can achieve your results. And the same thing, like, We've all been the recipients of many, many sales and marketing messages that are not even close to relevant for us, wondering how in the world did this person decide I was the person to be reaching out to on this, or the marketing team, and why am I receiving this and how can I unsubscribe from this? And so it really is that delicate balance that you mentioned, and I think the tightrope is a great way to think about it. The next question sort of on my list had to do with broken processes. So if we kind of— and this is a really great segue— so if we take it a step further and we think about these processes that you guys are running in, in your organizations. I'd love it if you could share another example of where you had a broken process in the past and how you're able to mitigate it, things that you guys do on an ongoing basis to try to identify these broken processes and then fix them.
Yeah, I'm working to think through a really relevant example, but one of the things as you're paying attention to processes is putting the right KPIs and SLAs behind what you're looking for, right? Data becomes such an impactful piece of Ensuring you're getting the right outputs from your process, thinking about things like SLA setup, right? So we've set up SLAs for inbound.
And for our audience, what's an SLA?
Oh yes, a service level agreement. So setting, setting something like an expectation of a time period of when something needs to happen. Thank you for calling me out on my acronyms. So if we think about, you know, at the time an inbound demo request comes in from our website, How long does the SDR/BDR team have to follow up with that person, right? Where's the infraction? We know, based on research, less than an hour tends to be harder to track that person down. You know, within 10 minutes, you're typically able to get a hold of them. So how do you, when you're defining those processes, put the right expectations around that timing and using data to really drive that and set that constraint? In terms of like, do we have the right expectations? Is this the right process? Are we providing the right user experience? And are we getting the outcomes that we want? So when, you know, generally you're a newer company and you're defining your processes, you're not going to have the data off the bat to really make those concrete definitions. So really taking, you know, I'm going to call it that swag approach, that light approach to not over-architect the process, but put some hypotheses behind here's what we think should be happening, and being flexible enough that as you see the data, you can adapt and evolve it so it makes, makes sense to the business and makes sense to the customer.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Darryl, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah, good points. And I have a comment on SLAs too, but I'll talk about process first. I think, so there might be a little bit of a definition thing. I think for me, if a process is broken, it means that the output isn't what you intended or what you want. So in that case, then it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing, then I would define it as broken. And you need to fix it. It's usually mostly a misalignment problem, a technical problem, something like that. There's just some overall confusion. I think what we see most often is processes that could be made more efficient. And the way that I look at that is you make processes more efficient By either simplifying, meaning reducing the steps, like reducing 2 steps to 1 step, maybe 1 person does 2 things instead of having to pass it down an assembly line, and then innovation. And innovation, I think, is a really cool thing where you are looking at a process in a different way or your work in a different way that sort of makes the old process obsolete. And those, I think, are some of the most fun things to do. We had one example where we have these subject matter experts at AWS that are kind of few. There's not too many of them, and they have to review campaigns regularly. And one of the things that we're trying to figure out is how can we get them to review these campaigns faster? How can we get them to review the technical setups faster? How can we make more experts and things like that? But, you know, it was so difficult to find a way to simplify that process or get more resources until we started looking at it as if this— with this question of, well, what if we took a look at all the campaign builders and required them to take a specific training to uplevel their skills and sort of conduct the setup and a lot of this on their own? Which ended up being way better, and the end result sort of made the old process obsolete. You know, the end result was, you know, people can be more self-sufficient and do better work on their own, which is what they wanted in the first place. So I think I really like that, that the topic of innovation when it looks to process. One last point that I'll make, because I probably know we have to get to questions or something, but One, one, I think that we should be careful about SLAs. You definitely should have them. But one thing that it doesn't show is it doesn't show a misalignment of goals or of, of like vision. So, you know, you can have SLAs, which means I have to do something for you in a given timeframe, but it doesn't mean that I will want to do it. And it doesn't mean that I'm going to do it better. next time? And those are, those questions are answered through shared goals and sort of shared vision. So while SLAs are important and you need them in place, because otherwise it's chaos, don't just start shoving them in everywhere to fix things that they're not really designed to fix. A little bit of rant there, but just, just wanted to put that out there.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.
