Rajesh Bhattad explains how to move from SDR into Revenue Operations, covering the operational functions tied to company revenue and the skills needed to succeed. He emphasizes the importance of grunt work and behavioral psychology in sales operations, especially in early-stage startups.
Come on. These are all pieces of the puzzle put together becomes RevOps. And RevOps agenda is very simple. It always revolves around the dollar. The customer for sales ops is salespeople. The customer for partner operations is partner managers. For CS operations, customer success managers and likewise for product operations, it's the product managers, right? But eventually all these operational functions have to be tied together from the company's revenue point of view, right? Which is where the mothership revenue operations comes in a job like sales and others, there is a bit of uncertainty, but you have very clear goal. Say, you know what, this is my quota, this is where I have to hit, right? And operations makes it easier for you to telling you, you know what, here's your 4 million in pipeline for you to hit your 1 million in quota, right? Correct pipeline coverage is given. All of that is defined and answer for you. But in a lot of early stage startups, when you really start is a lot of uncertainty. If you can deal with that uncertainty, it's fine. There's a lot of data chaos around, nobody knows what to get at, what process to work. So if uncertainty is your thing, right, Operations is for you. If talking to cross functional department is your thing, it's, it's you like this job, right? It requires a lot of grunt. But one of the things that, that I keep telling, right, I mean strategy is a very sexy word. Everyone keeps throwing around strategies as a word and, and specifically in meetings, if somebody's throwing strategy as a word, often very honestly, it's kind of a bullshit word, makes no sense at all. What goes unappreciated in operations is the grunt work, right? Go any place you start, there will be a ton of Excel sheets thrown at you saying here's how we capture the data. Now your headache to get this all streamlined. So you're going to practically spend at least a quarter or two working on those Excel sheets getting all the data correct. Maybe there are days when you are, you can't pass through the data because it's so unintelligible practically maybe do manual work of seeping through some 500 records to figure something right? There is a lot of grunt work involved until things stabilize. I keep telling anyone in sales or operations, right Is a lot of behavioral psychology that you have to understand. Like for example, what goes unappreciated in this function is right? If you are, you're an sdr, you have been an sdr, you lead a team now and your team is used to one kind of a layout, they know here's the country Field, here's the input, it's the date of demo. And you've been doing this for a year. And one fine day I come as a new sales ops rep, the companies hired me or all bug out that and I move the fields, I change the layout, I change fields around and the very next day you'll see your team will struggle because there is so much muscle memory built that here is the country field, here's the date of demo. Even small nuances like this, right? It can hamper productivity and nobody measures that. What is the cost of moving one field from top to bottom? Nobody's going to practically come ask the sales office guy, you know what, you just, you just made our productivity. We are so used to that, right? Nobody's going to question me. But as a sales officer, you also have to be mindful of these very small nuances also, right? It practically hampers your team's productivity. Why did you not do that? He said, I did not know that. Why did you not ask for it then? He said, I did not know it was a problem in the first place. So he presumed that is also one of the jobs again of sales ops is, you know what, you have to cut down all these, you have to train teams through this and eventually once you're super mature organization, you spin off enablement functions separately. Whose job revolves around training and more things. Somebody coming from a scratch, no experience will not fit into this. They either should have a domain knowledge, they should have been a generalist at a small startup. I mean, having their hands ready. Like for example, one of the startups I know, they hired a chief of staff at a larger MNC who work very closely with the CEO's office because this person was practically a generalist. He was running pillar to post to get the data right? He still was a good fit for them because he knew how the metrics are moving around. What is the sales talking? What is the customer success talking? Because at the end of the day, this person was bombarded with business questions from the CEO's office saying, you know, give me this data, give me that data. It was this person's job to go pillar to post, get that data articulate, put it in a dashboard and give presented to the management. So this person still fit that role because he or she was practically going through this data, running around, getting the data structuring. It had the sense of how to structure this data now that it is, come on.
