More and more I have been seeing how small RevOps teams who have the “I can do it all” mindset succumb to burnout and attrition. While the “can do” attitude is admirable, your team and its efforts cannot scale if everyone is doing everything. Duplication of efforts and tag teaming on everything results in critical tasks falling through the cracks.

Especially today, when RevOps teams are crunched for resources and driving large revenue growth targets with sales, having a clear org chart is critical to project confidence to the broader GTM organization and avoid those devastating single points of failure.

The hidden cost of being a RevOps generalist

Most RevOps team members are jacks of all trades. Job descriptions from analyst to director levels require an ambitious mix of analytics, Salesforce expertise, compensation planning and sales strategy experience.

And that works great in the early stages of GTM evolution, when a small and mighty RevOps team gets to be the hero - the same rockstar who designed the first ever custom compensation plan cranks out the first sales performance dashboard and helps the VP of Enterprise Sales with their forecast.

However, that results in the creation of a single point of failure, and when that rockstar inevitably burns out and gives notice, the rest of the team is scrambling to pick up the pieces. As complexity in the GTM organization increases, specialization and consistency within the RevOps team become more important.

So when should you establish structure to your RevOps team?

“Most of us are good enough in Salesforce to be dangerous,” someone who worked in RevOps at a rapidly growing SaaS company told me recently.

Whoa, that does sound dangerous! Salesforce would turn into a minefield if all your RevOps analysts moonlighted as Salesforce admins!

And sure enough, as Salesforce fields proliferated, the rapidly growing SaaS startup set up a centralized Business Systems team, and cracked down on some of the more creative Salesforce permissions that the broader RevOps team had. Phew!

You need to define a clear org structure for your RevOps team much before you get to breaking point. Some indicators are:

• When 20+ GTM team members are on sales incentive plans, you certainly need a dedicated Compensation planning/ execution role

• When your sales teams on incentive plans are clamoring for weekly attainment reporting and your Salesforce report has 10+ filters that break every day, invest in a Centralized revenue analytics function

• When you have at least two distinct sales segments with differing sales motions, led by different sales leaders, dedicate a Field ops role to support each sales leader

• When you hear rumblings from the field that they have reached out to multiple RevOps team members but still have not been able to get basic questions answered on reporting accuracy or incentive plan mechanics, clarify your go-to points of contact!

• When one person has repeatedly been identified as a single point of failure, someone who owns everything from compensation planning, to performance reporting to business partnering, bring your team together to discuss a sustainable split of roles and responsibilities

==> Even if you just have a small RevOps team supporting a small but rapidly growing GTM team, it is worth aligning RevOps analysts to pillars to drive accountability and avoid those single points of failure.

What should your RevOps team look like?

Your team can take several forms, but very few teams can avoid a Central RevOps function with the following pillars:

• Sales systems & tooling (some companies may house their business systems teams in IT, while maintaining a liaison business systems analyst in RevOps, that’s a whole other blog post!)

• Sales training & enablement

• Sales strategy & planning

• Compensation, quotas & territories

• Revenue analytics

These pillars establish best practices, driving standardization and efficiency, owning critical central processes like:

• Tech stack management and review

• New hire onboarding, sales coaching and productivity enhancements

• Annual planning

• Incentive design

• Conducting monthly/ quarterly business reviews etc.

Depending on the size and complexity of your GTM organization some of these pillars can be combined. For instance, the same sales strategy & planning analyst who leads annual planning can pivot to GTM readiness, setting quotas and building territories, once the annual planning cycle is complete.

For larger, more complex organizations where annual planning is a large, cross-functional effort, you may need multiple analysts covering strategy & planning, compensation and quotas, and a senior manager/ director leading the team.

Rarely can these pillars be successful without a strong Field RevOps team, business partnering with GTM leadership to implement GTM strategy, and providing the “voice of the field” to your central teams.

The tussle between Central RevOps and Field RevOps. Who does what?

A close partnership is crucial between your Central and Field RevOps teams, but often the line is blurry between the two.

The Field RevOps team serves as the COO to your segment/ regional sales leadership:

• They own regional operating cadences like:

  • Weekly forecasting

  • Driving pipeline rigor

  • Territory building, leveraging central data sources

  • Piloting new sales motions and programs

  • Some custom reporting to support in-region SPIFs etc.

• They provide input into global cadences run by the Central RevOps team, and then cascade the roll-out into the field, serving as the first line of defense for questions before escalating to the Central team

It is always beneficial to have standardization in GTM roles, core performance metrics and incentive design even across different geographies and segments. However, if your sales teams operate differently in different geographies because of market differences, your FieldOps team might lean in even more into central cadences to recommend customizations and add regional nuance.

I would love to hear about how your experience setting up and scaling a successful RevOps organization. What structures have worked well for you? What warning signs have you seen indicating that something isn’t working? Whether your organization is large or small, I would love to chat!

You just wrapped up annual planning, and your entire sales motion has changed. In just one month, your GTM team will switch into the new sales motion. You wish you could write it all down somewhere. A go-to resource, an FAQ document you could point everyone to.

What you need is a Rules of Engagement (RoE) document. It is tedious to write at first, but once you have all the sections in, it becomes a good checklist for all the things to evaluate during annual sales planning.

Writing your RoE

You cannot possibly foresee all the edge cases and conflicts that will come up through the year, but you want your RoE to be a good starting point.

The shorter and sweeter your document is, the better, but here are some items you should cover.

1) The GTM motion

• Segmentation criteria:

  • How are your Account Executive (AE) territories defined across your segments - Named, Enterprise, Mid-Market, SMB? How many accounts does each rep own? How often are territories re-evaluated? When and how can an account move across segments or change ownership?

  • Under what circumstances, if any, can AEs/ Business Development Reps (BDRs) prospect outside of their territories?

  • What is your spend/ revenue threshold for Account Manager (AM) support? What about for Customer Success Manager (CSM) assignment?

  • What is your criteria for inbound - lead assignment?

  • How do your partnerships/ channel-sales teams liaise with direct sales?

• Swim-lanes and hand-off points:

  • When does the prospect/ customer change hands from the BDR to the AE to the AM and CSM? How long does the AE hold the account after the initial sale?

  • Who is responsible for land vs. expand, up-selling, cross-selling and the renewal?

  • What about overlay roles?

• Exceptions, edge cases and conflicts:

  • What happens if a self-serve account requests an upsell?

  • How do you treat parent/ child accounts or franchises? Are they all owned by the same rep within a segment?

  • What happens to account ownership in case of M&A? What about in case of duplicate accounts in Salesforce?

  • What happens if two reps claim ownership of the same or related accounts?

  • How do you deal with accounts which have a global presence? (This could have its own section, if meaningful enough!)

2) Opportunity stages

• Criteria for Salesforce Opportunities to progress through stages

  • Is it any different for New-business, Renewal and Upsell Opportunity types?

• Definition of Closed Won Opportunities

  • What actions need to take place for an Opportunity to qualify as Closed Won? (e.g. Contract counter-signed, 1st usage?)

3) Deal crediting and attribution

• Key metric definitions:

  • How is Bookings/ ACV defined?

  • How is your key revenue metric defined? (ARR, MRR, Invoiced Revenue?)

• Crediting methodology:

  • How long does an AE get credit for the new logo sale?

  • How are AMs credited for renewals and/or upsells?

  • Under what circumstances do you split deals across two reps?

• Attribution during temporary account coverage, and other special situations:

  • What happens to Accounts and Opportunities (both Closed Won and Open) when a rep leaves the company, gets promoted or goes on parental leave?

4) Incentives policies

• New hire policies:

  • How many months of protection/ ramp do new hires get to onboard into their new roles? How does this vary by role? What about for transfers/ promotions?

• Quarter close/ payout processes:

  • What are timelines to finalize monthly/ quarterly payouts?

  • What happens in case of issues/ escalations?

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Rolling out your RoE

Writing your RoE is just half the battle. You will want to get buy-in from GTM leadership so you can roll-out your RoE in partnership with them.

Work with your sales enablement team to condense your RoE into trainings that you can periodically reinforce with your sales teams.

RoE documents are often living, breathing things, that you might want to update as and when new types of conflicts emerge. At the very least, you will update it after annual planning, ahead of the kick-off of your new fiscal year.

What have your experiences been writing, rolling out and defending your RoE? Are there topics you wished you had added? Would love to hear about your experiences!

The dreaded forecast lies between you and your weekend. Just when you have rolled up your Commit and Best-case pipeline forecast, that Slack from your favorite sales leader flickers on your screen, asking you to update the forecast. One. Last. Time. And finally, you send it out and log-off, the butterflies for the Monday morning 9am forecast call start growing in your stomach.

Unless, of course… you are not done yet. Yes, yes, you finished the new business forecast for the Account Executives (AEs), but what about the Account Managers (AMs)? The oft-ignored AM or existing business forecast covers a large share of revenue.

And as much as you’d like, the same forecast methodology for AEs does not perfectly work for AMs.

Unlike AEs, AMs are on the hook for:

• revenue retention,

• churn prevention, and

• upsells.

Whether your AMs carry Bookings, ARR or revenue goals, your forecast needs to at least consider your customer’s usage of the product. And that’s probably sitting in Looker somewhere. Ugh.

Fear not! This week, as I plowed through thousands of rows of renewal and upsell opportunities for a client, wrangling together an AM forecast, I used a framework that put method to the madness, and I was out in time to enjoy a sunny Friday with my husband.

Here are some pointers for you to do the same.

Is your GTM motion SaaS or consumptive?

This could influence how you roll up your AM forecast. If you are traditionally SaaS, and your AMs largely upsell only around renewals (not ideal! you want them to be upselling all the time!), they likely hold a renewals ACV or Bookings goal that is inclusive of expected growth on renewals.

You likely look at all the renewal opportunities over this quarter and the next, and roll-up an ACV forecast. Ta da! But things look a little too good to be true. All the renewals are growing vs. last year’s baseline? You did see softer Enterprise monthly active usage (MAU) metrics last week … Maybe the AMs have not yet updated expected seat counts for next quarter’s opportunities. Sigh.

You may want to consider rolling up next quarter’s renewal forecast based on expected seat counts informed by recent usage. The customer is not going to renew at the same seat count signed last year if their recent MAU has been much lower.

If you are SaaS, but you expect your AMs to identify expansion opportunities all year round, they probably hold an ARR goal. Here, your forecast for the quarter is a blend of

• non-renewing ARR (sometimes called guaranteed ARR for the quarter),

• expected ARR from renewal opportunities and

• expected ARR from off-cycle upsell opportunities.

If you are consumptive and your AMs carry a revenue goal, the ARR framework still works (rolling up non-renewing, renewing and upsell revenue), but you are faced with the added complexity of translating ACV from Salesforce into revenue, leveraging historical revenue ramp curves.

How should you be weighting your renewal and upsell pipeline?

If you have great data on stage progression of renewal and upsell opportunities, by all means, use that! Otherwise, you can

• apply weightings on renewal opportunities in line with your logo retention (~80 - 90% for Enterprise SaaS), and

• apply new-business opportunity stage probabilities to your off-cycle upsell opportunities

What should your leading indicator/ input metrics be?

An ARR or revenue forecast can be a bit of a black-box, so I have often been asked for leading indicators or input metrics.

For Enterprise Account managers with just a few renewals in quarter, deep diving into each renewal opportunity is a good use of time. For both Enterprise and Mid-market Account managers, some aggregated metrics to keep a pulse on AM activity are

• % renewal opportunities in quarter that have closed won,

• Renewed ACV growth vs. baseline

  • the baseline could be the previous contract’s ACV for SaaS models, or

  • the last twelve month’s revenue for consumptive models.

It only takes one unexpected churn for your revenue leader to turn towards the AM business with an eagle eye, so the sooner you can spin up an AM forecast, the better. You can iterate on refining stage probabilities and usage forecasting, but getting out an AM forecast early in the quarter can save you a lot of pain down the line.

Have you been thinking about AM forecasting for your business? I would love to hear about your experiences.

I recently spoke with the amazing Sean Lane, author of the Revenue Operations Manual about the operational considerations when pivoting to product-influenced sales, especially at a company with extremely successful bottoms-up adoption. You can listen to the full episode here.

We touch upon some of the themes below based on my experience pivoting from a sales-led to a product-led sales motion at the hyper-growth Canva, which was already at $1B+ in ARR when the pivot to the new sales motion was made!

The spectrum of product-led to sales-led motions

It’s rarely ever a binary choice between pure self-serve product-led models and entirely human-led sales models, especially today, when bottoms-up adoption is the key to success. You want some degree of product influence in your sales motions. Product-landed and sales expanded motions offer unique advantages in feeding warm, qualified leads to sales teams. These leads have experienced their “aha” moment in small teams, and are ready to take the next step in moving to an Enterprise contract. Boom. The product seeds, then sales expands!

The 5 considerations of implementing a sales motion pivot at scale

Nailing your sales territories, PQA/PQL criteria, sales processes, sales incentives and data infrastructure is critical to succeeding in your pivot to product-influenced sales.

Planning a 3 month transition period with guaranteed sales incentives to minimize risk while the kinks are being worked out can help build trust and a strong partnership with your sales teams.

1. Sales territories

Your sales territories can become even more potent when enhanced with product usage data. Even something as simple as adding a minimum free/ paid MAU threshold to your territories can help ensure your reps are not calling completely cold prospects. You can even use this opportunity to right-size territories given higher territory quality.

While dynamic territories sound great in theory, they don’t quite align with sales compensation cycles. Territories in constant flux result in loss of trust. Freezing territories for the sales compensation cycle (e.g. the quarter) can ensure your quotas stay reasonable and valid through that period.

Determine how accounts just below the product usage territory threshold can be nurtured by Product Advocates or Marketing, so territories can be replenished at the start of the quarter with new accounts.

2. PQAs and PQLs

Even in streamlined territories of ~100 accounts for an Enterprise rep, stack-ranking accounts using product signals can keep your reps laser-focused. Short term product usage signals (e.g. week on week increase in usage, new team members added etc.) can be used to score accounts within territories. The top 20% of the territory based on these scores become your Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs). Within those accounts, power users or admins could be flagged as Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), a.k.a, the champions who can open doors for your sales reps to expand the account. Extra points if you are able to enrich user data with titles to further boost your PQL scores.

What should your sales reps do with these PQAs and PQLs? Design sales playbooks that can be executed when product signals change. For instance, did the number of teams with 5+ users for one of the accounts in a rep’s territory just hit 20? Launch the “Convert to Enterprise” playbook!

3. Sales processes

Codifying rules of engagement during changes in sales motion is critical. How should your reps handle upcoming renewals for current Enterprise customers, especially if pricing is changing? Are there any scenarios where your reps honor legacy pricing, for instance, multi-year contracts?

Rev Ops teams abhor exceptions in policy, but documenting frameworks in partnerships with sales on how to handle potentially complex customer contracting scenarios can provide structure to these exceptions.

Clear delineation of roles and responsibilities and hand-off points between xDRs (Product Advocates), AEs and CSMs in a product-influenced model are critical as product signals that trigger conversions, expansions and consolidations can happen anytime during the customer lifecycle.

4. Sales incentives

Changes in sales incentives are almost inevitable when shifting to a product-influenced sales motion. This can be quite nerve-wracking for your sales teams, and loss of trust is the last thing you want!

In addition to pure Bookings or ARR based incentives plans, your reps might be held accountable to some new metrics, like seat activation, in SaaS models, or product usage in consumptive models. Make sure your metrics are high-fidelity, and the plumbing connecting your sales data and product data works well.

Which brings us to …

5. Data infrastructure

A product-influenced sales motion is only as successful as its data. Salesforce.com generally isn’t designed to host millions of rows of product signal data. Be judicious in the product data you decide to pipe into Salesforce. While adding an extra step in a sales rep’s workflow is less than ideal, consider showing PQA/PQL scores in a BI tool to start, while testing their fidelity. Once you have a better sense of which signals best predict closed-won opportunities, you can push them into your CRM, so your reps can see all their territory information in one place.

It can be tempting to delegate all of this immediately to a tool. Several vendors today offer platforms that seamlessly unify sales pipeline data and product signals, and can even push notifications to reps when product signals are triggered. While these tools can supercharge your sales motions, prioritize designing your sales playbooks and determining your PQA/PQL thresholds. Tools can only streamline and automate sales processes that are already well structured!

Doing all this at once can be daunting. However, even small (but well executed) changes can unlock significant value in terms of shorter sales cycles, higher win-rates and more ARR!

Leave a comment if you have recently pivoted or are considering a pivot to a product-influenced sales motion.

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AartiRamanConsulting is here to help make this process seamless for you. Drop me a line at aarti@aartiramanconsulting.com if you are looking for help pivoting to a product-influenced sales motion.

Planning may seem daunting at first, but breaking it down into the components below has helped me in all the planning seasons I have led over the years.

Let’s chat with finance! The top line ARR plan

Planning kicks off with a negotiation with finance. What should the top-line ARR goal for next year be? Finance teams are skilled at conducting top down assessments of revenue growth, but these assumptions always need to be validated bottoms-up by revenue operations.

For instance, if finance is planning on New ARR growing by 25% YoY due to an increase in deal volume, is that supported by sales performance? Will that come from increased sales headcount or from increased productivity per fully ramped sales rep? Are deal-size assumptions consistent with the sales motion? These are iterative conversations between finance and revenue operations.

Ultimately, the finance plan is a high-level number, at best broken down by New and Existing ARR, and by region. Revenue operations should stress test the ARR plan in partnership with finance, and evaluate the feasibility of the ARR drivers based on their understanding of expected sales performance (e.g. New business, upsell and cross-sell sales productivity, and Renewal rates by region, sales segment etc.)

What will it take? HC/ Resource allocation

Unless a major pricing/ packaging over-haul is underway, a large YoY increase in the ARR plan generally cannot be justified by an increase fully ramped sales productivity alone. It will also likely involve sales headcount growth.

Top-line ARR planning goes hand-in-hand with headcount planning. Where is it most profitable to add sales heads? LTV/CAC (Life time value/ Cost of acquisition), the Total Addressable Market and current market penetration can help make this decision. When should you stage the release of sales headcount? Time-to-hire and time-to-ramp should be considered so that the new sales headcount can start contributing to ARR goals in-year. Ensure that the additional sales headcount requested does not dilute territories and still maintains healthy LTV/CAC.

In addition to sales (AE) heads, BDR, CSM and other support resources should also be considered during resource allocation, based on pre-determined AE/BDR and AE/CSM ratios. More on that when we talk about the GTM motion!

(Of course, don’t forget to throw in your asks for revenue operations and enablement headcount! Revenue operations teams are often lean, but they do need investment to sustain growing GTM teams.)

How will you do it?

Annual planning is a great time to critically revisit how you take your product to the market. Ideally, you don’t want to change things around multiple times a year, or even every year, unless you have a strong signal that your current motion is not working.

The GTM motion

Where along the sales-led and product-led spectrum do you want to fall next year? Switching to a product-led sales motion from a traditional enterprise sales motion does not happen overnight. How much is your bottoms-up product adoption? Consider incorporating product signals into your sales process before committing to switch completely to a pure product-led motion.

How do you define your sales segments? Strategic, Enterprise, Mid-market and SMB definitions vary, but are often rooted in some measure of Size of Prize, most generally the number of employees in your target companies. You may draw tier-lines based on the maturity of your sales team and complexity of your sales motion.

Is there friction in your customer funnel? Unclear customer hand-off points? Which roles are responsible for land vs. expand? Does the AE land new deals, hand them over to the CSM and move on, or do they own up-sell and cross-sell as well? What is the role of the CSM? Who handles renewals? How many AEs can one CSM feasibly support? These may vary by segment!

BDRs will help your higher cost AEs in heavy outbound, more “traditional” enterprise sales motions which require a lot of qualification and prospecting. Product-led sales motions may not require quite as much BDR support. How many AEs can one BDR feasibly support? These could also vary by segment!

All these are questions you want to lock down as you finalize your annual plan and headcount resourcing.

The sales incentives

Once the top-line plan and GTM motion is set, how will you motivate and compensate your teams to hit these goals? Incentive planning involves walking the fine line of helping your sales teams “win” while also driving business outcomes.

Once roles and responsibilities are clearly delineated in the GTM motion, identify which critical business metrics each role is able to influence the most. Metrics proliferation in an incentive plan can result in lack of focus and also makes the plans more “game-able”. Pick not more than two metrics per role to include in incentive plans.

Output metrics are best suited to be added to incentive plans (think ARR for AEs, ARR Renewal rates for CSMs etc.) For roles like BDRs that are further removed from revenue, some activity/ effort metrics (e.g. leads qualified, pipeline generated etc.) may also be considered. Driver metrics *may* be added to plans if a large behavior change needs to be incentivized (e.g. pushing AEs to close New logos above a certain size), but the addition of these metrics could have unintended consequences, and take the focus off the primary output metrics, like ARR.

Pay mixes (base vs. variable) and pay curves will dictate the type of sales culture you want to nurture, so be intentional about those steep accelerators and downside penalties! Incentive planning is highly cross functional. Don’t forget to loop in finance and HR before getting leadership sign-off.

Sales quotas and territories

You are in the home stretch, but the most operationally intensive part of planning! Converting your top-line plan into rep level quotas is both an art and a science, incorporating industry standard expectations, historical performance, expected product and pricing changes, and available whitespace in territories.

In the interest of simplicity, you may want to consider setting uniform quotas within a region and segment (e.g. all Strategic AEs covering North America will carry the same ARR goal), however, to make this fair, territories will need to be balanced and uniform, especially if ARR from existing customers is also included. Generally, you “over-assign” quotas - the sum of your rep-level quotas would be higher than the annual plan to provide some buffer.

Don’t expect all your sales reps to hit quota. A bell curve distribution of quota attainment is a good outcome. In fact, more aggressive incentive plans count on some sales reps significantly over-achieving, some significantly under-achieving, while the bulk fall in the middle.

Territories and quotas go hand-in-hand. Assign fair and balanced territories that are rich enough to justify quotas, but also not so large that several accounts go untouched and over-looked. Some territory movement (especially early stage prospects) every year instills a healthy sense of competition, but too much movement (especially for existing customers and late stage prospects) creates disruption and lack of continuity. Product-led sales motions tend to incorporate some thresholds on bottoms-up product adoption as a determinant of territory quality (e.g. average Paid MAU per account in an Enterprise territory is xx).

The roll out plan

You need a plan for your planning season! Prepare a high-level timeline with the milestones you want to hit and all the cross-functional partners you want to bring on board. Socialize early and often with sales leadership. Work closely with sales enablement partners to plan the roll out with enablement sessions and change management, especially for large scale changes in GTM strategy, roles and responsibilities, incentive plans and quota structure.

You may need a week or two after year-end to evaluate the full year actual performance before finalizing rep level quotas, but socialize indicative quotas with sales leadership prior to year end, so they can prepare their teams.

Here is what a sample planning timeline might look like so you can hit the ground running in the new year!

Hi! My name is Aarti Raman, and I have been a Revenue Strategy and Operations leader at Canva, Uber, Twitter and Glassdoor. I recently started my own Revenue Operations consulting firm.

As a part of my journey in independent GTM consulting, I have started a blog about topics I find interesting. You can read my first post here and subscribe via email.

Part of maintaining this blog is to spark a conversation, so I welcome any and all feedback, and requests for topics in the GTM space you would like to hear more about! What’s on your mind?

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