What IS RevOps? 🤔 ft. Sid Kumar

It's never, it never ends up being a third, a third, a third. It just never is, right? It's always, where do you find opportunities to go fine-tune the engine or where do you need to go double down and pay a lot more attention?

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine podcast. We are so humbled to have with us today the one and only Sid Kumar, who is the SVP of Ops at HubSpot, former field sales leader at AWS. Probably in my opinion, one of the best of the best in the RevOps space who can truly talk to founders and revenue leaders about what it takes to build properly from the ground up. And you also have this guy Dale next to me.

Sid, thanks for joining us, man.

Great to be here. Look forward to the chat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Okay, so let's start with a little bit of controversy. We are Revenue Reimagined, so you can't take you can't be a revenue operations leader anymore. You've got to do something else in the go-to-market strategy. What would you be and why?

If I would be a chief, you know, you talk about the chief go-to-market officer, right Dale? You talk a lot about that. I think about this as the COO of go-to-market. So I think the COO of go-to-market. That's how I think about RevOps. And why would you pick that? Would you pick that over marketing or CS or sales?

Well, it goes back to connect the connected go-to-market. If you're not truly connected across your go-to-market, you're just delivering marketing, sales, customer success. And I think we've seen that playbook just not work. RevOps has become that architect of what is that buyer's journey look like and how you're going to orchestrate your engine behind it to deliver the CX that you need to.

I love that. So let's double down on that for a little bit, right? Like, there's a lot of startups that we work with that function in silos. And to your point, you have sales over here, CS over here, marketing over here. And I think, at least in my experience with startups, RevOps is kind of like this afterthought of like, yeah, this is cool, but maybe when we hit a million dollars. And like, I'm a big believer like that's wrong.

Talk to me. When you talk about the COO of bringing it together, like how do you make sure? And why is it important to have RevOps early? Because a million dollars is way too late.

It is way too late. As soon as you start generating revenue and you start delivering product to the market, you're quickly going to start getting functionally siloed. And you're going to start doing marketing activities, whether you have a CMO or not. You're going to start closing deals. You're going to start to figure out how to support those deals. That's RevOps in its infancy because you have a full customer lifecycle to look at versus manically focusing just on the funnel and looking at, are you closing those deals? And I think that's it. It's less about the organization and more about: Are you delivering end-to-end value to customers? Are you thinking about how they learn about your product? How they're actually going to buy it? And how are you supporting them through renewal, expansion, loyalty?

So I think it's a concept more than anything, a process.

During your career, what's the easiest way you've seen to get alignment super quickly in the process? Like, what tactics, what processes have you run that have been successful? Because we talk alignment a lot and we don't see it happen very often.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think there's a shift from alignment to true collaboration and communication, right? Alignment feels a bit passive. It's like, yeah, we'll get along and we'll pretend we're working together. This guy, I kind of get along with him. I—

And Dale's normally the one to interrupt, but I'm going to interrupt. I love what you just said. Alignment is passive. Alignment and collaboration are two very different things. I could tell you, "Hey, great Sid, we're aligned," and then I go off and do my own damn thing, and then I'm pissy at what you do. Collaborating on it—keep going.

Because Dale interrupted you, but like, very different.

No, it's the intentionality of it, right? Are you bought in to the fact that you need to work with your counterparts, whether it's whatever combination of marketing, sales, and customer success it is, to deliver the best outcome for your customers and for your company? And it goes back to how do you convince people in functions to play well together?

I think it's identifying what is that common objective. Do we all care about the success of our customers? Are we solving for the success of our customers? Do we agree? Great. If we do that, do we agree that revenue and all these lagging indicators will accrue as a result of doing great things for our customers? And then you start to break down the silos a bit because then you start to say, okay, well, marketing, you're looking at MQLs or you're looking at leads. That doesn't translate to pipeline. Let's figure out how we create a common language between sales and marketing looking at what are those processes that are like team sports that need to be team sports.

Demand gen is the oldest team sport. But now you look at sales and CS, then you look at the role of marketing in CS. You start to look at where do they need to be starting to really play as a single team. And then one plus one equals three for the customer, and then both functions are delivering more value and outcome for the company as a result. That's how I think about it.

And I think that makes a ton of sense. You know, when you look at RevOps, you sit at the middle, right? Call it marketing, sales, CS. And it's your role—or the RevOps team role, better said—to stitch it all together. But inevitably, what I've seen happen is RevOps is misconstrued as sales ops. And now I'm calling you as my SVP of RevOps and asking you to stitch together a HubSpot, not Salesforce, report and put it together. But that's not—we use HubSpot. We love it. Thank you.

That's not what RevOps is.

No. Talk to me about the transition that we've seen over the years, from sales ops—I don't know why it's giving me a thumbs up—from sales ops to RevOps. And what the difference is?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think notice he just said my question was great. It is a great question. You're wearing a suit today. I mean, you got to dress up. I mean, anything you say when you're wearing a suit is just, you know, it's got to be good. Anything coming out of your mouth, and you got the thumbs up from AI too.

I think it's a great question because if you think about sales ops, RevOps is not sales ops 2.0. And I think that's really important to realize. Sales ops, you think about as more reactive and doing the things that a sales leader needs or believes they need in order to do their job more effectively. Whereas I look at RevOps as revenue. So what are all the components of your go-to-market that generate revenue? How do you take that holistic end-to-end view of it?

Number one is scope, right? So it's not just sales. It's one component of it. But I think the other is it's being much more proactive—helping see around corners. How are you a business partner? Like, the business partnership is really where I think the difference is. It's your CCO or CCOs or whatever you call it. Or like their sidekick? How are you jointly making business decisions together, kind of like the COO concept that I was sharing earlier? So you're making those day-in and day-out trade-offs together. You're looking at execution together. You're thinking about how do you go after that TAM over a three to five-year period together.

So it's a lot of strategy. It's a lot of execution, and it's everything in between. So I think you need a really great communicator that's able to build those relationships and really serve as that connective tissue across your go-to-market functions.

Where does RevOps fit in your organization? Like, where does it report into? Does it report into a sales leader? Does it report into the CEO? Does it report like—HubSpot may be a little bit different because you guys are a little bit bigger. But as we have a lot of startup founders like, where—when they're starting to think about RevOps, where would it sit and why?

Yeah, I'll tell you how it's structured here, and then I'll give you my broader point of view on it. Here we have, we brought all of our go-to-market team into one organization called the flywheel. We did this about probably three years ago, and we brought together marketing, sales, customer success, and then the fourth pillar was we created RevOps about three years ago. So RevOps is the fourth pillar. All four of these orgs report to our chief customer officer, okay? So it is just part of the go-to-market organization.

And I tend to like that. I tend to like it as close to the customer and to the go-to-market as possible. And that can mean different things in different companies and not at arm's length from the truth or the ground truth. And that's where, again, it could mean different things in different places, but I think...

Close to the action so you understand it's part data but a lot of it's art. You know, you're really thinking about the art of customer sentiment, partner sentiment. Staying close to that informs your strategy, helps you fine-tune your execution, and just stay agile.

The other point I'd make is we've been in a world of "set and forget" type of planning. Yes, we're in this annual planning, budgets get released, and then it's like, okay, January 1st. But that's not how customers think. That's not how buyers buy. I think if you're in an MRR business, you've got to be thinking daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly—just shorten the timeframe and ask: is there new information that causes me to revisit my beliefs? Keeping that agility on execution and resource allocation is super important right now.

How do you drive that mindset shift? I think even working with a company right now that's selling to SMBs, very focused on MRR, but planning is "all right, it's December, we've got to plan for January and build out headcount for the year, what's the revenue target for the year?" We asked, "When was the last time you looked at this?" "We looked at it December of last year. You missed your target by 86%." I'm a little confused—how do you shift that mindset from annual planning to looking at it in a more agile, more frequent manner? And is it RevOps that drives that or does it come from somewhere else?

I think RevOps can be the catalyst for that. At HubSpot, what we started doing, especially coming out of the pandemic—the past three or four years have been anything but normal. Any given month you're looking at it and saying, "What do I think about the month and what does it mean relative to my assumptions?" We put an agile planning mindset in place where every month we get together, probably about a week into the month, and use it as a go-to-market forum. I know Sangram is big on this—are you having go-to-market meetings or are you having sales, marketing, or CS meetings separately? We have a go-to-market meeting and say we had these assumptions before in our plan when we did this back in Q4. Where were we? Where do we not know? Where have we potentially got it wrong?

It's not to be knee-jerk and start moving things around for the sake of moving things around. You need trends—you need at least three data points to go make a trend. But it's starting to get ahead of what signals you're getting around changing buyer behavior, partner behavior, user behavior. Do you have more data points that give you reason to think you should revisit your assumptions? Then be okay just saying you were wrong or you were partially right. That's the biggest thing you have to overcome—not holding onto this. It's got to be a living, breathing thing where you have a plan that's as good as it is when you do it, and you've got to be okay revisiting the assumption.

I think that's a top-down mindset shift.

Well, I was just thinking about failures. You were talking about being okay with failures, so I was curious—RevOps is not new, but as you've grown up through RevOps, what's one of the failures that you had that you learned from? An epiphany where you were like, "Oh, I did this wrong and I have to fix it moving forward."

Yeah, this was back at AWS. I remember this time where we had come into the year organizing territories a certain way. We came in with a big quota to allocate across a number of regions and territories, and we realized about a third of the way through the year there were a couple of verticals that were really getting traction with a specific offering. We said we could wait another nine months to reorganize territories, which is super disruptive in the middle or even after you just kicked off the year. But we're like, "Look, given how fast things are moving right now, nine months is like a lifetime."

So we clustered it. By the way, we were further convicted by the end of that year, and we then had an opportunity to double down on that. It was a disruptive bet, a lot of pain for the RevOps team, I'll tell you that much, but it was the right business decision. It was an example of saying we got something wrong, we paid attention to a signal, and we pivoted.

It's funny—so many people are unwilling to accept failure, or unwilling to say, "You know what, we need to re-evaluate this. We made a mistake." It's that pride and ego that gets in the way. I said those were going to be the territories and this is going to work, and by God they're going to work. I think it takes a certain personality and mindset to do that. So I love that you called that out.

When you're balancing between sales, CS, and marketing, everyone's vying for your time, everyone's vying for your resources. Who does typically get the most allocation? Who's more important? How do you determine where you're spending that focus? For someone new in RevOps, how do you decide what to focus on?

It never ends up being a third, a third, a third. It just never is. It's always: where do you find opportunities to fine-tune the engine? Where do you need to double down and pay a lot more attention?

I'd say in the past twelve months or so it's been spending a lot of time on CS. I think this is an area that is fundamentally changing. There's been a lot written on this. Jason Lemkin just posted something the other day, but there's a lot of discussion around understanding customer value. Are you truly trying to go after what is driving value for your customers, or just putting ratios of people against renewals? That's an area we've been spending a lot of time on—understanding customer use cases, usage, the outcomes they're trying to drive, linking that back to what they bought.

Then between sales and marketing, I've been spending a bunch of time on integrated demand. I'm sure you're spending a ton of time on it too. It's thinking about the evolving world of demand and how you think about a multivariable demand equation when things that used to work a certain way don't work the same way anymore. You have to get creative about how you make sure the pie is big enough at any given point in time.

I think it depends on what you're trying to solve for. I tell Dale all the time that what we used to do with just blast emailing people isn't the way to do it anymore. He doesn't listen. He doesn't listen, and I told him like he wore a jacket and he got an "Out Boy." So that's how that works.

When for someone to be successful in RevOps, where do you find that background comes from? Is it typically sales, CS, marketing, finance? Those on your team, those you might have mentored—where do they typically start?

I ask, and Dale teases me and tells me that I'm the RevOps arm of Revenue Reimagine. I geek out on it, but I'm a sales guy at my core.

I think it's a lot of different areas. There is a traditional cohort of folks that were in Sales Ops or Marketing Ops. Some companies have CS Ops.

Then they become part of it. So they've been on that Ops track. Finance is another side of it where you're looking at it from a different lens. You're getting closer to, I would say, the ground execution.

The other is—I didn't have a RevOps background before AWS. I kind of got into RevOps almost a little bit by accident. I was running digital sales at CA. So you know, had my quota, had all the digital sales, demand gen, yeah, all that stuff. And I just was like, a lot of that was very operational—was operational sales, right? Operational sales and go to market. And I really enjoyed the architecting of the go to market. It was like the first time I did lead to revenue at CA. Did the same thing at AWS on a very different scale. And then round three is HubSpot. You know, so really thinking about the connection of lead to revenue and then that closed loop. It's just, I think if you can get it right or even partially right, it just pays a lot of dividends.

So I came from a function. I wouldn't call myself a career sales leader, but that's immediately where I came from. But what got me super excited was the ability to go say, all right, I understand how it works on the other side. And being having been in marketing, having been in sales, I ran a customer success group. So I've been in each of the three functions in some way before coming to RevOps. So it's: How do you constantly help look at it from the other perspective? So you're helping a sales leader and a marketing leader talk the same language. You're helping a CS leader talk the same language as sales and marketing.

So I think it's one of those three—from a function, traditional sales ops or, you know, Finance tends to be the other. You just hit the nail on the head: you're helping everyone speak the same language. And that is what—and gut check me here—that is what we see in a lot of these startups that we work with in our business get wrong. There's no one foundational language. And I'm going to take it one step further: sales, marketing, success, product—everyone's talking in their own different language and can't be able to bring it together. So I love the way that you stitch that together. And it's so important to start it earlier than later.

Yeah, and I think a lot of it—so one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, and Sid, you were saying RevOps seems very data driven. We do a lot of data pieces. And as a sales leader, as you know, when you're in sales, a lot of things become gut as well. You're like, I believe that deal is going to close. I believe this is going to happen. How do you, as a RevOps leader, balance like what the data is saying, but the sales leader is like, but I know this deal is going to close? And you're like, okay, but the data is saying something totally different over the last eighteen months. Like, how do you balance that with the leaders?

What Dale's saying is when Dale tells you that a deal is going to close at the end of the month, and I look at it and I'm like, we haven't spoken to this person in nine months, it's not going to close. How do you balance that, Sid?

Yeah, it's part data, as I said, part qualitative, part science, part art and science. And I think it's like, here's what the data says. Tell me why you think the outcome is going to be different. And there could be an override that's qualitative there. You know, data is the signal or the breadcrumbs that lead you to go ask the questions.

Yeah, and then the question—the answer you might get to the question be like, oh, okay. So maybe you didn't log all your activities, Dale, in the CRM. You're doing WhatsApp, you're doing text. So you actually have been talking to the CEO and you're getting that PO on the thirty-first. Fine, I'll get off your back.

So I think if you balance that—I think: Is data the leading indicator or the lagging indicator? It could be both, depending on what the data is. Like, revenue is a lagging indicator. But what are the activities that Dale has done that lead me to believe that that lagging indicator or that deal closing is going to happen? So I think you have to really think about—I always think about North Star metrics. What is the North Star metric? It might be revenue or MRR. What are the activities, the engagements, the customer verifiable outcomes that you can see that give you confidence that the lagging indicator is on its way or has no chance of happening?

Love that. Yeah, yeah. So at Revenue Rebel, we always do "give more than we get." And so you were gracious enough. What are you going to provide to the audience? How about I do a consulting engagement for somebody who wants to pick my brain on RevOps? What do you think about that?

I love that. I love it. But I want to clarify because our audience—while they're great—a consulting engagement does not mean Sid is going to spend the next three months with you at ten hours a week. Sid is offering like thirty to forty-five minutes of his time to work with you, not a long-term engagement. But I think that's incredible. I think I started this by saying you are one of the brightest minds in RevOps. I don't know what an hour of your time goes for, but that's a pretty, pretty, pretty big give, and we appreciate that.

Yeah, and I have to say, like, we're working with a customer right now, and they thought they had a sales problem. And we went in—they had HubSpot, whoever set up HubSpot was slowly broken. And we couldn't do anything before we fixed HubSpot. So we're actually in the process of migration and going through the process. So the stuff that Sid can provide this person would be gold because it's not always a sales problem, as Sid really says. You have a go-to-market problem, which could be—and in this case, it was RevOps.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's always RevOps' fault. I mean, I like that.

All right, Sid, can we do some rapid fire?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, I'm going to change it up.

Oh boy.

True or false: If it's not in HubSpot, it doesn't exist.

True. True, true, true. I say it all the time: if it's not in CRM, it doesn't exist, Dale. Get your deals in there. Dale WhatsApping the CEO's executive assistant saying that he spoke to the CEO is false.

Yeah, totally false.

If you had a crystal ball, what's one revenue trend that actually will become like a strategy in the next twelve to eighteen months?

I mean, it's probably not a crystal ball, but I think—just, we haven't used the word AI once or the term AI once, which I'm pretty surprised about thirty minutes into this. I think the amount that we're going to rely on AI as part of sales productivity a year from now is going to shock all of us. You know, if we watch this a year from now, how much do you think we can take off of a rep's plate through the undifferentiated heavy lifting? It's kind of hard to believe. Last year at this time, no one had ever heard of ChatGPT. You know, days—you know, November 30th. And how much has happened? So I think that's going to be the big, big surprise there. Like, productivity is what is on top of everybody's mind right now, and everybody's tired after the past two years, right? Dale, Dale writes everything on ChatGPT.

So I'm going to stray from rapid fire because you're right—we didn't talk about AI at all from a RevOps perspective. How are you utilizing AI, and where do you think that is going to go in the future?

Yeah, we're—I mean, there—we have our product teams who are spending a ton of time thinking about AI use cases within HubSpot for our customers, like yourselves. What RevOps is doing is looking at automation and AI capabilities for productivity for our go-to-market teams. So we put this under the umbrella of something called "guided go-to-market," and what we've done is really look at the entire buyer journey and let's understand what are all the digital and human touchpoints that go empower that buyer journey. And then where do we see opportunities for certain, you know, task types of work that is lower value-add but needs to be done? So that we can get more rep time in front of customers and with partners. And that's a big, big area that we're spending time on. And, you know, RevOps is—my team's been heavily involved in driving the charge on that one.

So, and Adam, Adam's actually AI. Like, because he doesn't know—Adam doesn't—Adam doesn't wear a suit, so it's got to be AI. That's an avatar right there.

There you go.

Hey, so earlier in the show, you said that you were going to be the COO, the go-to-market officer, it's tomorrow morning. What's the first thing you're doing as the COO?

I'm waking up. I'm going to have a cup of coffee in my hand, and I'm going to look at the end-to-end health of my business across go-to-market. I'm not going to go just look at—

My pipeline report, um, Adam does he's a spreadsheet leader. Pipeline's good, but it's one aspect of—wow, throwing in the shade. It's, are you starting the day thinking about where in go-to-market should you be spending your time? And that the time you spend, where you're spending it, should be guided by where things need your attention, right? As opposed to diving right into deals and leads, and so forth.

Yeah, but that's where people's head normally goes, right? Like every sales leader, even executive leader, it's like, "Oh, we got to look at the pipeline. Where's the pipeline? Or what deals are going to close?" That to Dale's point with this customer we're working with—the deals aren't the problem. Like, that's not the issue. Where is the issue? I love that you said that, Sid. Thank you.

Thanks for spending half an hour with us, man. I'm sorry you had to put up with him.

Sorry. I'm sorry that I have to sit next to him. But this is long overdue where—where can people find you? Where could people find all the great advice that you put out there? Plug yourself, man.

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. We can send out a link as part of the post on this. Find me on LinkedIn. That's probably where I spend most of my time learning about what's going on in go-to-market.

Do you post on X, formerly known as Twitter?

I am a consumer of X, but I don't really post on X. I've never posted on X.

One. Dale, Dale loves him some Twitter.

Yeah, it's one of those things. It's like a doom scroll on Twitter, but, or X. But nothing beyond that.

I love it. Sid, thank you so much for joining us, man. It was an absolute pleasure. Guys, go follow Sid on LinkedIn. For those of you that are using other CRM platforms, I have used them all. I'm not saying this because Sid sits on the line. RR is powered by HubSpot. The majority of our customers are powered by HubSpot. Go check out HubSpot. It is not just for SMBs anymore. It can power your entire business. Sid, thanks so much, man. Love it.

Thank you both. Enjoy. Take care.