AMA: DoorDash Head of US Pre-Sales Strategy, Blake Cummins on Developing Your Revenue Operations Career

Career path will vary widely depending on the person. I'll answer this question with the view of "how do I progress my career path in rev ops": 1. Be consistent in your day to day: Build a reputation as a dependable teammate that will get the job done. Do this by hitting timelines, taking ownership of your work, and delivering high quality products. 2. Practice and tailor your communication skills: Be able to inspire confidence from your stakeholders in both verbal and written communications. Do this a. by concisely articulating your point, use fewer words and use numbers to illustrate b. focus on a single point you want to get across, the details or ancillary items will take focus away from the main thing c. tailor you communication to the audience. Put yourself in the shoes of who you're presenting to and consider what they are looking for. Your chief revenue officer is looking for a different message than your peer. 3. Uncover opportunities on your own and have a plan to execute: Finding an opportunity to make the business better, and having a plan to execute on it is one of the biggest differentiators. Chances are, you know your business or scope better than your manager--and you should be thinking about ways to improve it. The difference between "what else can I do?" vs. "this is an opportunity I want to test" is a differentiator. 

I love questions that demonstrate curiosity, scrappiness, operational excellence and enthusiasm for the business. One of my favorite Q/As below Q: Walk me through an example of how you impacted the business? how did you discover the opportunity, execute on it, and ultimately how did it impact the business? A: I want to hear several things in this answer 1. Curiosity for the business and how to make it better--digging into data, talking to stakeholders, etc. 2. Scrappiness on execution--you didn't have all the resources you wanted, but you found a scrappy workaround to test your hypothesis or get something done. 3. Strong operating process--you were able to get buy in from a cross functional team, align them to this initiative and you grounded your results in data. 4. You were proud of the outcome and inspired to execute more.

To justify a promotion you want to be able to show impact, followership and consistency. You want to be able to say 1. this is what I did 2. this is how I did it 3. I'm operating at this level consistently. 1. Impact: show with numbers the impact that your initiatives had on the business, and point to your leadership / actions that enabled it. Quantifying your impact to the business, and leading these types of initiatives is key. 2. Followership: Build a strong followership of teammates and cross functional partners who would pound the table for your promotion. Operate in a way that you are an effective collaborator, make room for other people's ideas, and people enjoy working with you. 3. Consistency: Show consistency (6-12 months) of operating at this high level, driving impact and building your followership. You must show that you have truly upleveled your skills across several initiatives vs. a one off big win.

To be successful in revenue operations you must 1. have a data analysis foundation 2. be a strong problem solver and 3. be a good story teller. 1. Data foundation: the requirements will change depending on your company's tech stack (SQL, Tableau, SFDC, etc.), but you must have experience analyzing, visualizing and synthesize takeaways from data. Almost everything you do in rev ops must be data driven, and understanding how to pull actionable takeaways from large data sets is key. 2. Problem solving: Know different problem solving frameworks and apply them in your day to day to get experience with how they work. The most basic being 1. start with a hypothesis 2. test that hypothesis 3. debrief on results and iterate. It is also ok to test in an unscalable / manual / simple way. One of the biggest fallacies operators run into is trying to run the perfect test--use the 80/20 rule and be a scrappy problem solver 3. Story Telling: A large part of the rev ops role is aligning different teams (sales, marketing, product, finance, leadership, etc.) to work towards the same goal or on the same initiative--and story telling is a huge part of getting this cross-functional alignment. An operator needs to 1. get buy in (show the business impact and why the team should be excited to work on this) 2. clarify how the team is going to execute (demonstrate a well thought out plan with deadlines and DRIs) 3. assign ownership (identify who is responsible for each aspect of the plan).