AMA: MURAL VP, GTM Strategy & Operations, Kayvan Dastgheib on Influencing the C-Suite

This is an interesting question, because new resources can mean quite a few things. I will look at this question through the lens of RevOps securing more budget for additional headcount and/or technology. The short version: The story for RevOps resources needs to be told through the lens of growing the business. If your story does not tie to measurable business outcomes, chances are your ask will have little to no traction. Very few people within an organization would doubt the performance, and need for a staffed revops team, coupled with a well designed and implemented GTM tech stack. That said, we are not the only team within a company looking to secure more budget to staff up and bring in the tools needed to support our stakeholders. Even then, the most effective story still might not work. The needs of the business and the decision making of the C-Suite may necessitate those funds be used elsewhere/ Whenever I make the case for resouces I first decide which business outcome am I most clearly aligned to for this specific ask. That is very important, you cannot paint every ask for budget with the same brush. * "Offensive" Play: This resource is used to unlock revenue, through enabling us to do something we were not able to do before. * "Defensive" Play: This resource is used to protect revenue, usually through risk mitigation. Regardless of play type, the execution is nearly the same. Interestingly, this mirrors many of the other insight driven tactics I use for other needs of the business. 1. Tell your audience what they need to know, be up front what you resource you are asking for. Do not bury the lead. 2. Why is this resource important? Keep it short, and specifically call out what business impact this resource is driving, make it measurable. 3. Clearly state the alternatives, there is always alternatives even if you do not like them. It is important to include this as it frames the context of the problem and the opportunity cost of moving forward or not. Offensive/Unlock Revenue Example: Hiring a new RevOps analyst dedicated to supporting the Business Development team. In this scenario, we try to convey what we can do with an additional resource that we could not viably tackle before. Let's say that we currently have 2 full time analysts on the team, one dedicated to supporting the Account Management and Customer Success teams, and the other dedicated to supporting Business Development and the New Business Account Executives. As the organization grew, the operational needs of the BDRs have grown substantially. What was once easily supported by a single analyst, is not so anymore. The BDR team wants to move to monthly blitzes, which requires weekly dedicated time for list building, contact sourcing, and technical support for 10+ BDRs. You as a RevOps leader want to hire an additional analyst dedicated to the BDR team. A short deck works here, and make sure you partner with your stakeholder to put this together. In this case, partnering with the leader of your business development team is critical. * State up front the role you are looking to create, and the estimated cost. We want to create a position within the RevOps team for a new Sales Operations Analyst, dedicated to supporting Business Development, with a target start date of [Start_Date]. We expect the OTE of this role to be [X]. * Pick 1-2 initiatives that they will be supporting and provide a measurable impact. It does not hurt to work with FP&A on this, as they can provide some insight into how this can positively impact your CAC. With a dedicated resource, we can pivot to monthly outbound blitzes against our target account list. Current capacity does not support our ability to do this any more than once per quarter. Our sales activity data supports that moving to a monthly program can increase our SQOs by 22%, by increasing our account coverage. Based on our current sales velocity this will result in $[X] more bookings in Q2. * End your summary slide with a clear statement of the alternatives. In order to support this type of program with existing resources, we would need to deprioritize X, Y and Z to free up capacity on the existing team. This is not ideal as those directly support [insert key initiatives and the business metrics tied to them.] Alternatively, we maintain the current BDR prospecting cadence with minimal operational improvements, resulting in the current [X] meetings set per month. * Include some supporting slides with additional details. * Make sure your GTM stakeholder can provide some support and insight into the roadblocks they are experiencing and how they believe this role can be a game changer. * Build a concise and clear role and responsibilities 1-pager. When this analyst is fully ramped, what are they doing? This is going to be your job description. Defensive/Protect Revenue Example: Purchasing a calendaring tool for the sales team to assist in scheduling new meetings with prospects and customers. In this scenario, we have identified an operational inefficiency. We want to fix it, because of the revenue risk it poses. Inefficiencies alone are not compelling unless it specifically impacts revenue performance. * Again, state up what you are asking for, and how much it will cost. We want to purchase [Calendaring_Tool] for our New Business teams. We estimate this to cost $[X,000] per year for approximately [Y] licenses. * Pick a metric tied to the operational efficiency and pull it through to the revenue impact. Our current appointment setting approach is highly manual, and is only available within a rep's personal calendar. Our Discovery Meeting attendance rate is below target benchmarks at 55%, the gap primarily due to a high volume of no shows. We estimate this is resulting in a loss of [X] new SQOs per month, and based on our current sales velocity, that's a loss of [$Z] bookings per quarter. We estimate implementing this tool with its automated meeting reminders would result in conservative [A%] reduction of no shows, resulting in an increase of [X] completed meetings, [Y] new opportunities and [$Z] in new bookings per quarter. * Explore the alternatives, how would you build this in house? How long would it take? Would it work? If left unattended do you expect this problem to get worse? What would be the impact on pipeline, and revenue for these other options? As I said before, there is no guarantee that these will work. But, from my experience you better your odds of success with this approach.

Short version, RevOps stakeholders evolve as a company grows. * Single stakeholder or a handful of direct connections with department heads * Diversification as stakeholder needs become more dependent on cross-functional efforts, coupled with expansion of RevOps functions * Fully centralized with hub-spoke relationships across the entire business * Specialization to support sophistication at scale This is a function both of the size of the organization and the size of the RevOps team itself. The partnerships go deeper, not just broader. * When GTM functions first start establishing "operations" roles, they are usually dedicated, single stakeholder teams. For example, the first sales ops analyst will likely report directly into Sales, and the first marketing ops manager will report directly into marketing. Due to the size of the organization, these roles will need to work closely with other fairly small teams. They will work directly with (sometimes a few, if not only one) major stakeholder in Finance, PDE, and GTM. * As each pillar of the business expands, the operational needs and dependency on other units grows as well. Sales, Marketing, and CS will all start to have increasingly complicated needs as their functions become more thoughtful, proactive and far reaching. This fosters a variety of interconnected initiatives. This is compounded when we account for the maturity at scale of Finance, Product and Engineering. * Inevitably, operations roles will (and should) be consolidated into a central operations team. What started as a mini-web of 3 pixel bolded connected lines evolved into a more refined and structured hub-spoke model. There is now multiple points of contact with multiple stakeholders across every facet of the business. * Then, as the organization reaches major enterprise scale, the ability to maintain this complex network yields diminishing returns. At this point, we see organizations evolve structure of the hub-spoke model into clearly defined specialized lanes where roles and responsibilities reflective of their partners. The knowledge required to be an effective partner requires the capacity to invest the time to be an expert on the breath and depth of now very sophisticated and deep business functions.

I think this is a great question, because RevOps as a role becomes exponentially more impactful the more stakeholders that we have bi-directional, empowering relationships. New and existing RevOps teams should constantly evaluate how they are delivering for their stakeholders, and proactively gather feedback to build this positive improvement loop. We need to build upon trust and accountability. Let's first define what is momentum. I see this as a two different scenarios. * You are likely looking for a C-level executive to be a champion for your initiatives, to act as a sponsor and use their influence and relationships on your behalf. This applies in both situations where RevOps has a seat at the leadership table and does not, and senior collaboration is critical for getting C-Suite attention. * You are new to an organization, and eager to make a big impact. You are weighing where and with whom do you focus your efforts, knowing this is a stepping stone to broader organization wide change. In RevOps, your time is precious, and the initiatives and leaders you support implies that there will be others that you will support less (until capacity becomes available or increases of course). There is no magic answer here, because this alignment is conditional on the current objectives of the business. 1. Make sure you know, in granular detail, the strategic objectives for your organization in the current half and fiscal year. 2. Internalize the message from the leadership team. Be able to explain what is important right now, and what focus areas are cascaded down to the various teams. There is definitely at least one direction the ELT is leading the organization, maybe a few. This can be a number of things: like focusing on customer growth, reducing churn, building a high performance new business team, implementing consistent quarterly marketing campaigns, driving penetration/attachment rates of multiple products across the customer base, etc. 3. With that in mind, examine the teams accountable for delivering on that objective. Those C-level leaders and their respective teams are going to be the best candidates for your alignment and proactive focus. I think it will be a theme in my responses today, but everything needs to be tied to a measurable (and believable) revenue impact. If your organization for example is focusing on churn, and building the infrastructure and strategy to mitigate it. Perhaps your organization has a Chief Customer Officer, with respective CS leadership. Maybe you have a joint team reporting to a CRO, where CS and Account Management leaders will be working side by side. 4. Look at their priorities, and the current state of the business in respect to the change that needs to happen. To be a partner, you need to be an expert on their business, as if it were your own. Invest the time to build an intimate understanding of the nuts and bolts of their organization's day to day and how they work towards delivering towards that strategic objective. 5. Get time with the accountable leaders. Pick their brain. Trust their input, as they see problems and opportunities through a different lens than you. Relationships take work, in every aspect of our lives. You need to show that you are committing the time to listen and internalize their way of thinking. 6. Start block and tackling these big initiatives into bite sized wins distributed across, now, soon and later timelines. Partner with their teams, aligning on these specific bodies of work, and get to work. Use your skillset to deliver insights, process, data, and systemic wins to build credibility for your efforts. 7. Repeat. This takes time, and as you progress you will be able to look back and see just how much momentum you built. P.S. If you are a new RevOps leader, or are going to be joining as a new leader, pick up the book The First 90 Days. Some of it may seem obvious but it is a great playbook to bolster your communication ability to establish those relationships early.

My interactions with the C-Suite fall into several major buckets. * 1:1's [CEO, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Product Officer, etc.]: Depending on the role, these can vary from weekly to monthly depending on the level of dependency of our functions. Where close alignment on a daily basis is required, this will be more weekly. There are important as we can have effective, and transparent conversations to ensure we are aligned on strategic initiatives as well as tackle more tactical items that have surfaced. * Weekly Rhythm of Business: [CEO, CRO, CMO, CFO] This is the operating cadence, and lifeblood of the business's momentum including a variety of collaborative, multi-department meetings. These are the expected Weekly Sales Forecast, Pipeline Health, Leadership meetings across Sales, CS, Marketing and Finance. * Less Frequent or Seasonal Rhythm of Business [CEO, CRO, CMO, CFO, CPO]: These are usually sessions where weekly syncs do not make sense due to the time needed for meaningful change to occur. They require time between sessions for enough progress to warrant a discussion on updates and potential direction. Here we can find pricing and packaging strategy, product roadmaps, GTM strategy and prioritization, and fiscal year planning. * Strategic Updates [Audience dependent]: This is the "non-regular" bucket, where cross-functional leadership is present in order to ensure we have strategic alignment on specific initiatives. These are scheduled in advance, with signifiant pre-work to ensure the meeting is as productive as possible. Due to the nature of the attendee list, this is where we aim for a specific outcome, whether that is approval on next steps, or re-alignment on new directions.

There is a behavior the RevOps teams of all seniority levels can work on, and should constantly work to improve. We have a tendency to assume everyone can read the data like we do, and we send reports when instead we should have sent insights. But, what exactly does that mean? Let us explore an example. RevOps, as a data centric profession, means that we are closer to the numbers that define business performance more than most other teams within the organization. As a result, that familiarity fosters a false perception that what we see in the data is obvious to everyone else. Situation: A Chief Revenue Officer asks: "What does our pipeline look like for Q1?" * A first instinct here could be to run over to Salesforce, put together a quick dashboard with a few reports capturing the open opportunities. Maybe we add some additional reporting, visualizing sales activities, like meetings and prospecting, as leading indicators of future pipeline potential. * We then merrily copy the link to the dashboard and send it over email. Slack, or Teams "Here's the view on our pipeline! Let me know if you have any questions." Mission accomplished right? The problem here, is that instead of leveraging the data mastery, and expertise over the data to tell a story, we sent a a wall of graphs. This puts the burden on the CRO to decipher the data to determine what action needs to be taken next. Situation Re-imagined - What a RevOps partner hears: "What risk is in our pipeline for Q1? Where do I need to invest resources and partner with other teams to accelerate pipeline growth?" * Just like before, we can run over to our data sources of truth, in this case Salesforce. Again, we put together a phenomenal dashboard. * We review the data, and look for the areas that are going well, as well as where we are weak. * Potentially we find that we have strong mid-market pipeline coverage, but we are struggling to generate enterprise pipeline. * To ensure we are not jumping to conclusions, we dig deeper, investigating the pipeline health by going one layer down to investigate pipeline age. We also dig into the distribution between Inbound and Outbound, questioning if it is performing as expected across our segments. Are we seeing any notable changes in conversion rates, activity or channel mix? Next, we package a synopsis for our stakeholder - a summary that can be ready in < 3 minutes: * What do they critically need to know? Our Q1 pipeline is at risk, due to insufficient pipegen in Q4, coupled with an aging pipeline that is masking the shortfall of our pipeline coverage. * Data driven observations on why that's the case: We have seen a significant decline in our outbound pipeline generation efficacy across enterprise, this is further complicated by a decline in inbound conversion rates from meetings to active pipeline, even though we have had no meaningful change in the personas through that channel. Over 35% of our pipeline slated to close in Q1 has been pushed out repeatedly from Q3 of the previous fiscal year. * What do we need to do to fix it? Let's bring in our marketing partners and put together a new campaign to re-engage cold opportunities from Q3 and Q4. Let's evaluate our target account lists, and see if we can put together microsegmentation for an outbound blitz. Reframing how we addressed the question allows us to save back and forth, and get right to the action. RevOps plays a key role in enabling our C-level stakeholders to move quickly and rally resources to address a business problem.

Earlier in my career exposure to the C-Suite was understandably in more controlled, scheduled environments. At an analyst level, and sometimes even at a manager level opportunities to directly connect with the C-Suite are few and far between. I am a firm believer that exposure matters. It is the responsibility of every leader out there to look for opportunities to uplift and uplevel their teams by giving them the time in the spotlight. I had some notable mentors in the past who believed this as well and worked to create those moments for me. These moments fit into two buckets: 1. Visibility: I was able to sit-in and observe strategic discussions that would inevitably lead to action items. These were incredibly important as this enabled me to see the dynamics between leaders, how effective and ineffective collaborative communication worked, and how strategy transformed into the tactical. * My managers would "bounce" ideas off me in the session, putting the focus briefly on me while gathering my tactical input. * I would be responsible for the meeting notes, sending recaps and documented decisions. * I would work with my manager on next steps, bringing back updates in follow up syncs. Some examples: * Weekly forecast calls * Revenue reconciliation efforts post M&A * Strategy meetings on headcount planning for business development, customer success, and support * Workshops on territory planning for mid-year or fiscal year changes * Workshops to build requirements on the product roadmap for a new integration between the product and Salesforce 2. Delivery: Presentations on major initiatives. I was either the lead, or co-lead working on a significant project that supported a company wide objective. These would be presented to senior managers and likely a couple members of the C-Suite. * These would be scheduled in advance by my manager, with pre-read materials sent at least a day in advance. * I would work closely with them to build the story, and messaging within the deck, to ensure it was clear what we were looking for: whether that was constructive feedback, approval or guidance on next steps. * There were dedicated sections where I would be the primary speaker, conveying insights to those able to make fundamental decisions. Some examples: * The decision on a new customer success platform * The progress updates and final version of a customer health score * The read out of newly built AE, SDR and CSM scorecards * Implementing a novel, predictive model for an ICP * Building out pro forma analysis on pipeline impacts from competitive pressure This is just scratching the surface.