Revenue operations is undergoing a full-scale revolution. The days when sales teams relied on gut instincts, scattered spreadsheets, and the coveted Rolodex are long gone! Today, RevOps is a think tank of innovative strategies where sales, marketing, and customer success align to create optimal efficiency. But with this evolution comes a stark reality: adapt or get left behind.
In this episode of Go to Market with Dr. Amy Cook, guest Rob Levey, SVP of RevOps, delves deep into the transformation of RevOps by tracing its roots back to the early Salesforce era and unpacking the seismic shifts that followed. Rob, a seasoned RevOps veteran from the early 2000s, leads us through the rise of CRM databases, the explosion of sales intelligence tools, and the timely pivot from geographic to account-based territories. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t a history lesson—it’s a wake-up call.
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AI is here, and it’s rewriting the RevOps playbook. Those who master customer intelligence and AI-driven insights will drive business success. The question is: Are you ready to lead this new era?
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy: People often relate a company to a work family. But, truthfully, a company is a performance-based group of people very much like a sports team. So, when you talk about RevOps with collaboration among a group of individuals coming together in a high-performance scenario, how have you seen RevOps evolve through that lens?
Rob: In the early days, it was the adoption of Salesforce. There was no HubSpot; there was nobody else. They were pioneers in the CRM space. Marketing automation tools, like Marketo, definitely weren’t around, and sales was a very close-knit community that relied on Rolodexes filled with contacts. You’d go to a show and get a business card, which was gold. It was truly the livelihood of salespeople.
But then came this CRM, where we now had to tell sales to put those contacts in a company database, and all hell broke loose. Salespeople were wondering why they would give away their prized assets: contacts.
That was the early stage of Sales Ops. It became quota planning and sales comp plans, as we know them, but the real management of that CRM, is a seismic change to get salespeople to say, ‘Okay, hang on. We are going to start recording an opportunity in a database and track how it flows and convince salespeople that it may actually be helpful to them as opposed to just a company mandate.’
Those types of tools really help to connect the bridge between sales and finance. To say, ‘Hey, we can use this as an accurate way of forecasting what the business is going to be because prior to that it would be a lot of anecdotes, with a very strong VP of sales, saying, Yeah, well, I’m convinced this deal is gonna close.’
Rob: Marketing and sales, to some extent, customer success, have always been separated from the sort of sales Ops machine, where most of the effort was focused. For instance, this is the current pipeline. How are the salespeople doing? Are they closing? What’s the productivity of sales?
Amy: If people were to lean in on one thing in particular, what would you say that people should do?
Rob: I think it’s customer intelligence. I see that as the next generation. RevOps and AI can mean lots of things to lots of different people, but if we focus on customer intelligence, before the sales rep even picks up a phone or tries to get into an account, we can give them a detailed book on all of the aspects of that company that they’ll need to help penetrate new business, or upsell, and drive a bigger renewal.
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We’ve never been short of data. What we’ve been short of is the intelligence behind that. And knowing what’s going on in that company is going to help the sales rep sell their product to that company. That’s where I think the next generation goes. It’s far more customer-centric, but it’s far more intelligence-based. For instance, you’re not just making cold calls with the personalization of your LinkedIn account. But you understand the company a contact works for, their key priorities, and how you can tailor your product or solution to their problems.
