In the early 2000s, Ryan Westwood, CEO at Fullcast, was dabbling in revenue operations before people recognized that aligning sales, marketing and customer success teams with shared revenue-focused goals was even a thing.
Through a series of connections early in his career, Ryan found himself sitting in a classroom setting learning about streamlining sales management and marketing management under specialized leadership from the president of Sales at Salesforce.
That was 2009.
Since that time, the management model that Rayn found so natural and strategic for running company operations would be known as RevOps in industry circles.
That was 2016.
I sat down with Ryan in the first episode of the Go to Market Podcast to talk about his early exposure to revenue operations, why he implemented this model into his company Simplus, why RevOps leaders are some of his favorite people, and explain how Fullcast co-founder Bala Balabaskaran’s past experience pioneering RevOps at Salesforce helped bring to light an automated platform that Ryan believes is the bright, transformative future for revenue operations and go-to-market strategies.
Here are some of the highlights from that interview.
Amy Cook: What do you like most about the RevOps leadership concept?
Ryan Westwood: If you think about it really, it’s been just about 20 years I’ve been in or around revenue operations, and it felt so natural to go back into it . . . Some of the best people that we know are in RevOps. They’re super hardworking, they’re the smartest people in the room, very strategic, they can do operations, and they can do all the tactics. Oftentimes these are the wizards behind the curtain who are making everything happen, but they don’t always get the credit. They’re the unsung heroes.
A lot of times your RevOps leaders are the ones who are taking the board level kind of discussions, and they’re putting them in practice and making the tactical things happen that make the revenue engine work, but a lot of times, they’re not given the credit for the things that they’re doing. We want to give a voice to that community.
Amy: What was it about Fullcast that appealed to you?
Ryan: We were willing to spend some money to be able to acquire a business that we loved and appreciated, to be able to build, and we wanted to do something in RevOps. What was so exciting about Fullcast is we saw all these companies that were over here focused on rep productivity, whether it was a prospecting tool, whether it was a coaching tool, a lot of these companies that you would typically see focus on the CRL and reps, and then all the way over here was Fullcast, and it was a former RevOps leader building for RevOps leaders.
Amy: I find it interesting how often RevOps leaders prioritize systems for other teams but never shop for a system that helps them do their job. Don’t you?
Ryan: I actually was with a RevOps leader who’d been in RevOps for 15 years, and I asked her to tell me about her tech stack. She showed me what she had for the SES and the AEs and for the CRO and CEO. She’s walking through all these tools that she had personally reviewed, that she had personally helped in the purchasing process, and that she had implemented, and then she has this light bulb moment. She had never purchased software for herself.
She said she lacked resources— “I’m asked to do more with less, and I don’t have anything to enable my job.” It was interesting that she had been giving so much. It shows the selflessness of a RevOps leader, where they’re so focused on everyone else that it maybe doesn’t even dawn on them that the efficiencies in their own role they haven’t been able to gain.
Amy: What are a few things that you would like the RevOps community who listens to this podcast in the future to know?
First, we want to elevate you. We want you to have a voice and elevate you among the leadership team and the board. We think that you’re underrated in your roles. We think you have an outsized impact on the growth and the trajectory of a company, and efficient growth starts and ends with Rev ops.
I want them to know there’s a lot of conversation around where they should report, and we think that there’s opportunities for them to impact the whole business, not a silo of the business.
The other thing is we really want to understand their top priorities. We want to understand what it is they need to get done. And we’re here to listen. We will listen, and we will figure out what your top priorities are, and we will deliver products to help you with those priorities. And we want to be the source at full cast for everything you need.
In a very real way, we have been involved in RevOps since the beginning. It’s a new field, and it’s an exciting field, and it’s a field that’s still being defined. I feel really lucky to have a part in that and to help pull together the community with so many other community leaders that we’re partnering with, to really define a market segment.
We want Fullcast to become what workday is to HR, and what Salesforce is to sales. We want to have Fullcast and RevOps become synonymous. We want to build the community and we want to listen to RevOps leaders and deliver value for them.
Click here to listen to the full interview on Spotify. Tune in every week to a new conversation with some of today’s most innovative RevOps leaders.
