As the Go-to-Market leader in a relatively new company, Katerina Ostrovsky, a lifelong RevOps practitioner, appreciates the value data brings to strategic and well-coordinated annual planning.
“Companies are starting to understand that treating revenue as a science and process engineering every facet of sales, marketing, and customer success while layering in the art of the customer’s voice, leads to impactful results,” Katerina emphasizes.
In this episode of Go to Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Katerina explains how RevOps drives strategic clarity, alignment, and the actionable changes needed across stakeholders to meet ambitious revenue goals, why the concept of timing is so often underestimated and misunderstood as a powerful GTM tool, and how data-led conversations create an indispensable formula for better annual planning.
Here’s how.
Amy: In addition to working directly with individual leaders to discuss numbers, how do you approach annual planning?
Katerina: Annual planning is one of the most critical activities that RevOps plays. We work very closely with other parts of the business—finance, specifically, but also product. We have this unique perspective that the organization relies on for data to make decisions.
There’s always that meeting in the middle. However, it’s important for revenue operations professionals to help the organization understand what it’s going to take to meet the goal. So, for example, if we’re going to grow by ten percent, how do we do it? And that’s where the real strategy comes in—you have multiple levers.
You can increase the input from marketing into sales, so you can increase top of funnel, potentially giving salespeople more opportunity to close deals. You can get better at every deal that you have. So what does that mean? This means that increasing your conversion rate from demo to negotiation by five percent can mean a lot of dollars at the end of that sales cycle.
There are all these levers, including: How are you going after your existing book of business? In theory, an existing customer should be easier and cheaper to close than a net new logo, right? And so, if you look at how much expansion is happening within your accounts, what’s happening with retention? Is there a way to increase the retention rate? So there are all these different levers, and that’s the real conversation that needs to happen.
Amy: It’s exciting to meet people like you who understand the complexity of the business and how every stakeholder needs to be part of annual planning.
Katerina: There’s always been a bit of marketing and sales friction, and it’s so misplaced because the reality is, they need to function together. Many times people will say, Well, we need more top of funnel. “We need more leads” is a sentence I hear a lot, however, the organization actually needs to decide if they want quantity or quality. In an environment where you can’t just hire more salespeople, you have to be more efficient in marketing and sales and be able to identify leads that are ready to buy.
I’ve seen lots of new AI-powered apps that are predictive about where in the buying journey that particular prospect is that support narrowing down where sales puts its efforts. You can really change the quality game, make every at-bat that much more impactful, and have the ability to actually close.
The more an organization understands that their expansion revenue, or the share of wallet within an existing account, becomes increasingly important, the more the collaboration of marketing needs to happen, because marketing isn’t just about acquiring new logos. They have a significant impact on the existing customer base. So, how do we make that part of the customer journey that isn’t linear in any way? How do you identify and market to existing customers? That’s an area where we can do better.
Want to hear more? Click here for the full interview.
