Mari Manglaras didn’t plan to develop her career around revenue operations. As a data engineer, her world revolved around analytics. But when a sudden economic downturn impacted her industry, Mari discovered her superpower was inside sales.
“I got a job as a salesperson at a startup, and by my third month, I was 1,113 percent of the goal,” Mari said. “I sat there and listened to other people about how their prospects were reacting to the sales process and so forth. So that’s how I fine-tuned my whole development as a sales individual and rapidly moved up to lead the highest-performing sales team that this company had.”
In the latest episode of Go-To-Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Mari explains the secret behind her sales team consistently hitting the 200 percent mark.
“The reason that we were always 200 percent was I started to build out within our CRM, basically robots,” Mari explained. “I built out territory alignment and made subject matter experts in industries, and all the reporting was focused in or around their specific revenue that they can generate. So leads were going to them that were specific to their industry or subject matter expert areas and so forth, and so my team started to function really well and become 200 percent.”
In other words, Mari was mastering RevOps before RevOps was cool.
Learn more about this data engineer’s meteoric rise to GTM success by polishing off the fundamental tool for effective revenue operations: clean data.
Check out some interview highlights here:
Amy: While more companies are interested in RevOps, some don’t understand the long-term advantages of hiring a RevOps leader and view it as a consultant position. Are they right?
Mari: RevOps is a way to manage all the inner workings of the revenue-related process from sales leads that comes to marketing through the sales channel. It requires really understanding the forecasting and lead gen customer journey, territory, reporting, analytics, and Go-to-Market strategies. It’s data-driven analytics that can help companies see where the revenue is and how to accelerate for the next year. One of the reasons why you most likely don’t want to hire someone as a contractor is because your business will constantly change. Products will evolve. There’s always turnovers that happen within an organization.
In sales, for instance, you need someone with that mindset of where to put territory alignment to ensure that your quota hasn’t taken a dip when someone leaves the organization, and then when new people come on board, how to divide your territory from that and then going into the new budget for the next year projections.
Amy: We’ve both seen a trend in companies creating subdivisions of revenue operations. Why do you think standardizing RevOps is important?
Mari: I think that in the operations people that have, you know, the background in operations. We all understand it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone within an organization really understands what it is, and I think you can make more awareness about what the different parts of it are and what might be important for your company to bring on, whether that’s RevOps, whether that’s someone that has full operations and can do RevOps.
Amy: I know you came into RevOps with a data engineering background. How important is clean data in Go-to-Market?
Mari: I have always had a love for data and data analytics. That’s what I love doing, and that’s what inspires me every single day. So when I’m working with either clients or in my full-time roles where they want me to do a CRM overhaul in which could be Salesforce, HubSpot, etc., you can’t make the appropriate decisions for Go-to-Market or analytics if your data is not clean. It’s true about garbage in, garbage out. If you don’t have consistency in your industries—you’re buying lead lists, or you’re getting leads from different forms—people can put in whatever they want with the lead lists that they get, so they’re just all over the place.
You need to understand how to distribute your leads appropriately and make the right Go-to-Market strategies. You need to standardize and clean all your data by industry. You have to do it with company size, even coming down to people nowadays. They’re in companies for maybe one to two years, and then they move to a new company. So even making sure that your contact list is up to date is really important too.
Want to hear more? Check out Mari’s full interview here!
