Since the term was coined in 2016, revenue operations (RevOps) has evolved to help business leaders navigate dynamic Go-to-Market strategies across industries. As one of the fastest-growing roles in 2024, what can businesses expect in 2025? Change, of course.
In the latest episode of Go to Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Olga Traskova, vice president of RevOps at Birdeye, is prepared for another transformation as this strategic role moves from a reactive supportive role to one more proactive and strategic driver of business growth.
Olga explains why this shift demands a new breed of RevOps professionals, one equipped with technical expertise across a range of tools and systems and capable of navigating the entire customer journey.
In this interview, Amy and Olga dive into the key skills required for success in this evolving landscape, including practical experience, effective vendor collaboration, and robust networking, while also breaking down the challenges facing today’s RevOps teams, such as managing increasing expectations and integrating artificial intelligence, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance for sustained performance and well-being. It’s quite the dance, and Olga handles it brilliantly.
Here are some highlights from that interview:
Amy: What skills are we looking for to excel in today’s RevOps roles?
Olga: I’m seeing now that we need to become more technical. If you look at 10 years ago, there were 200 different tools. Now it’s 1000s. We must understand and know most of them, because when your CMO or your chief sales officer asks:
- “Okay, how do we solve this problem?”
- “How other companies are solving this problem?”
- “Are there any tools that are solving this problem?”
You need to have this at the forefront of your mind and stay ahead of the trends and the solutions that are out there.
That is required, along with being educated and understanding the market and the landscape of different technologies. The main issue now isn’t just about agreeing to buy it; the question is, who’s going to manage it, who’s going to implement it, and who’s going to demonstrate it?
Amy: How do you see RevOps as a hybrid role?
Olga: I believe in hybrid roles. RevOps was created as a function to eliminate silos, bring in alignment, and grow the organizational things. Then I realized that as we grow, we silo ourselves, we become siloed within revenue operations.
Unfortunately, when marketing ops is working on the top funnel and customer success ops is working on retention, they might step on each other’s toes, and they might not even realize what’s going on on the other side of the process. So what I’m working on now within the team is to ensure that everyone is aware of the entire customer journey, that they understand all of the stages and the processes within the entire customer journey, from lead to cash, and then from extra cash, from the upsells.
So, they need to be aware and be able to jump in and help their team or other people within the RevOps team. So we are looking for people in business operations.
I worked with marketing but also have analytical experience. We are looking for people with some finance experience but also understand sales operations and various systems. So, we’re looking for people to become hybrids within the current org.
