Once reluctant (BDR) Business Development Representative Craig Handy found his true calling when he stumbled into sales operations a little over 8 years ago. Since then, he’s cut his teeth working with the likes of Shopify, York IE, and now Jobber, heading up revenue operations teams and bridging the go-to-market silos.

His LinkedIn posts feature digestible, thought-provoking insights that, in his words, put the “go” in “go-to-market” - we recommend giving him a follow if you’re looking to gain a more nuanced perspective on your GTM systems!

We sat down to talk about his perception of revops, how companies can approach process improvement, and where the industry is headed.

‍

1. You started off in a business development role, so what influenced the move from sales to revenue operations?

I say this a lot of the time but I think everybody should start in business development - or at least do a couple months there - because it is one of the most humbling experiences, but also the quickest way to understand how to communicate your business!

I didn’t enjoy all the psychological gameplay and pressures in my team, and I found myself spending more time coming up with email cadences, playing around with the data, refining scripts and configuring our tools. I’ve always been interested in organizational psychology and how to get most of the people, and I found that there were so many parallels to that.

2. What are some common misconceptions you think people have about revenue operations?

People’s definitions still vary a lot which is why I’ll often preface my ideas with “this is my version of revops”. 

One thing I see a lot is a lot of people finding revops via sales or marketing operations first and assuming they’re almost the same thing. But actually, revops begins when you step into a space where you change your perspective and your “customer”. When I’m in marketing ops, my “customer” is marketing; when I’m in sales ops, my “customer” is sales. In revops, I need to own and be obsessed with the overall customer journey. We drive strategy, and sales and marketing news to support revops, not the other way around. 

3. So how do you encourage marketing, sales, and customer success departments to collaborate with revops effectively?

I don’t believe breaking down silos is revops’ responsibility. I actually think that the silos themselves - whether it’s for marketing or sales or customer success -  provide an opportunity for folks in each team to get really good at their specific craft, in the same way that you’d divide engineers into different teams to focus on different things.

It’s the job of revops to own the customer journey and be the bridge to between the teams, to take different elements and put those in the proper place in the buyer journey and connect those silos instead of destroying them.

4. In one of your posts you talk about the need for revops people to have empathy for those in customer-facing roles. Could you elaborate on this?

Imagine building a process or go-to-market initiative when you don’t include the end users or the folks that will actually take responsibility for it. My father works in building equipment management, and it would be like someone new coming in and telling the team how they need to work when they have zero technical experience of the work they do. 

To be a good revops leader, you don’t necessarily need to be able to do everything you observe, but you do need to understand what’s happening. If you don’t, you’re rolling the dice every time you make a decision sometimes you’ll be right, but every time you’re wrong something will break and you’ll erode trust. 

5. You’ve also written about the “people” side of revops and how you get them on board with new processes. Can you share some of your strategies for motivating people to change up the way they operate?

One thing I like to do is conduct surveys or interviews to make sure we’re addressing the real issues to begin with. For instance, I could ask “do you feel like Salesforce is loading fast enough?” and if reps answer “no”, I could figure out away to reduce load time from 14 to 9 seconds. But that could have absolutely zero effect because the rep isn’t primed to receive that and it might not have been the actual issue.

So instead, we ask broader strategic questions, like “How are you using this?” “What’s your perception of this?” so we can come up with more strategic solutions. It could be that load times actually increase slightly, but it the rep feels like they’re accessing the data they need in the areas that matter then that’s a process improvement they can get on board with.

The other example is when you have to ask sales reps to log their call notes; if you have to remind people to do it, it's not important enough. What I mean by that is that if that information just goes into the void and it's not used or leveraged then it's just feels like extra work for the reps, so why would they do it? People want to know that what they're contributing is adding value. It’s your job to showcase that with every process so they see how their work adds up.

6. In your view, what are the biggest reasons companies fail to get good ROI on their tools? How do ensure you build a techstack that actually brings value?

One thing I like to say that shocks people is that if we could go to market without technology, we would. That means that from a revenue operations perspective, we want a go-to-market-led vision, not a technology-led one. A lot of the time it’s the other way around and people invest in technologies to solve symptomatic problems rather than asking whether they fit with their GTM strategy.

Secondly, I like HubSpot’s idea of a toolstack that is crafted, not cobbled. I will often bias towards the second-best tool in a particular segment if it plays nicer with the environment of the ecosystem. It’s about being thoughtful in how you bring things together and not over-complicating your systems for no reason.

Finally, the moment you implement something and leave people to their own devices to start using it, is the moment it starts eroding. Processes and best practices start changing until teams no longer have any idea how the tools were supposed to be used. So it’s not just about implementation and launch, but about being a constant steward to your tools throughout their lifecycle. 

7. Are there any particular qualities do you look for in your revops team hires?

When I was at Shopify they had this concept of the “shaped individual” that I really liked. What I like to look for is “H-shaped” individuals who have two discipline-specific crafts and a thoughtfulness for how to combine them. I think rev Ops is synonymous with Fusion cooking - so you think of how Japanese Peruvian cuisine is incredible, and how it comes from combining two totally unique and distinct things to create something completely new. That’s what I want revops people to be able to do, whether it’s combining marketing with sales, partners with customer success or whatever.

The other thing I like to look for is people who recognize that there is healthiness in chaos, but there's also balance by introducing structure to help the company maneuver better. Revops people have to be comfortable with both chaos and structure, so if there’s fear of either they might not be a good fit!

8. What’s your opinion on the role of AI and automation evolving within revops in the coming years? How do expect the field to change in the next 5 years?

One thing I think you're going to start to see is a lot of smaller companies that are profitable simply because we can do more with less people thanks to AI. I think revops stock will go up because it will no longer be dependent on lots of people crossing different departments; you’ll have individual operators who have more flexibility to pivot from marketing to sales ops etc. That will require individuals to make sure that they have a healthy balance between the science on the technology side and the art go-to-market strategy side. 

In the longer term, I think there could be more of a shift around what we consider “growth operations”, where revops is no longer predominantly associated with sales-led motions but also incorporates product-led growth too. 

9. Finally, how would you explain revenue operations to a 5-year-old?

That's a good one - I tend to overcomplicate when I explain!

I would say that if you have something that you want to give to other people and you're not sure how to do that, revenue operations helps you to figure out how to do that in the best way possible.

‍

Make sure you follow Craig on LinkedIn for more expert revops tips!

‍If you're looking for more revops inspiration, check out our list of 20 must-follow revops leaders.