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December 30, 2024 5 min

RevOps Learnings from 2024: Building a High-Performing Engine

By Alana Kadden Ballon

This year has brought valuable lessons in building a high-performing RevOps engine. Highlights include leveraging AI to enhance pipeline generation, improving data quality and sales development, and refining proactive capacity planning to balance growth targets with team resources. Establishing operational cadences, from goal setting to performance reviews, has driven alignment and accountability.Looking ahead to 2025, the focus remains on harnessing AI, refining strategies, and building sustainable growth. Whether you’re an early-stage startup or a growing SaaS company, these takeaways offer actionable strategies to optimize revenue generation and scalability.

RevOps Learnings from 2024: Building a High-Performing Engine
2024 has been a year of both challenges and incredible growth across the industry. As a RevOps leader, I’ve learned some valuable lessons that will undoubtedly shape our success in the years to come. Here are three key takeaways that I believe are crucial for any SaaS company looking to optimize revenue generation:
1.Build Pipeline by Unleashing the Power of AI:
In today’s fast-paced environment, building pipeline efficiently and cost-effectively is paramount. This year, we’ve witnessed the transformative potential of AI across various aspects of our RevOps function:

  • Data Quality: AI-powered tools have significantly improved the accuracy and cleanliness of our data. This has not only streamlined our processes but also provided us with a more reliable foundation for informed decision-making.
  • Account Intelligence: AI algorithms have enriched our understanding of our target accounts. You can now identify key decision-makers, understand their pain points, and tailor our outreach accordingly.
  • Sales Development: AI has revolutionized our sales development efforts. From automated lead scoring and personalized outreach to predictive modeling of deal outcomes, AI has enabled us to optimize our resources and maximize our conversion rates. If you are getting started, you could consider using AI to send personalized sequences to targets without investing heavily in a sales development workforce.
    By strategically integrating AI into our workflows, I’ve been able to build pipeline faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost. This has been a game-changer for our sales team and has directly contributed to our overall revenue growth.
    My favorite tools right now:
  • Contacts – ZoomInfo & Cognism
  • Data Enrichment – Clay.ai
  • Email Prospecting, Coaching and Deal Management – Clay.ai, Gong & Salesforce

2. Proactive Capacity Planning: One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is balancing capacity with ambitious growth targets. How did I tackle it with my team?

  • Developing a Detailed Capacity Model: I meticulously build historical data to forecast future demand and determine the optimal headcount for our sales and marketing teams. Even when I had no data, I would look month over month at just a few AEs to see what was trending.
    • Are your capacity expectations realistic? How much growth are you expecting per person?
    • Make sure you plan on how attrition (desired and undesired) will impact your business. How long will it take you to backfill?
  • Tracking Performance Trends: I continuously monitored key metrics like ramp time, productivity, and seasonality to identify potential bottlenecks and adjust our hiring plans accordingly.
    • Are new hires ramping as expected? Does the ramp schedule need to be adjusted?
    • Is our seasonality following last year and any prior years? I measure QoQ and YoY.
  • Proactive Hiring: Recognize the importance of hiring ahead of our booking goals. Revenue is a lagging indicator, but seeing the pipeline growth and deal velocity or accelerate is an earlier indicator that you should hire to stay ahead. Once you beat revenue expectations and the board raises targets, you have no excess capacity to take on the target. By proactively scaling our team, you can capitalize on increased demand and maintain a consistent flow of new business.This proactive approach to capacity planning allows you the ability to avoid costly hiring freezes and ensure the right talent is in place to drive sustained revenue growth.

3. Establishing a Robust Operational Cadence:
Consistent and effective communication is crucial for a high-performing team. Even if you have one AE and one person in marketing, these cadences drive accountability. Throughout the year, implement a series of operational cadences to ensure alignment and accountability:

  • Annual Goal Setting: Set ambitious but achievable goals and objectives for the year, inspiring the team and providing a clear roadmap for success.
  • Weekly Forecast Meetings: Conduct regular forecast meetings to review key metrics, identify potential roadblocks, and adjust our strategies as needed.
  • Monthly Performance Reviews: Conduct monthly reviews of individual rep performance and ramping progress to provide timely feedback and identify areas for improvement.
  • Quarterly Business Reviews: Conduct quarterly business reviews to assess overall performance, analyze key trends, and identify areas for optimization.
  • Half-Yearly Replanning: Conduct half-yearly replanning sessions to reassess our goals, adjust our strategies based on market dynamics, and ensure the team is on track to achieve our revenue targets.
    These cadences have fostered a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.
    Does this sound too sophisticated? Are you just getting started with sales and marketing? I strongly believe that adapting each of these components is important from the very early days, but with some of the startups I have advised, here are the most important things to do as you start the year:
  1. Pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. With any of the free ai tools, you can create fantastic prospecting messaging that is customized and targeted to your teams. Invest a little and you’ll see you can reach a large audience to build your brand awareness and engagement and only involve a person once someone raises their hand. Almost always teams focus too much on active deals and not enough on generation.
  2. Get your story straight. Ensure you are presenting the business problem you are solving, linking it to technical capabilities, and bringing it back to quantifying the money saved or earned by leveraging your platform. This could be decreasing risk, reducing actual spend, or increasing client’s output. Continuously gather insights from how customers respond to your story and evolve your message to incorporate what they find most impactful.
  3. Define proof-of-value (POV) success. Before you get them hooked on your product, define success and understand the path to budget and purchase. Create a timeline and determine what will happen when you demonstrate your platform’s value.
  4. Build business cases. When you lay the foundation with the story, understand what is most valuable for the customer & tie that back to the POV success criteria use cases. Provide them with a summary of how you will deliver savings or increased revenue and link that to the results of their POV. AI tools are extremely powerful at creating these with minimal inputs.
  5. Set limits. Buyers are constantly trying to find ways to save more, and will continue to extend a POV for as long as possible. If you have done the above, hold the line and move ahead.

Looking Ahead:
As we enter 2025, I’m excited to continue to leverage these learnings and learn from others in the Revenue Operations space. We will continue to invest in AI, refine our capacity planning models, and strengthen our operational cadences. A truly world-class RevOps engine can power your growth for years to come.

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