RevOps Co-op Weekly #112 - The CEO Perspective on What RevOps Brings to the Table
AJ Bruno is a certified commercial pilot. He’s also a serial entrepreneur, currently the Co-Founder and CEO of QuotaPath, a leading commission management solution. Here's what he thinks about RevOps.
RevOps Co-op provides resources, content and community for those who ❤️ revenue operations. This weekly newsletter features collected tweets, posts and thoughts on a variety of RevOps topics. We also have a private Slack community with > 6500+ RevOps pro’s from companies like Slack, Lyft, Clari, Miro and more 👉🏻 click here to join.
The CEO Perspective on What RevOps Brings to the Table
Thanks to AJ Bruno, Co-Founder and CEO of QuotaPath, and a member of our RevOps Co-op Creator’s Guild, we have a new perspective on what RevOps brings to the table.
AJ’s first company was called TrendKite, which was ultimately bought by Cision for $225 million. While building TrendKite, AJ had a lot of sales reps that came to him to say, “I think I got paid incorrectly, this is wrong.”
He wasn’t surprised to hear this - they were using spreadsheets to manage their whole commission process, and he knew there had to be a better way. From this experience (which was far from a one-off in B2B), QuotaPath was born.
But this experience also taught AJ something else - that RevOps is a mission critical component of any business.
The CEO Focus - Hiring
Now, as CEO of QuotaPath, AJ gets pulled in a lot of different directions, but one thing that he does consistently week over week is participate in new hire interviews. Every. Single. One.
Some may think that having the CEO sitting in on every interview conversation is “small company” thinking, but as AJ explains, there’s a talent war going on and he needs to be in those conversations to ensure the best people come on board. In time, he knows he won’t be able to manage it, but for the moment, he’s an advocate for the QuotaPath story.
“I interview every single person that comes into the organization,” he says.
“We’re at about 100 employees. I can probably do that to 150. Where better to hear from a prospective employer than from the CEO themselves. I’m not interviewing you, it’s the reverse interview.”
You heard that right - AJ wants candidates interviewing him.
He also tracks his time – from interviews to RevOps meetings – and knows he has 42.3 meetings a week.
“I know the hours that I’m spending in each of those categories and buckets,” he says. “I try to make sure I’m spending time on the right things. It’s a challenging thing for sure.”
Hiring a RevOps Unicorn EARLY
Early in the growth of QuotaPath, there was agreement that RevOps was a key ingredient to the company growing. So, late in 2021, with a staff of about 40 people, he sought out the strongest RevOps leader he could.
And who’d he find? Ryan Milligan.
“He became the face of SalesOps. So, SalesOps obviously has everything to do with sales… all the metrics and KPIs. His background was also MarketingOps and SEO, so we knew he could span,” he says.
“Our goal was to give him the opportunity to span the entire organization.”
Because AJ recognized how well Ryan managed on the Sales Ops side of things, it was a quick decision to create a more centralized role in the company for Ryan. And thus, the RevOps role within QuotaPath was created.
“We did it much earlier than I think it has been traditionally done because we just felt it was so important,” AJ says of bringing RevOps into the structure. “Ryan has been such a key component and strong thought leader in the community.”
This integration and recognition of both SalesOps and analytics within QuotaPath also had an impact on QuotaPath customers - it allowed the company to walk the walk when it came to creating a centralized RevOps function in their businesses as well.
“Ops is all of the underpinning and the execution and all of that architecture, the back of the office,” he says. “Then the analytics piece of it is like, ‘Well now we have this stuff, what do we do with it? How does it surface? What are we actually analyzing? What are our key takeaways?’ And you have to be of two brains to be able to do both of those. Ryan is one of those unicorns that can.”
AJ sees Ryan as someone who is able to operate in any of the departments: finance, sales, marketing, operations; and serve as a bridge to move things along. A true utility player if you will (read this article about why your RevOps team is the business version of baseball’s utility player).
Make RevOps Integral to the Organization
As AJ explains it, the data that RevOps provides to the organization is more than credible or trusted, it’s also active. He says Ryan is quite dynamic in board meetings. While his department is definitely a validator of data, he also has the ability to present that data without emotion, which makes it even more powerful.
“The numbers are the numbers,” he says. “We can’t change those numbers unless we start to think about the activities that drive the objectives, the results, and change those.”
Ryan had given AJ a proposal that outlined six things he wanted in order to grow the organization. AJ embraced that, but also accepted limitations.
“I said, ‘great, let’s pick two, let's start there’,” he says. “So we had a great conversation about the team and where people would be slotted in.”
It was an appreciation of how RevOps would grow and expand as the organization also grew and expanded.
…There’s more! Read full Blog here 👉 The CEO Perspective on What RevOps Brings to the Table
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RevOps Co-op provides resources, content and community for those who ❤️ revenue operations. This weekly newsletter features collected tweets, posts and thoughts on a variety of RevOps topics. We also have a private Slack community with > 6,000+ RevOps pro’s from companies like Slack, Lyft, Clari, Miro and more 👉🏻 click here to join.