Customer-In Revenue Operations - with Alison Elworthy, EVP Revenue Operations - HubSpot

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOps Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Alison Elworthy, Executive Vice President of Revenue operations at HubSpot. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas. First, the evolution of revenue operations as a function. Second, is RevOps a strategic function or a tactical department? And third, how a customer-in-focus shapes the role and responsibilities of the revenue operations function? Alison, please take a moment to give us a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Alison Elworthy** (1:13)
Hi, Ray, and thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. So my journey to RevOps started probably 10 years ago when I started at HubSpot. I actually started at HubSpot as a marketing ops manager, and then I moved into sales operations and then business operations and did that for about the first six or seven years of my career at HubSpot. Then I transitioned into the Customer Success organization. So I was the VP of Customer Success, overseeing support, our onboarding teams, our CSNs, and then just about five months ago, came back into ops, leading RevOps at HubSpot.

**Ray Rike** (1:54)
Wow. So your journey has really been operation-centric, including all of it, I will say go-to-market function, sales, marketing, and then customer success, right?

**Alison Elworthy** (2:05)
Yeah, that's exactly right.

**Ray Rike** (2:06)
Well, that kind of maybe explains something that I read just the other day was an article that you wrote on Medium, and I believe it was entitled, Arise RevOps, the new orchestrators of the customer experience. Can you tell me a little bit more behind that concept and how your journey with all the operations roles kind of has morphed into the external customer experience focus?

**Alison Elworthy** (2:30)
Sure. So it's interesting, when I started my career at HubSpot in Ops, I never spent time with our end customers. It was always supporting our marketers, our sales reps, or the business, and I was always behind my computer screen. I was never actually interacting with customers. Then when I moved into customer success, I spent all my time interacting with customers, and now coming full circle back into Ops, I have a brand new perspective and appreciation for the importance of truly solving for your end customers when you're in an Ops type role. I think it's just so critical to have appreciation for your customers and empathy for your customers when you're in Ops, as you solve through your frontline reps, because I think Ops holds the key to that customer experience that you create from a go-to-market perspective. It's just so critical that your Ops teams know who they're solving for and how they should be solving for them.

**Ray Rike** (3:31)
Well, let's double-click on that a little bit, because I see RevOps being positioned in the marketplace as often a way to consolidate and align the internal Ops teams, marketing, sales, customer success, and even business Ops, indoor to better align and integrate the go-to-market functions, marketing, sales, and customer operations. But all too often, I see that becoming more of an inside-out perspective. So my first question on this, Alison, is how do you recommend or how do you ensure that your revenue operations function and professionals have a better appreciation and understanding of the customer and the customer's requirements in their experience?

**Alison Elworthy** (4:11)
Yeah, and I think you made such a great point in that, Ray, is that I do believe that the way in which you operate and are organized internally, directly reflects on what the experience is that you create for your customers. And so for us at HubSpot, we were working within our marketing, sales and CS silos, and there wasn't that consistency or end to end kind of glue that really held us all together to think more broadly about that customer experience. So we say we went from a function out experience to a customer in one by pulling RevOps together. And remind me, now I went off on that tangent, what was the question at the end?

**Ray Rike** (4:48)
That's a nice strategic frame, right? The customer end focus. But let's get to the tactical part of this. How do you make sure that that marketing ops person or RevOps analyst really understands the customer, what she really needs and how their experience is being impacted by what they do for day to day?