Revenue Operations Outsourcing Strategy - with Cliff Simon, CRO Carabiner Group

**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 talk 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 It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Cliff Simon, the Chief Revenue Officer at the Carabiner Group. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Cliff. First, revenue operations, strategic function or tactical department. Second, the primary responsibilities and measurements of revenue operations in the B2B SaaS industry. Third, the decision criteria for outsourcing or insourcing revenue operations. Cliff, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Cliff Simon** (1:10)
Hey Ray, thanks so much for having me. Glad to be a part of this. As far as my brief journey, yeah, been with Carabiner here now for about two years as we've grown and scaled the company up. Got a lot of friends that seem to run in the same circle, so I had a nice introduction to you guys via our friend Brandon over at Place Technology.

**Ray Rike** (1:31)
Well, I'm excited to have you here, and since we just met, I'm going to give you an easy kind of, let's ease into this conversation, Cliff. Not really, but Revenue Operations, is it a strategic function or is it a tactical department? How should I as a CEO or CFO be viewing the Revenue Operations function?

**Cliff Simon** (1:51)
Yeah, I actually think this one's not very controversial at all. It has to be a strategic function. If you at the very top within that first team in an org are not pushing for Revenue Operations in a data-driven model within your business and having the ability to make data-driven decisions, it's never going to actually permeate. Everything within a company comes from the top. Your culture, the way that you treat your customers, the way that you work internally, the cadence and the speed at which things get accomplished, all of that comes down from the top. You can't force that into human beings. You have to be able to show by example. And I think Revenue Operations is nothing different. There has to be a clear message and a clear pathing, a clear direction from the C-suite of, this is how we are going to go about the business of this company. This is why this is important. This is how it's going to affect everyone within the company. And from that point on, you can start putting together all the tactical pieces of the actual execution and assigning those as their relevant stakeholders.

**Ray Rike** (2:57)
Yeah, I think my experience has been Revenue Operations is actually viewed initially as the strategic function to really help accelerate revenue growth across acquisition, expansion, retention, and improve the customer experience. But then the day to day, Cliff, becomes data quality issues, systems integration, kind of information flow between your marketing automation and your CRM. So I guess my follow up question is do you see revenue operations too often getting so mired in the day to day technical detail that they forget that their role is to be a strategic partner to the revenue and the executive team?

**Cliff Simon** (3:34)
It happens all the time. It happens all the time. There's so many things that are constantly moving, right? We all know the inflection points. As you continue to grow as a company, as you're looking for that next series of funding, or you're trying to hit that next ARR milestone, or that next employee account, whatever it might be, you just get so head down in trying to figure that out, that you don't always think about it with the future in mind and with that big strategic picture. And it's one of the things we see most often, right? And I don't think it's because people don't want to be thinking about it. I also think that just with the growth of RevOps as it is today, that there's not enough folks who have the experience or the foresight around the strategic side of it. And that's just because, gosh, it's grown so much, right? You're talking about 5,600 people with RevOps titles in January of this year. There's 17,000 people with RevOps titles now on LinkedIn, right? They're almost entirely director and VP level. So the growth there has been wild. I think there was 11,000 open jobs in RevOps in January. There's over 35,000 open jobs right now in RevOps. It's exploding.