Revenue Strategy - What, Why and How to Measure the Impact with Jeremey Donovan, SVP Revenue Strategy at SalesLoft

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp 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 that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Jeremey Donovan, Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy at SalesLoft, and a current Masters candidate in Data Science at University of Virginia. Today, we will be covering three main topics. First, the core components of a revenue strategy. second, the key metrics to predict and then measure the success of a revenue strategy. And third, the future of the B2B Cloud revenue team. Jeremey, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Jeremy Donovan** (1:15)
Well, first of all, Ray, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. I love that you mentioned that I'm a Masters candidate in Data Science. I was not expecting that. I love that. I guess I can give you a little background on that too. So how did I get here? I started out as a semiconductor engineer way, way back.
in the late 90s. And over the course of time, I worked my way into sales by doing this thing that I call add a word, drop a word. So I was a semiconductor engineer. I dropped the engineer and became a semiconductor analyst. I then dropped the semiconductor part and I was kind of a general technology analyst. Then I dropped the analyst part and moved into product development. So information services, product development, and then product management, product marketing, corporate marketing, marketing and sales, and then ultimately sales and sales strategy. So that's my progression to getting here, but it's all built on a technical foundation, which relates to like why when I'm closer to retirement, am I pursuing a master's degree in data science? And it really is just, I like to keep my brain active and fresh on the latest and greatest in whatever is kind of technically hot at a given time. So I've done that my whole life.

**Ray Rike** (2:25)
You know, I'm really impressed by it because I went from engineer into the world of sales and then kind of go to market revenue management. And I was had a boss once that said, Oh, AABBC closing, always be closing. And my number one phrase today is ABL, A OIS BBL learning. And you actually are personifying that. So good on you, Jeremy. But let me talk a little bit about this title you have at SalesLoft. You're the head of revenue strategy. When I first saw that, because I've been following you for a while, I'm like, I got to talk to Jeremy. What are the components of a revenue strategy? And what's the head of revenue strategy responsible for?

**Jeremy Donovan** (3:09)
Yeah, I've taken the advantage of re-branding my job title. As many have, it used to be head of sales strategy. I've been at SalesLoft now about three and a half years. And during that time, I always had the sales slash revenue strategy part of what I do. I've also cycled through leadership roles in a bunch of different areas in sales development, in sales engineering, in sales operations, and so on. So with respect to strategy, like how I would separate revenue operations when we also have our, I no longer run RevOps. We have a great leader there, Jamie Miller. How I would separate revenue strategy from revenue operations is I have historically been what I like to refer to as the consigliere to our CRO or a consigliere, because we have a few, to our chief revenue officer. And what that means, right, is if you were to take apart the pieces, so I'll start with strategy, like what is strategy? Strategy is all about people, process and technology that's needed to accomplish goals. And so that means, let's say we're going to change something about our territory strategy, right? Then we need to think about in that order, how is this going to impact people and how are we going to deploy this? What are the processes that we're going to follow in order to change our territory? What rules are we going to apply and so on? And then the technology, where applicable, like is there technology that will help us with that type of transition? So that, you know, again, that's the strategy piece. And then the revenue piece, the reason I updated the title from sales to revenue is because it has happened in the industry over the past couple of years, right? We went from VPs of sales to chief revenue officers. And during that time, at the very least, the chief revenue officers assume not only pre-sales, but also some of the post sales pieces, is inclusive of support and customer success. So the reason I felt it was okay to change from sales to revenue is that I've now worked on a number of projects across the CS and success worlds. And the other piece of revenue is marketing. A lot of times, CROs and CMOs are separated, but I have a background. In fact, I was a chief marketing officer in a couple of places, so I have that background as well. So hopefully I've earned it, but that's for others to judge.