RevOps as the Revenue Architect - with Jeff Ignacio, The Revenue Architect Podcast

**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 It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Jeff Ignacio, host of the Revenue Architect Podcast, Revenue Operations Practitioner, and a top 100 RevOps thought leader and influencer. Today with Jeff, we'll be covering three main topics. First, Chief Revenue Officer and Revenue Operations. Does one require the other? Second, what responsibilities does Rev operations need to own versus manage? Third, how to successfully move back and forth from tactical activities to strategic advisor to the revenue executives. Jeff, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Jeff Ignacio** (1:22)
Great. First of all, I appreciate you having me on in the long-winded introduction. Don't know if I deserve all those accolades, but let's just go into a little bit of my background. I have an eclectic background. I think as most RevOps practitioners do, came through the ranks, solving business problems through bringing technology in the door in my days during Accenture, and then wore the bag myself and was in a sales role. Feast of Famine really understood what it's like to have your backup against the wall. Went to business school and pivoted over to a finance career supporting sales where I worked at Google helping to support both there and me and APAC regions. Now, the last couple of years, I've actually moved to be in the front lines supporting sales and marketing in a sales operations and a revenue operations role. And today, at a company called Upkeep, we're a series B funded company focused on solving maintenance workers' problems. And my role is to support marketing, sales and our customer service groups.

**Ray Rike** (2:15)
Well, you have one of the most wide reaching backgrounds. I've had a chance to talk to you about revenue operations with both the strategic consulting, the financial planning analysis, the actual carrying a bag and being a sales professional, then sales ops and RevOps. And the first question I really wanted to talk to you about was, why do you think revenue operations seems to have hit an inflection point of ascendancy in the B2B tech industry? Why do you think it's RevOps time to shine, Jeff?

**Jeff Ignacio** (2:45)
Well, the first thing is when you're launching your go to market, you're going to want to build up what that motion is going to look like and provide all the necessary infrastructure. And so if you look at the marketplace, the autonomy of providing support has come down to the departments, but it's created this leaky and creaky handoff and alignment between both sales, marketing, and then subsequently from sales to CS, and then on the referral basis from CS all the way to marketing. And so although we've gained efficiencies at the departmental levels and within the functional levels, we're actually finding that there's an incongruency that the customers are experiencing by experiencing this handoff from marketing to sales, and sales to CS. It's not a conveyor belt. It's actually a circle that allows the customers to work with various parties at companies to have a great experience. And I think more and more companies are starting to compete, not necessarily on efficiency, but on customer experience, and revenue operations is one such driver to enable that.

**Ray Rike** (3:39)
Well, that is a perfect opportunity to double click on something you said, because I was going to ask you, do you think RevOps is more than a combination of SalesOps, MarketingOps, and CSOps, more of an efficiency play? But you actually turned it around and said, it's focused on the customer experience, and to make sure that those handoffs and leaks between marketing, sales, and customer success, doesn't impact the customer experience. How do you actually measure how RevOps is helping improve the customer experience and that buyer's journey?

**Jeff Ignacio** (4:10)
One thing that I like to work on and think about is that our work is not necessarily project planning or program planning. It's a lot more around product management. And so if you look at your stakeholders as your internal customers, from marketing to sales or CS, you're thinking about, what are all the programs I'm launching internally? What systems are they interacting with? How can they access the information so that when they do interact with their customers, they have the relevant experience and touch points that they can then bring up live with the customer to give them the information to ride the value they're looking for. That's the ultimate goal of what Revenue Operations is trying to do when it comes to the external facing. And then when internal facing, when you're thinking about developing your strategy or your planning, it's the analytics, the insights, the information that executive leadership needs to have at their fingertips so that they can plan accordingly and cascade that down all the way to middle management down to the front lines. So I think more that RevOps is aligned with product management. And if you have that in mind, you should be thinking about, okay, what's the best in class product experience look like from a process system and enablement perspective?