The Evolution of Revenue Operations - with Henry Mizel, SVP RevOps at Apollo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Henry Mizel, the Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations and Partnerships at apollo.io. We'll be covering four main topics with Henry today. First, the evolution of revenue operations.
Second, the primary responsibilities in measurements of revenue operations at apollo.io. Third, a discussion about revenue operations, strategic function, or tactical department. And fourth, a little bit about a story or two of how revenue operations uncovers and delivers real business value. Henry, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Henry Mizel** (1:25)
Yeah, thanks Ray. So my background, I've been in Revenon going on 10, 12 years now, so I've really seen the evolution through its different stages.
I've built the function out from kind of the initial person through to teams of 20 or 30, through Seed Series A, all the way through to D and E companies, and mainly in tech, but I've done some real estate rev ops, which was fun as well.

**Ray Rike** (1:52)
So revenue operations for more than five years, 10 to 12 years. So you got an amazing view on how the role of revenue operations has evolved. And I think it was three or four years ago, it was the number one job opening on LinkedIn.
Henry, would you mind sharing with the audience a little bit of how you've seen the role of rev ops evolve over the past few years?

**Henry Mizel** (2:17)
Yeah, absolutely. So definitely seen several iterations of that evolution in the last kind of decade or so. Think going all the way back to the early days, you'd probably call it systems admin or Salesforce admins. It was very much like a tactical support function that evolved into sales ops, so getting a bit more strategic on the sales strategy side and then bringing us to the present day, being more encompassing in rev ops as a whole. So that's really recognizing and realizing that the revenue engine is more than just sales and requires specialist knowledge across all of GTM.

**Ray Rike** (2:55)
And then really mapping that to the entire customer journey Let me ask this, you've been an individual contributor, practitioner, and now you've got a big revenue operations team.
So beyond the way it's evolved from that system administration to more of a strategic function, how about the way you approach it as a leader in a hyper growth company like apollo.io? Kind of tell me a little bit about how do you view revenue operations and how you try to position it and lead it in your organization?

**Henry Mizel** (3:27)
Yes, I think it's definitely evolved from that kind of support function into a much more strategic leadership function. I'm seeing more and more rev ops having a kind of quote unquote seat at the table, being in the board meetings, being much more aligned to that senior leadership team, being on the senior leadership team as well.
I think really being a function, being a multiplier for revenue growth and being a very cost-effective and ROI-positive way to scale companies. I think some of the kind of shift, both in how I've approached it, certainly in the last couple of roles I've had, is moving from that kind of non-strategic into strategic. So instead of being super focused on tools or just servicing requests, fire drills, thrash, moving much more to clearly defined strategy, what is the rev ops roadmap? How does that align with stakeholders from leadership all the way down? I think the art of saying no is super important. Not to be a blocker, but it can also just be like zooming out to understand the why, but just so that you're approaching it more of a kind of partnership versus kind of this service desk, order taking, hey, we need to do this or this doesn't work, it needs fixing. Because if you get into that trap, you never get out of that trap. And then you really struggle to provide that kind of value.
And then I think in terms of like how a little bit about kind of how I view the kind of role itself changing, I think the kind of old world was like a singular spike in a certain area. So like either a systems heavy person or maybe like a heavily management consultant based person, not necessarily bad, but you do lack some of the kind of broader context of that systems process tooling and strategy and data that kind of encompasses all the rev ops. So like the kind of the new way I tend to think about hiring and building those teams and building the department is kind of looking for that spike in those kind of four or five areas and getting a good balance that fits the stakeholder needs.