The Revenue Operations and Sales Development Partnership - with Taft Love, Iceberg RevOps

**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 and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Taft Love, the co-founder of Iceberg RevOps. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Taft. First, revenue operations, when to start and how to evolve the function. Second, the sales development and revenue operations partnership. And third, the key metrics that RevOps should measure and be measured by. Taft, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Taft Love** (1:09)
Thanks, Ray. I'm excited to be here. So my journey, sort of a winding road. I started out my career in law enforcement and after a decade in law enforcement fell sort of into the startup world as an aging SDR. I moved from an SDR role into a sales role and eventually sales and then sales and marketing and then revenue operations. So that is sort of the path I took to here where along the way I founded a company that does revenue operations for scaling startups which led to our conversation.

**Ray Rike** (1:44)
If I wasn't thinking we're going to have the discussion, but it's such a unique journey especially starting as a peace officer. But tell me a little bit about once you made that transition into the world of sales, sales development and sales, what was the fascination or what was the catalyst to make RevOps the actual function that you would create a company in?

**Taft Love** (2:05)
It's interesting. I had no knowledge of or interest in sales operations, marketing operations and RevOps really didn't exist as a term yet, although it existed as function in some bigger companies. When I started in sales, I found myself wandering into operations by solving the problems I saw around me. I'm one of those people who organically grew into an ops role, who didn't come up through the LinkedIn operations team for a decade before going out on my own. It all started at PandaDoc, which is a great company still growing like crazy, but I was an early salesperson there. There were some things getting in the way of me being as successful as I could be, and I started solving them. Eventually, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but in this case, the grease was, I guess you go fix it, Taft. That's what led to more and more operations roles. At some point, I realized, I think I'm good at this. I think I like it.
Eventually, started solving the problems with an agency that I was having as an ops leader. That's how I transitioned from sales into operations.

**Ray Rike** (3:11)
Well, you mentioned a word early. In today's conversation, we're going to center around the word early as it relates to RevOps. The first topic I really wanted to jump into, because this is what your company does for a living, is what part of the journey, what stage should a company first consider a RevOps function?

**Taft Love** (3:33)
This is a really, really great question, and I'm going to say something that my marketing team will be upset with me for saying. At Iceberg, we don't really do RevOps. We do systems strategy and management. Now, a system strategy is a part of RevOps, but it's not the whole, and you can have a systems management and strategy function that operates according to RevOps best practices. For example, not answering to the client departments that you serve, but having sort of centralized reporting, things like that. So most startups don't need a true RevOps program early. I think you need to get, in startup world, and hopefully this will be meaningful to listeners, you need to have gotten to probably a B round, and that obviously is not broadly applicable, and there may be people for whom that doesn't apply, but most startups need a systems team that can provide the data the company needs to manage its business between founder selling and that B round. What I mean by B round is you've reached a point where you have dedicated sales and marketing leadership, growing teams, and each team is complex enough that your leaders are working out of dashboards and not in the trenches with the people working for them.
That's the point at which I think you need to start considering a RevOps team. RevOps also isn't universally a good idea. There are still companies out there that should probably have separate sales and marketing operations. The more intertwined your sales and marketing become, usually as a function of your strategy, the more likely RevOps makes sense for you.