Janis Zech: Super excited to have you. Welcome, Noah. Well, let's dive right in. I mean, you know, I know you are kind of a history guy. And so, you know, like, in your view, you know, how has RevOps developed? I mean, you probably all read that it's been the fastest growing job in the US. It's, you know, it's super high, obviously, it's been there for a while. So, yeah, what's your view on the history of RevOps?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. It's it's definitely evolved over the years. I can say that to start with. Basically, like, RevOps, as you guys probably know, like, it's a relatively new term. It's kind of the combination of marketing and sales at the end of the day, but it didn't start there. Really, like, the the origins of it actually are go back all the way to IBM, wherein it was called business operations. It was much more finance focused and, you know, sales driven. And this is even before, like, the concept of, like, a SaaS, you know, cloud based software where, like, everything was on prem. You know? Things were built into server rooms at the end of the day, and that's kind of, like, the origin of, like, where this role came from. It then kind of evolved, then there was this focus on sales. So then it turned into sales operations, and, you know, that's when, you know, Salesforce came on to the scene and more traditional CRMs took place. And, really, the focus was narrowed. So it's not so much on, like, the business operations and the finance side of things, but now, you know, sales is becoming a threat. And here we are today with revenue operations. I think that the change took place around twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. I remember being at a SalesLoft adjacent conference to Dreamforce back then, and they were, like, announcing it. This is the age of revenue operations. You know? And it's really now that all of these teams, you know, sales, marketing, customer success, and sometimes finance and other roles, are now being combined into this one kind of larger operational department at the end of the day. And what's next? I think it's probably growth operation. Really, like, driving revenue from a revenue operation standpoint is gonna be the next frontier where we're not actually just optimizing, but we're actually, like, contributing to revenue at the end.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, I had to smile when you said, basically, software as a service not being a thing, you know, always funny to hear and think back to the old good old days. But, I mean, you know, thinking about, you know, RevOps, I mean, it's a it's a very hype thing right now. Right? And and rightly so, I think it's it's it's so important to to be more successful in, you know, as a revenue team overall. But I think the question, you know, I I sometimes ask myself is, how do you get into it, right, if you're studying or thinking about, you know, switching into this, how do you think, you know, like, what's your view on that?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. Absolutely. And I've been thinking about this a lot. You know, there's a lot of new college graduates that are coming into this and seeing revenue operations as, you know, a different career trajectory than other conventional jobs. And, really, like, nontech jobs in tech have always had, like, a pretty high barrier to entry. And so thinking about, you know, how to actually, like, push people into this has been, like, at the forefront of my thoughts for quite a while. Most of the candidates I do see, unfortunately, in revenue operations have, like, a year or two of experience under their belt. The strongest candidates I see have either been SDRs or, you know, junior customer success managers or sales engineers. Sometimes they even come from marketing operations or product. The strongest candidates I see that are entering with experience are also Salesforce admin at the end of the day. So people that have, like, hands on with CRM, like and you don't necessarily even need to go to school for that, but things like that are generally, like, the best, you know, approach into this career.

Janis Zech: And and why do you think that?

Noah Scherick: It's it's mostly because you're familiar with sales processes. Like, if you if you graduate from college, like, maybe you had a couple courses in finance or operations, but, really, the strongest candidates I see might not even have a finance background. Maybe they came from the liberal arts or, you know, some other conventional background. But I do see that the strongest candidates know what a sales process is and know how to actually work with it and work within it at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: Don't don't you see the risk that you're too technical and you might not understand the world of the AEs or SDRs day to day? So if you if you don't have that experience, you mean? Yeah. Exactly. I mean, if you if you come purely from a from an admin perspective, right, like, would you would you think that's a that's a risk? Or I mean, how do you understand what who you're building for? Right?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's something that I really look for. I look for people that understand stories. So, like, storytelling is a really big part of revenue operations. I really see it as basically, you know, you have to if you are an admin, of course, at the end of the day, you know how the systems work, but you should also be able to explain how the users actually use the system at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: I mean, like, based on that, I I would wonder, is revenue operations really an entry level role at all? Like, should people really, like, after studies even go into revenue operations, or wouldn't that, like, be better to actually do a couple of other things first and then gradually move into that? Like, I think starting out in marketing, much clearer. Like, you you work on, like, a much much much smaller topic, much smaller area, expertise that you need to learn and get into. And then from there, you can sort of, like, graduate into revenue operations.

Noah Scherick: Absolutely. It's a it's a really great point. And, generally, that is the case where it's it's wonderful to see people with a little bit of job experience entering revenue operations because they have, as we said, this understanding of, like, how b two b SaaS is or just tech companies in general work. We're very narrow focused. There's revenue operations across those, like, different companies, but we're focusing there. There are, however, sometimes outstanding candidates from college. Like, normally, you know, they are creative thinkers at the end of the day. They have very good project management skills, and they probably have at least, like, a Salesforce certification or multiple HubSpot certifications and spreadsheet skills. Those are kind of, like, the the big things that I look for. Like, you have to be able to understand and work with data and, like we talked about earlier, storytelling.

Janis Zech: Sounds like product management to me.

Noah Scherick: Yeah. So I think at the I it's it's and it absolutely is. I think the best revenue operations candidates are, like, going to be agile project managers. Right? And some of the strongest people I've worked with, like, take a full, you know, sprint planning, all of, like, the, you know, software development frameworks and put them into RevOps, and it's perfect. It works out so well at the end. It's just, you know, your product and your code are a little bit different.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think I think we spoke a lot about, like, discovery and how do you do discovery well and then also road mapping and project management. Right? I mean, if you if you think about somebody who's one or two years experience in either marketing, sales, or CS, would you think then they should go rather into a MarOps, sales ops, CS ops role and then, you know, learn that and, you know, have different experience in ops? What would be the progression from your point of view?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. For entry level people, it's always better or sorry. For people that have, like, one or two years experience, it's always better to kind of, like, go into what you know. Right? And usually, that's the easiest thing too. Right? If you are a CSM or you are a marketing person, to then take over the ops of your company and be responsible for that, it's gonna be a far easier entry into this world of RevOps than just jumping straight in and, like, owning an entire org, you know, owning sales processes when you know marketing.

Janis Zech: And, I mean, if if you're in marketing today or if you're an SDR or AE, like, what can you do to to learn the traits of of of, you know, operations?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. For sure. Really, it the first thing first is understanding CRMs. Like, you know, this is this is the core thing that we do in RevOps is understand and work with and develop CRMs to the best of our abilities. Then looking at kind of the stories being told by the revenue team. What is the customer journey of your company look? Does it make sense at the end of the day? And then is it mapped into the CRM? That's kind of step one. Then, you know, having a strong analytic background and being able to work with the data. So, usually, the people that come into this from internal already know how to do reporting, already know, like, what are the key metrics of my company and how do I work with them, and then jump straight off of that. And then, you know, explore different possibilities, and then you are kind of doing RevOps from inside of your role already.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Okay. That's a really good takeaway, I think. You know, you're in a specific role, and you can already learn the traits and dive deeper into them. I mean, do you do you think that, you know, people should, you know, do studies outside, you know, of their jobs? Right? Like, are there good resources where you could grow and learn those kind of things?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. Absolutely. There's plenty of resources out there. I think even outreach dot io, I believe, is the one. You know, outreach has a whole library of RevOps. You guys also have a great library of different resources available. And then I can't emphasize how amazing the certifications from Salesforce and HubSpot are for this. HubSpot's got, like, twenty different certifications, including wrapping up operations now. They will give you a baseline to really, like, say, hey. I'm comfortable with the you know, I can talk the talk. I can do this at the end of the day from, like, a semantics point of view, and then it's all just now about applying it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds to me like, you know, you're in the role. You basically understand the user perspective. Right? I think that's always very, very valuable. And then you learn and try to improve already from there. You know, are there specific things, you know, that would fast track this development for you?

Noah Scherick: Other than the certifications, I think also just having acumen with data is the most important thing. Being really strong at spreadsheets, not just VLOOKUPs at the end of the day, but, you know, being able to transform data and migrate it and use it. Because most of the time, like, that's really the gap that RevOps is filling. It's a data gap. Right? You know, you you can have all of your processes as they're done day to day. You've got the CRM in RevOps' roles to make sure that those things are as integral as possible. And so within your role, identifying and understanding how what data you have and then what data you should be having is something that you can definitely fast track.

Janis Zech: Yeah. How how technical do people need to be? I mean, is it is it helpful, right, especially with regards to data structure, data storage, and then, you know, essentially creating insights and and, you know, scores? Like, how technical do people need to go, and what kind of maybe even, you know, university courses or, you know, practical courses could be could could help there.

Noah Scherick: I have my own take on this, and it's like, I prefer the renaissance man, someone that can do a little bit of everything. But if you you do you will find, you know, larger RevOps teams with focus areas. Right? So some people will focus on data, enablement at the end of the day. And so, really, you have to fit whatever your team needs, for better or worse, when you're starting out. But if you are gonna be a, you know, a solo IC contributor, you know, the only person doing it, it's best to have, you know, a very broad strokes thing. And, like, the things to do in college would be, you know, agile project management courses, you know, data analytics courses. And they're not really teaching Salesforce at the end of the day, and so you'd have to supplement that, you know, with the certifications.

Janis Zech: You think there's something like a ceiling for the RevOps career? Like, you know, where do you go? Like, when you are, like, VP of RevOps, can you like, do you think it's it's something that's likely to happen at some point that actually revenue operations people could also move into the CRO role. I think from my point of view, it kinda makes sense, right, if you look at the CRO as the person who manages sort of, like, the whole revenue organization that marketing could theoretically belong to. You don't need the CMO anymore in the future, or or do you think that's that's unlikely? That's, like, a different skill set.

Noah Scherick: It is such a good question, actually. And the answer I give is yes. I like, kind of obviously, you've got somebody with, you know, the ability to understand data and processes and sales. And then as long as product isn't, like, so complicated that you need that, you know, intimate knowledge of how to sell it, you can manage a team of sellers in doing it. Right? I wouldn't recommend, like, a RevOps person go be the CRO of, like, an enterprise sales org. But, you know, anything that's targeting SMB or mid market, anything with, like, a broad strokes, like, you know, horizontal play will have, like, a much a a very easy and also be a very good candidate for those roles. Because what I look for I mean, now we're going into my ideal CRO, but I look I look for, you know, a person that's very analytic, very strategic, and can also talk like, coach the sellers into how to be better and also coaches managers in how to be better. And I don't see why revenue operations isn't a a very you know, actually it should be, like, a straight stream almost from, you know ideally, you start up in sales, right, SDR, then RevOps, then CRO or something.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think this is it's such a debate. Right? I think the CRO over the CMO, right, like, how much marketing do you know as a CRO, and should that be, you know, rolled into one person or to be two different people. Right? I I think even that is a big discussion than, you know, what makes a great CRO, also depending on your go to market motion, mid market, you know, enterprise. So, yeah, I think we could probably spend another, you know, two hours just talking about that. But I'm I'm curious. You said something that I found really interesting. As a VP, right, you go to CRO, but we, in the entry level role, spoke a lot about kind of administrative, day to day tactical tasks. Right? Like, how do you grow from that to being more strategic over time? Like, what are things that would help somebody to develop in their RevOps career over time?

Noah Scherick: That's a good question too. And something that I also addressed in the course of my career, basically, like, I like to think of it as when you start your career, you're, like, very much in the weeds. Right? Like, people are just throwing stuff at you, and there's these different tasks, and you don't have that bird's eye view. You're not, like, you know, in the cloud looking down. You don't have that strategy. And so when you're early in your career, giving yourself the time to do that is probably, like, the first thing to do. Just make sure that you have the time to, like, ask why. Why? Why? Why? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? Like, does this make sense at the end of the day? Is there a better way to do it? And then start challenging the people around you. Like, a big thing about what I do at the end of the day being a RevOps consultant is just challenging my challenge, challenge, challenge. Like, if it doesn't make sense to me, it probably won't make sense to them when I play it back for them at the end of the day. And so you can do that at any part of your career. Right? Like, you don't need to wait until you're set up in it. If you see something that doesn't make sense, like, raise your hand and say, hey. Like, this this needs to change. And then they'll probably be like, you're right. Go fix it. And then, you know, you can create that feedback loop, right, between, you know, actually, like, analysis, like, production, education, and then analysis. So making it kind of like a recycling loop between all of the different, you know, things that you're doing.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I really like your point on, you know, taking the time to work on, you know, day to day operational tasks because I think, yes, there's a big debate about being more strategic, and I'd fully get that if you're on the director or VP track. It absolutely needs to happen. But at the same time, you know, the day to day also creates a better system. I'm a big fan of, you know, iterative improvements. I think they have a big impact, and building a scalable revenue organization is like a very complicated house. Right? And the small things, they have a big impact. So I think being able to learn them, you know, and spending time with them, and then while you do that, learn, you know yeah. I think you you put it perfectly, why things are how they are and how they could be better and thinking deeply about that. But, yeah, taking the time to really be operational. I think that's that's really good for people coming into the job market.

Noah Scherick: I can even jump off that very quickly and just say that that's also why, like, I'm such an advocate of agile project management in RevOps. Like, it is about that iterative process. Right? You do it once. You take a couple weeks. You look at it. You fix it again. It's not all it's not like a like, this this whole career is not about doing one and done at the end of the day. It's about, like, iterating and development and iterating.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think that, like, you say, like, control the things you can control. And I think, obviously, you know, you can try and and and, you know, have that sort of, like, bird's eye view and, you know, give input in your organization. But, obviously, it also heavily depends, you know, on the industry, the market dynamics, and and just, like, the company working and the culture. Like, do you think there's an ideal size of company sort of, like, that helps fast track your career trajectory?

Noah Scherick: Great question. I mean, so there's kind of there's starting out let's let's say starting out. Right? It's not gonna be, like, for, you know, somebody with a bunch of years of experience in RevOps. Starting out, I would say, like, fifty to one hundred is a good size of, like, company size. And then the general rule that I've applied in my my work is, like, for every eight salespeople, there should be one revenue operations person. And so, for instance, if you're at a at a company of fifty, there's probably eight salespeople at the end of the day. And so there's gonna be one person. So at that in that situation, you have to have the trust of, you know, the sales leader, the trust of, like, you know, the leadership team that you can do it as an IC starting out. Probably won't be the case. So, like, that sweet spot would be probably seventy five to, like, two hundred and five hundred and above. Like, really, the you know, those mid market companies that have sales teams of twenty or more, you will be part of a team. You won't be the only one, and you'll learn a lot from the people around.

Janis Zech: How important is growth of the company?

Noah Scherick: I mean, it's always ideal to have RevOps work at revenue generating companies. I I got very blessed working at Adjust because we were always profitable. And that that was just, like, great because you have different problems at the end of the day. Right? Every company has a different problem. I mean, that's also something that's applied for my consulting practice. You know? If you're a PLG company versus a sales driven company, if you, you know, have no inbound and only outbound, if you, you know, have a very complicated product to sell like it's an enterprise product versus an SMB focused product, these will all shape the revenue operations work that you're doing. And so the sweet spot, if you were gonna ask me that, would be, you know, if you wanna learn the most, like, go for an SMB with a good mix of inbound and outbound at the end of it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And then from an employer perspective, how do you how do you make sure that, like, you hire the right people? Like, is there, like, a certain, you know, set of, like, tests or, like, certain hiring process do you recommend?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. Curious. Absolutely. Kind of like the the bullets for what I look for in candidates to be successful is that they're driven. Like, usually sometimes I'll see people that just don't have drive, and that's always, like, a big problem, especially since it's about iterating fast. The next thing that I look for is a a fast understanding of the status quo. Usually, people are inheriting processes at the moment, and if you don't understand what's going on to begin with, you're gonna you're gonna fall behind really quickly. The third thing would be analytics. So you have a good analytic acumen, and you can read and understand data very well. And then going back to agile, project management skills at the end of the day, of course, are super duper important. And then, of course, an understanding of the technology and the key challenges that that technology is trying to answer. So an understanding of the product that you're kind of trying to support. If there was, like, an ideal case study to go after that, there's many different ways to do it. You can ask them to define a process within your organization. So, you know, hey. Here's here's a rough customer journey. Tell me what actually is going to happen here. You can have them do a Google Sheets or Excel test. I like to do that where I ask, you know, for expansion, contraction, and churn at your b two b SaaS company and ask them to work through, you know, like, month over month, what's the growth? What's the what's what's the actual trajectory of the business? And then for Salesforce companies, I always ask for a Salesforce acumen part of it. Either have me build me a flow in a sandbox or write a validation rule or create a formula field so that I can see that you can be in the weeds.

Janis Zech: Do you do all of them with every candidate?

Noah Scherick: Yeah. It depends. I mean, usually, the Salesforce part would only be, like, one or two equations. And then the SaaS part, if you're or the the Excel part, if you're really good, I've seen people do it in two hours. If you're really bad, it'll take you twelve. And then the process definition piece of it. That's like a newer part of it. I used to not ask that, but I think that it's important to see how people think through processes. I used to not care so much about that, and I only focus on the analytics and technical pieces of it. But as RevOps has changed and as it's kind of expanded in what people do, it's important to see that now.

Janis Zech: I mean, it's such a challenging role. Right? It's so broad. It has so many different facets to it, and I think that's why in larger organizations, you see teams becoming more specialized. But I think it's always great if you actually have experiences across the board and not just in one area. Right? I think as a graduate, it's really, really helpful. You come into a situation where where essentially you're growing fast. You're working with really strong people, so finding people who can teach you something. But then also you have the ability to do a lot and take a lot of responsibility early on. Yeah. I think that's that's that's that's always helpful. How do you I mean, let's let's assume, you know, you you run through all these case studies, you know, and people still wanna work with you. You know, how do you how do you onboard and measure, you know, success in those roles in the early days? Right?

Noah Scherick: Like, I I mean, I'll just say the ones that complete the case study are usually really passionate about working with me. They, like, are like, oh, man. Like, this guy knows his stuff. Like, he's asking me all these really crazy questions.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I saw you saying. That's what you think.

Noah Scherick: Yeah. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. I guess, you know, if we were to talk about, like, a thirty, sixty, ninety plan, like, there's it's it's pretty straightforward. I mean, at thirty days, I want people to understand the company. Right? What is the people, process, and the flow? Maybe they had gotten their first exposure in the CRM and, like, they're making minor adjustments. Maybe they had done some data analytics. At sixty days, like, it's all focused at the end of the day for me on project management skills. And so at sixty days, you have a project management set up with you and your manager, and you're running sprints to basically understand, you know, what am I going to do this week versus next week? And you can handle smaller projects on your own. You don't need to handle that, you know, someone in there. And then at ninety days, ideally, you have a great deal of autonomy, and you're able to kind of not only do the initiatives that are handed to you, but also you're able to invent and create your own initiatives and pitch your own projects to then do in future.

Janis Zech: Do you have something, like, time to ship? Right? Like, at even here at Weflow, we have something, you know, that new engineers need to ship their first feature, then the first week ideally or first two weeks. Like, did you have something like that? If it's, like, first feature, let's say three weeks, twenty one days.

Noah Scherick: Yeah. I think that's acceptable.

Janis Zech: So I think one thing that's also interesting to look at is so you you go through all the assessments. Right? You hire that person. You create all those plans, and, you know, that person develops and becomes, like, a really good RevOps person, maybe at some point takes over their own team. Are there some things you you can you can tell us or teach us sort of, like, how do you how do you delegate as a RevOps person? Like, how how do you make sure that when you hire a team, that this team is actually busy and, you know, you can really scale scale scale the revenue motion?

Noah Scherick: That's a great question, Philipp. Essentially, I've been trying to figure this out for many, many years. When I when I started at Adjust, we had to answer this question like, what do we do? What is what is revenue operation? And I think that what we figured out is that it's a lot. It's like, you could even do a rubric, right, of, like, these are all the departments we support. These are all the different things that those departments could need at the you know, in order to in order to be the best that they can be. And so I developed a rubric kind of to answer that question to hopefully, you know, enable teams to enable teams to be able to support their companies the most. And so, really, what you can do with this rubric is a couple things. You can identify, you know, where are the gaps in your own revenue operations department. You can also identify where are the strengths of your teams. So you can say, you know, maybe I have a team member that is focused on marketing as we talked about earlier at this MarOps spec. And they essentially you know, you can you can code that out into this rubric and then say, oh, like, this person wants to actually move more into sales. So we can then create, you know, career progression off of this. We can define more about what they wanna do in the other departments and then move them into there. You can also see, basically, if you have it for a whole team. Right? You know, you can see, okay. Somebody's focused on marketing. Somebody's focused on customer success, but maybe there are gaps in sales. Maybe we don't have anybody doing enablement for sales. And these can then generate projects and generate work inside of revenue operations teams to then move it forward.

Janis Zech: So that's the rubric of chaos. At some point link in the bio. Structure. Yeah. Yeah.

Noah Scherick: The link is in the bio. It it basically makes sure that people in the team then also go through all the different, you know, sort of processes and areas of expertise that you need to learn if you wanna become really, really good as a RevOps person and become CRO at some point in your life. And, really, there's two different ways that people can approach their careers in revenue operations. You can go for, like, super broad. You know? You do a little bit of everything, and you touch all the different departments, and you can jump into any task or topic. That's kind of I try to look for people like that because it's such a malleable and flexible role. But there's also teams that especially, like, you know, if we get to the plus one hundred people, you know, plus fifty salespeople, that they really have to silo revenue operations. And then it's like, okay. Like, you're RevOps, but you're focused on the marketing. You're focused on the sales ops part. And that's completely fine. That's a great way to develop your career too. You just will end up probably being in, you know, different kinds of roles. Right? So maybe the MarOps focused person will end up in a marketing, like, a leadership role in the future.

Janis Zech: Yep. Yeah. And I think different size of company as well. Right? I mean, if you are focused on, let's say, marketing attribution, which is a huge topic, I mean, you could go very deep on that, and a lot of people need that. I'm really passionate about that, by the way. Like, marketing attribution is the best. We're we're gonna we're gonna have a Shadi Saunders, you know, in in the podcast in a few weeks, and I think he's also quite passionate about that as well. It's a it's a big topic. We could probably speak another few hours about that.

Noah Scherick: At least. At least.

Janis Zech: But, look, I mean, I think this was super insightful. Thanks for sharing all this. I mean, maybe last question for you. I mean, if you were to start, you know, if you dial back twelve years, having learned everything you learned so far, I mean, what would you do different? You know, what what were some of the biggest learnings you've had?

Noah Scherick: I really love that question. I wouldn't have moved to Berlin without knowing German, right out of school. That would be the first, like, advice I'd give myself is that it's very hard it was very hard to launch a career in English in Berlin at the time. But would say great. The weather's great. Oh my goodness. The weather here, especially in the winter, you know, come for the winters. Yeah. The the advice the advice I'd give myself is to well, RevOps also,