Janis Zech: Alright. Welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab podcast. Our guest today is Anastasiia, a real operator in the business since two thousand eighteen. She worked at companies like Enrich, Hiding Hub, Iris, Karoo, Scootal, I hope I pronounced that right, and is currently head of revenue operations at Sandvil, which is a health tech company. Anastasiia is also doing freelancing, or has done freelancing for all different companies of different shapes and sizes, setting up, particularly, HubSpot, I think, and really setting up RevOps systems from scratch. It's a real pleasure to have you. Welcome, Anastasiia.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Thanks for having me. It's nice to hear all of my career journey in one sentence.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's pretty good. I will speed this up to one point five then later. And yeah. No. Anastasiia, could you maybe introduce yourself in two or three sentences? I'm sure you are more than just like the companies that you work for.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Yeah. I'm really bad at, like, elevator pitching myself. But so head of RevOps. I'm based in Manchester. I have lived in many, many different places down to my parents moving about, but currently in Manchester, loving life here. So work at Sembl at the moment. Sembl is like a CRM basically for doctors, which is near and dear to my heart. And my specialist and my niche, I guess, is RevOps from scratch. So I go into small to medium sized companies, whether it's freelance or on a full time basis, and I set up the function, the RevOps function from scratch for them, so from around zero. My big passion project, I guess, at the moment is I'm coaching early careers RevOps people, so baby operators. And they kind of help them out through their first RevOps role, make sure that they're happy, make sure that they know what they're focusing on, those kind of things. So, yeah, big passionate side hustle of mine is that.

Janis Zech: Okay. Great. Are you doing that as part of, like, an official program or just people contacting you on LinkedIn, or how does that work?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: No. So people tend to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we kind of — they ask for advice, and we go on a call, and they just kind of go, can you just do this regularly with me? And I'm like, yeah. Of course. But, yeah, so it's not like an official tutor program, I guess. Like, it's not classroom learning. It's more that they come to me with a specific problem and we just bounce ideas around until it's fixed. So it's that kind of thing. So a lot of junior ops people are not working for other RevOps professionals and the skilling up doesn't really happen. So they do need, like, an external person to help them actually get up to speed a bit quicker. So, yeah, that's where I come in. Like, Mary Poppins, I guess.

Janis Zech: Okay. Yeah. I think that's great. We did an episode also, like, with Noah, on this. It was one of our early episodes, and we also talked particularly about this problem. Like, a lot of people who started RevOps, they come from other functions, or they're just starting out as graduates, and then RevOps can be quite demanding. You have a lot of stakeholder management and systems and responsibility. So having someone to kind of, like, you know, bounce back and forth with ideas, I think that's extremely helpful. Yeah. So I really like that. How did you end up at RevOps? Like, how did you specifically end up in RevOps?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Ended up in it. That's the full story, really. So I graduated and I had, like, the most unapplicable to anything degree going. So I did social anthropology at uni. And typically, people get hired to, well, they either go down the kind of academia route, which I was sick of, or you get to work in, like, museum curatorship. Or the other option was to go into an active war zone and help the British government assimilate with people quicker. And that just did not line up with my very radical twenty one year old self. So I ended up in sales and it was soft by sales. It was recruitment tech, which is absolutely like bone crushingly difficult, especially if you are new to the scene. So it was a small company and after a while I was like, I really like sales. I like the kind of the little kaching that goes with the cash register and all that kind of stuff. But I just saw so many different little inefficiencies in the company. And ultimately, I just asked, like, can I do data? And they're like, yeah. Do you know what? That's a great idea. I don't know who was making decisions, but they were like, yeah, this person with no experience will do data and operations for us. This is great. So, yeah, so it's kind of like people ask me a lot of the time, like, how did you make the pivot? How did you end up with this role? How did you progress? Like throughout my career, I asked for opportunities and I was given them, which is like a very lucky person to be. Right? Because a lot of people don't get afforded the same stuff. But yeah. Anyway, so I asked for my first ops jobs, then I left and went to work for Iris Software, which is a huge, huge corporate. It's the largest and possibly least well known private software company in the UK. Like you never hear about it, but they've got their fingers in so many pies. And at one point I got given leadership over a team. So I had a team of just completely fresh graduates who were coming in and they were fresh into the role, hence my now lifelong passion project of early careers. But at one point I was doing sales ops originally, but at one point I got given marketing ops as well. Like we were consolidating stuff in the company and marketing ops came into scope for me. And at first I was like, I really don't wanna do this. This is terrible. But after a while I was like, this actually does make sense. Like it makes sense for me to cover marketing ops if I'm already doing sales ops because those two teams need to be one and the same. Right? So that was kind of my first glimpse into it. And then as years went by, like RevOps started popping up in the scene and it became more and more of a buzzword. So I guess I just adopted RevOps. That's my whole thing. Like, I was in sales ops originally, and then I kind of just land grabbed more and more responsibility until it became whatever this situation is. Like, focusing on three different functions and trying to help everyone at the same time. But, yeah, I still stand by it. I think it makes sense. It made sense as a career move because I would have lost my mind in sales. But, yeah, there we go. Weird story for you.

Janis Zech: Yeah. No. I love it. You didn't end up in RevOps. You adopted RevOps.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Exactly. Yeah. Obviously had full agency over my actions. No luck involved.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think it's always, like, right, the kindness of, like, you know, also the people around you, and this is also why it's so important to not make a decision on what company you join just based on, like, how much they pay, but also, like, who you are gonna work with and, like, who your first leader is gonna be and if they're actually gonna give you chances. I mean, like, it's for me, it's the same. Right? Like, had very fortunate, like, first sort of, like, leaders who trusted me a lot, gave me a lot of responsibility. And I mean, I think you are forever in debt to them. Right? Especially if they do that early for you and your career, then that can really help you grow quite quickly. So, yeah, extremely valuable. During our prep call, you mentioned something to me that was the topic of LeanOps, and that immediately resonated with me. I quite like that term. Didn't actually hear it before, but it immediately made sense to me. Particularly, I think, if you think about today's markets, everything is about efficiency. And, obviously, operations itself is very much about efficiency at scale, scalable efficiency. So, yeah, just curious, maybe you could explain to our listeners what the term LeanOps means to you and why you care so much about it.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: So you haven't heard it a bit of fault because it's not an official term. It's just a set of words that make sense. Right? So I guess to put everyone at ease, it's not a new type of ops because there is a real fatigue at the moment because there's, like, biz ops, there's RevOps, marketing ops, sales ops, HR, like, you name it, there is an ops about it. So LeanOps is not a new type of ops. Like, nobody needs to faint or cry. For me, it's a combination of words that describe the intentional act of being very ruthless and very efficient about the work that you do. So it's very much about, again, efficiency, prioritization, but also how much money you're spending on things and, you know, what kind of things that you put value on versus what kind of things you cut corners on. So it's more like this way of operating rather than anything official. No official situations here. So I guess the reason I started thinking about it was I'm really seeing a whole load of tech stack bloat. I don't think that's gonna be news to anyone, but it's genuinely quite weird to see everyone around me have tech stacks of, like, I don't know, thirty, forty bits of software. And also the same people will complain to you about their terrible data or, you know, how much tech debt they have and all that kind of stuff. And it's just like we put ourselves into these positions by not thinking through them early enough or not operating in a lean enough way. So, yeah, it's more like my own musings around the topic. I was like, why the hell have I got thirty bits of software to work with than anything official? But I think it's a good conversation to have and a good sort of set of principles to keep in mind, definitely.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, it could be the title for your first book. I mean, I totally get it. Sort of like a state of mind of how to think about revenue operations. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And maybe, like, just to stay a bit more high level — can you describe that mindset a bit more? I think you touched on, like, a few points already, like tech stack, for example. What other parts would you think about when it comes to LeanOps as a framework?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Yes. So I think if we talk about mindsets just in more general terms to start with, like, it does need a certain type of person. I think the reason why I personally gravitate towards it so much is because I am the stingiest person that you will ever meet. Like, the Eastern European anxiety of spending money is real, and it's a huge part of why I absolutely do not end up with bloated tech stacks. I just don't want to spend money on it. It makes me nervous. But it's not just about the tech. Right? It's about how you manage your time as well. So lean principles do come into that too. So what kind of projects are we prioritizing? Are we doing the right things? Have we got the to do list the size of our arms? Like, all those kind of things come into play as well. The money part is big. I think one thing that we'll come to a little bit later, and it's a little bit of a longer term game, is that companies are really losing control of their CACs, like their customer acquisition costs, and it just can be negated through this process of just hitting pause and not spending money and really thinking through stuff. I guess, like, the last thing to mention is just around the process side of it all, like, the complexity that we take on very willingly as operators because we don't think that there's another way through it. So there was a phrase that came up somewhere. I don't remember who posted it, but it was like simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Right? So the leaner, the more simple you can make something like a process or an interaction or, you know, whatever it is, the more sophisticated it is by default because it takes practice and it takes time to make something super simple. Whereas the contrast is literally just everything thrown at it. So, yeah, there's a number of different things that come into it, but I also think there's a huge cultural element to it as well. Like I said, I've worked in startups and kind of smaller small to midsize companies where it is part and parcel of the business to be efficient and to be ruthless with spend. I don't see that same attitude everywhere necessarily, and I think it's more of a problem in kind of VC backed situations where there is money to spend. But, yeah, it's kind of like you have to align yourself with people who can value efficiency as much as you do to even begin to work in this type of way. I've personally, because of my career journey, never worked anywhere who will just let me throw money at stuff, and I think that's part of why I still operate that way. But, yeah, it's just a weird concept to me that you can just throw money at a problem straight away without trying to solve for it. So, yeah, there's a lot to come into it basically, but the money anxiety does help.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think CFOs love this conversation. That sounds to me like you are all CFOs' favorite right now. I mean, one thing I do have to immediately think about when you talk about sort of, like, the mindset and just, you know, keeping things simple is actually really hard. It's, like, the KPI topic. Like, you know, I can easily add more and more KPIs and more and more fields to a CRM and, you know, make people fill out more and more stuff and calculate all of these sort of metrics that sort of help you or not. But then I think it's actually a lot more valuable to just say, like, hey. You know what? Like, the stage conversion rates and then those five fields that fit to our sales methodology. That's what we need, and we don't need much more in order to manage our sales process. To get to that point, right, really hard. And I think, especially, like, you sometimes see these companies that have, like, you know, twenty, thirty different KPIs, and they report on it. Fifty percent of the people don't understand what the KPI even means and spend a huge amount of time. So it's just a time sink.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: And there's no — I had this very same conversation recently with someone, and the phrase they said to me was somebody told our CEO that we should track this particular metric because everybody's doing it. And we started tracking it, but we don't care about it. What do we do? And I was like, well, you don't care about it, so stop doing it. Like, if it doesn't make sense for you, then why are you doing it? And it was genuinely like — there's so much anxiety of people. It's like that fear of missing out on stuff. Right? Like, oh, this other company is doing it or this large group of corporates is doing it, so I should as well. So I feel like a lot of the KPI nervousness, especially, like, we should track this metric because others are — it's just completely unfounded, and we do need to step off the gas slightly and maybe measure five or six really impactful things rather than the whole world.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I'm fully with you on that one. So maybe, like, talking about, like, risks and benefits of the LeanOps framework. Are there risks to it, or do you think this is really, you know, no problem, just do it?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: I don't think anything is necessarily no problem, but I feel like this one is less risky than the others. Right? So what are we talking about here? We're talking about being efficient, spending less, and delivering on higher value projects. That in itself is like tick, tick, tick. Great. Everyone's gonna be happy. I think the risk, if it can even be considered as such, comes in the fact that your org needs to trust that — like, for example, with tools. Right? Your organization needs to trust that you taking a couple of weeks to develop a homegrown solution to the problem rather than throwing money at it is a good and worthwhile time spent. Because if they don't trust you to do that, a, you're not going to be allowed to do that. And b, if you proceed down that path regardless of what anyone says, people will stop consulting you altogether. Like, you'll just be cut out of that decision. So, yeah, I think in general, there is a lot more risk in homegrown stuff. There is a lot more risk in kind of sticking your neck out on the line and saying, look, we're not going to do this. We're going to do it more efficiently. Or I'm not going to do this task you told me about that's super urgent. I'm going to do something that's actually high value. There is a lot of risk in sticking your neck out, but if you continuously do it, then the trust you have with the org will grow. It won't diminish just by default because you said no to something. Does that make sense?

Janis Zech: Yeah. It does make sense. And I think it's also a bit of, like, a struggle that you can see in RevOps. I mean, just as part of my role at Weflow, you know, I talk to a lot of RevOps people also in the form of prospects and, you know, people who are stakeholders in deals. I often feel like RevOps is having a really hard time with taking risks. So, you know, they fear sort of, like, the repercussions that can come from making a mistake because, obviously, it can have an impact on the entire revenue organization. So they often end up in this situation where — at least that's sort of like what I'm seeing — there is, like, someone in sales leadership, and they are kind of like the ones who push RevOps towards doing something, and then RevOps is having a hard time with pushing back or making alternative suggestions. I mean, definitely, it's also happening — I saw just now, like, also talking to one company and the head of RevOps there really pushed back on the sales leader and advocated a completely different approach, which made a lot of sense, and it was good that she did it, but it's rare. Like, it's really rare to see that. And often, I feel like they're stuck in this, okay, we are the people who execute the wishes of the sales leadership team. That's unfortunate, I think.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: I think you're right there. Like, there's a lot of fear associated with it. And it's just an absolutely bullshit situation that we find ourselves in because we either stick our necks out and say, no, we're not doing that, that's really terrible. Or we don't say anything and then we get caught because we've not contributed anything to the company. Like, we're not strategic enough. We're just systems admins. Right? And I don't envy people who work in those kind of environments because there's literally no way out of it. You're screwed either way, basically. So what can you actually do? But at the same time, like, it's just about trying to select people who you think will be fine with you saying no over and over again. Right? It doesn't go beyond that. If your boss is happy for you to push back and say no, and he or she's gonna value that kind of input into the work that they're doing, then yeah, you've hit the jackpot. If it's not that kind of environment though, I genuinely wouldn't know what to do with myself because I can't shut my mouth and just sit there and take direction of something that I don't think is right. So, yeah, it's a tough one.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Very hard a solution. I mean, like, solution is leave or endure. Right? Yeah. So, yeah, judgment call. So maybe let's go into the specifics a bit. You mentioned overstacking, so having, like, a huge tech stack, as one of the key things that people make as a mistake. But I think also building something yourself can also be quite risky and time consuming and expensive. So, yeah, I'm curious how you approach that topic of, you know, avoiding to load up the sales tech stack and where you would sort of, like, say, hey, here it's definitely worth building your own thing, and here are things like just buy it, there's already good solutions. So how do you approach that topic?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Do you know what? I would never attempt to build my own CRM, but I think if you start with a really, really good one — hint hint HubSpot because it's my only true love — if you start with a really, really good one, you will not feel as much of a push to buy extra tech. Right? So, like, I've done a load of migrations now from, like, Salesforce to HubSpot, from, like, smaller CRMs to HubSpot. The type of questions people ask me — like somebody asked me whether HubSpot will automatically associate emails to contacts, like incoming emails to contacts, or whether they'll need to buy a tool for it. And it was such a pleasure to just say, no, it'll do it automatically because you're picking a good system. Like, you're picking something that will work. But beyond that, I guess, like, part of my role is keeping on top of all of the stuff that comes out in tech and seeing whether it's a solution that we might need at some point, something that we might need now, or something that actually I can recreate and help support myself, and just take inspiration from tech that's actually coming out, but use it in my internal little homegrown way. So, yeah, that's part of it. Part of it is literally just knowing what you already have, what you have to play with, and what you have to pay for. But I guess where it gets hard for people is where, like, your sales leader will find some new shiny AI object and they come to you and they're super excited about it and they just literally just want it right now. So I guess that's where it becomes like, is it a risk that I want to endorse them to do? Or do I want to just go along with it, let them try it, but at the same time, try and build up something similar so that I can literally show them, look, you can have this new toy for five thousand pounds a month or however much they charge now, or you can have a slightly less good and shiny thing but for free. So, yeah, it's kind of trying to appeal to people's sensibilities and to people's own sense of stinginess even though they might not ever be as stingy as me. But yeah, so just like trying to balance it and trying to be quite clever about how you position homegrown versus bought because you're right, it is risky to build your own stuff and then you have to maintain it and you don't have a support team, like a third party support team. You are the support team, which is terribly draining. But ultimately, like, it is more sustainable. It is more stable because you're not relying on somebody else's software going bust, and it is a lot more rewarding as well to build stuff yourself. Like, it's nicer, and you learn stuff along the way. So why not try?

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I can relate to that. I mean, obviously, Weflow is also its own, like, B2B sales solution. So I think there are some processes where it can make sense or, like, specific stages of a company where it makes sense to buy, and then there are others where it doesn't. And, I mean, I would also say, right, like — so for example, we are forecasting, and not pitching Weflow here, but just as an example. So forecasting, you know, it can be quite nice to hand that over to, like, its own standalone solution. But then before you're able to do that, you actually need to understand how to run forecasting at your organization. And it's sort of like you need to create the culture. You need to, you know, train the muscle, like, in the entire sales organization to do that. You need to practice it regularly. So, honestly, I would probably just start with a spreadsheet there and just, like, build that out, get an idea of what you actually wanna do. And then when you get to the point where you have, like, confidence and the product is stable and you have a clear sales process and you have historic data and all of that stuff. Okay. And you're, like, a big company now with, like, five hundred salespeople. Alright. Then the spreadsheet probably is not a good idea anymore at some point, and then maybe it makes sense. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, do you also, like, just build stuff in spreadsheets, or do you always try to immediately embed it in the CRM?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: I love a spreadsheet. Are you joking? Yeah. This is just my whole thing. I love spreadsheets. I get burnt at the stake here by the robots community, but one of my very, very first projects as a baby ops person was basically building a CRM. So it was like a KPI tracking spreadsheet for, like, a sales and account management team. The reason we didn't do it within the CRM was because we didn't have one that was set up for the type of KPIs that we wanted to track. So it was recruitment tech. Right? So we were tracking, like, not just the number of companies that we'd bring on, but the number of jobs as well. And we didn't have, like, custom objects, like, the additional object functions, in HubSpot at the time. So without, like, loads and loads of manual work and manual field pulling in, we just couldn't do it. So I built a spreadsheet for them. So that was like my very first thing. I think what you said about forecasting though is really interesting because that is generally my approach to rolling out forecasts to the team. So you kind of go, okay. Here's a spreadsheet. Hard code your numbers into it. Then after a couple of iterations, after the team gets used to it, you go, here are all the deals from your pipeline. Put a status on them, like put like commit or best case or something. And then you slowly get people to a point where they're like, if you're exporting deals into a spreadsheet from the CRM, can we not just do it in the CRM? And you're like, yes, you can. Absolutely. Let's do that. So you kind of slowly build up that level of confidence in people, I guess, and their level of tolerance for forecasting because it can just seem like an endless exercise sometimes for sales reps. But, yeah, it's exactly that. You start with something that's kind of manual, kind of clunky, and then you build it up to be more complex in the back end, but less complex from the user's perspective. Right? Like, from the sales perspective. So, yeah, that is exactly what I do. Same with reports, really. Like, if it's a report that I can't build natively in HubSpot, I'm just gonna take the data out and I'm gonna put it in a spreadsheet and I'm gonna have a semi automated thing going, right, with like formulas and like pivot tables, like whatever you want. My first instinct is not to go to like a visualization tool for reports or anything like that. It's always always Excel.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. I think, like, I mean, maybe at some point, right, like, you have, like, a maybe stock listed company or something, and every month, same reports, and it's, like, two hundred stakeholders and stuff like this. Again, right, like, okay, maybe a tool makes sense for sure, but then I think especially in a startup or early stage company, I feel like, you know, you introduce new products, you change the sales process, you go from, like, maybe inbound motion to an outbound motion, or add, like, a sales engineering function to the whole process or whatever. Right? Like, and then everything changes suddenly, and it's so much more complicated suddenly. And then you already spent, like, hours or weeks building something in the CRM, and then suddenly it's, like, not valuable anymore because everything needs to change. It costs a lot of time again. So, yeah, sort of like the Pareto principle a bit. One thing — I think, you know, LeanOps not only refers to the technology, but I think also to the people. RevOps often is, you know, sort of like a lone wolf role. I think you have bigger and bigger teams nowadays, so it's starting to grow for sure. But in your mind, sort of, like, how do you think about, like, the ratio between RevOps and go to market teams? Do you have an ideal ratio top of mind?

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Yeah. I don't really because it depends on the type of people that you work with. Like, it so depends on the type of people you work with. I've been in companies where I literally only had ten people to look after and that's including all the stakeholders that I was looking after, the frontline teams, literally everyone, oh, and the finance person running there as well because they're a stakeholder. And that was difficult work because the team weren't tech savvy and they needed help along every single step of the way. There was a lot of kind of hand holding and, you know, constant process tweaks because people just didn't really understand what they were doing. I work with a team of — I think maybe there's twenty in total — but it's double the size of the non tech savvy company. Right? But they are technically very adept and they are, you know, very independent. They don't need me as much even though the stuff I'm doing is no different to what I was doing in the previous place. So I don't think you can just put a straight number on it because it so depends on the people. Like, you can't underestimate how much more draining it is to work with a group of people who just don't want to understand tech, don't feel like they must, and also don't feel like they should follow any process, as opposed to people who are like, yeah, okay, this is the thing that we're doing now. Let's just get on with it. But yeah, it's gonna be very, very different. I guess like the general company size comes into it as well. I think working in corporate, you might only have, I don't know, like a ratio of, I don't know, twenty or thirty to one in your revenue teams, but the buck doesn't stop in revenue. It stops — like it just doesn't stop. Because you've got so many different stakeholders from so many different departments and people end up coming to you as the source of knowledge for everything to do with revenue that that ratio, that magic ratio just doesn't exist. Like, it's a limitless thing. So, yeah, I don't have one in mind. I think I more have the type of people that I want to work with in mind and the kind of cultures that I like to operate in. So that, like, really adaptable, ideally people who are already tech savvy or at least want to learn. I think that's the big thing for me. But, yeah, no set number. I'm open.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I would agree. Right? Like, every time I talk with somebody about this topic of complexity and a good ratio, I come back to a framework from Hilary Headlee. And she basically says, like, okay. You take the number of products. You take the number of territories or markets. You take the number of verticals and so on, and you multiply that. And then you will quickly see, like, the numbers increasing like crazy. Right? Like, basically, you have, like, one product, one territory. Complexity is one. And then, you know, you start introducing maybe, like, a second territory and a second product. Suddenly, you're, like, at four, and then so on. Right? It goes up quite quickly, and then you have inbound and outbound sales and field sales, and then suddenly, okay. Wow. Now you're, like, at a really high number. And yeah. So, I mean, for sure. Right? Like, I think there's this, like, what's your complexity and sort of, like, how many people do you need to manage that complexity? And then, like, the way I got you now is sort of like, yeah. I mean, ideally, you work with very entrepreneurial people who like to take ownership, who are accountable, who have a willingness to learn, and then that complexity already decreases because those people — you can trust them with just doing whatever is best for the company and the revenue goals.

Anastasiia Vasiutina: Exactly. Yeah. You need a talented, like, entrepreneurial team as a RevOps person to get anything done really. So, yeah, it's a good framework as well for measuring complexity. I'll keep that in mind. It's quite interesting.

Janis Zech: That's really — I'll send you the link afterwards. It's I really like it. It's so simple and easy to apply and easy to explain also. But I think that's the tricky thing. Like, you go to leadership and leadership comes to you and talks about, like, I don't know, different territories they wanna add, and then I think using that framework to make that calculation in front of them, like, and this is how the number goes up, is a good way of visualizing it. Cool. I think maybe to close things off — we talked about different aspects of LeanOps, we talked about cost, we talked about keeping tools low and therefore also probably complexity in a lot of cases. Is there anything else that's important for you when you think about