Janis Zech: Hello and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab Podcast. I'm here with Steve Silver. Steve, good to meet you.

Steve Silver: Janis, great to chat with you as well.

Janis Zech: Well, thanks for coming on. I saw your talk at RevOps AF from RevOps Corp in Santiago about the RevOps charter, and I thought it's a fantastic topic. But before we dive into that topic, you know, who are you? What do you do?

Steve Silver: Yeah. So a quick intro. I've spent the past eleven years at Forrester as vice president of research, leading the sales ops and then the RevOps practice area. So been, you know, following closely this evolution from separate and distinct marketing operations, sales operations, customer success operations functions into this growth area of revenue operations. And so prior to Forrester, though, I spent the last twenty years as a sales operations practitioner. So leading sales ops for a couple of large multinational, multibillion dollar companies as well as for a couple of startups. So I like to think I bring both the, you know, the wounds that it takes to be a subject matter expert, but also sort of the academic background through Forrester and the research that company did.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, that's fantastic, and I think it's such an interesting evolution. I remember back in the days, we actually called it biz ops or and systems, you know. And so we could probably spend almost an hour talking about just, you know, the evolution of all the different functions into a unified revenue operations approach. But, you know, like, at the RevOps AF conference, you basically had a presentation about the RevOps charter, and I'd love to dissect this today, and maybe we can even, you know, share some resources afterwards. But maybe start with, like, what is the charter? How did you come up with the idea, yeah, to give some context to our listeners?

Steve Silver: Well, I think the idea of a charter obviously has been around, well, for thousands of years literally. And a charter is this sort of agreement or grant of rights between one party to another. And I think there's some interesting things there. First of all, emphasizing there's more than one party involved in a charter. It's not just something that a RevOps professional writes and sort of, you know, puts in a drawer and says, okay. We have a charter. It has to be something that they use as an alignment tool between themselves, their organization, and the rest of the go to market organization. And the reason it's so important, I think, is exactly what we were just talking about, this sort of evolution of RevOps as a function. And, you know, you ask ten RevOps professionals what they do, and you're gonna get fifteen different answers. And so it was our attempt to help not to dictate to organizations, but to help them figure out what can they do, what should they be doing, what are their deliverables, what are their metrics, and then what are the skill sets that they need in order to accomplish that mission? Right? So that was sort of the genesis behind this idea of let's help our clients develop a RevOps charter.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And I think that's so important because, obviously, as you put it, right, RevOps is essentially, ideally, a strategic function, but at the same time works with so many different stakeholders. Right? So I really love the idea of, like, you know, sitting down, actually getting alignment. What's the like, how do you design such a charter? Like, how do you approach it and who needs to be involved? And, yeah, I mean, how do you even get started?

Steve Silver: Yeah. I think there's sort of three big steps that take place when you're when you set out to build a charter. And the first is defining your scope of responsibilities. Right? At least at a high level, what is it your organization will do? Equally important, what is it you won't do, at least, you know, for this iteration of the charter? What skills, what competencies are required? So setting that scope of responsibilities is really that first step. And the people who participate in that are typically, you know, the RevOps leader, of course, depending on the size of the organization, the managers and the directors within RevOps. Or if you're a party of one, then, you know, you're probably at least taking the initial shot on your own. But I think it's important as you go through this process, so scope, to review the scope with your key stakeholders. Right? Don't bring this document to them and say, okay. We did this work. This is what we're doing. It's part of getting buy in along the way that's so critically important. So engage with your chief marketing officer, of course, the head of sales. If you have a chief revenue officer, that individual is gonna be critical. But also, head of finance is probably going to be involved. Head of customer success will probably be involved. So, you know, think through those key stakeholders as you're going through this process. So, anyway, that's step one is to scope out what your range of responsibilities are. Step two then is to actually build the chartered document itself. And at the conclusion of this, we can share a template for that. I don't really care what the template looks like as long as it captures some key components, your mission, the skills, the deliverables, the metrics. So then you design the charter. And the third step then that you've kind of been building to along the way is to activate this. And, again, that's not just rubber stamping it, putting it in the drawer, never coming back to it again. It's reviewing the document, getting that approval from your key stakeholders, socializing the document with the broader sales community, marketing community so that people begin to know, well, when can I turn to RevOps? When shouldn't I turn to RevOps for a solution? And it gives the RevOps leader kind of that power to say I don't wanna say no, but to make sure that their efforts stay focused on those critical deliverables that everyone's agreed to.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Fantastic. I mean, I'd love to dissect the different steps a bit more. So when we think about the scope, right, and, I mean, you've this is obviously always in context of organization of size. But, yeah, super curious as you have studied so many organizations, like, what's a very typical scope? What are the different areas that you would list there?

Steve Silver: Yeah. And again, I think to your point, Janis, this can vary dramatically. Right? So we'll sort of talk about, well, okay. Here's the biggest scope, and that's often, you know, where we started with our clients. And then from there, you begin to narrow it down depending on the size of the RevOps organization, the size of the business, the needs of the business. But, typically, you're gonna have, let's say, five components. Number one is planning, and that's the annual planning cycle, budgeting, you know, everything from territory assignment, account assignment, campaign budgeting, all those sorts of things that typically go into that annual planning process. Process design and management is another big component. Those customer facing, revenue facing processes, your sales process, the lead management process, the opportunity management process, the forecast process, the handoff to customer success, renewals. So all of those revenue processes need to be designed. They need to be managed. They need to be measured. A key component, of course, of executing those processes is technology. So that's another big one. And I think we've seen, as you're well aware, we've seen a big change in not just sales technology, but technology across the entire revenue engine. And the focus now is much more on how do we deploy tools that help us interact with our customers better across that entire customer journey, leverage the power of AI, leverage the power of CRM and Salesforce automation. So this idea of technology management is typically a key component. And then the last two are closely related — data. You can't really do anything without a solid, you know, core of trustworthy data. So it's data strategy and management, not just collecting data, but making sure it's secure and it can be used and it's accessible to the right people. And finally, that leads us to measurement and analysis. And I go beyond just reporting because we're seeing RevOps move out of, hey. I generate a lot of reports and I check the box into how do I deliver actionable insights to my key stakeholders, everyone from the account manager to the sales rep to the sales leader to marketing leaders, even up to the CEO and the head of finance. So that's kind of the five buckets, planning, process, technology, data, and measurement.

Janis Zech: Would you say that in a scaled organization — and maybe we need to define what exactly that means — this is also typically how the RevOps organization structures, or is this deliberately not an organizational structure?

Steve Silver: That's deliberately not an organizational structure. Although I have seen clients who said, oh, that works for us. That's how we're going to organize. Right? I think as you start thinking through organization — and by the way, I wouldn't rush right to organization. Unfortunately, that's a lot of work where places where people start. Get that scope of responsibilities done first, and then you can look at the organization. What skills do we need? What capacity do we need to fulfill that range of responsibilities? And that should drive your organizational structure. And, you know, this is probably going to be an iterative process. Typically, what we see is organizations start out with this sort of massive scope of responsibility. And then they look at, well, what do we actually have the budget and the capacity and the skills to do? And you sort of start chipping away at that range of responsibilities until you get to something that is manageable. It can also point out gaps in the organization. Right? For example, if you say, oh, we're going to deploy an AI driven tool, and we need data expertise, but we don't have either the AI capabilities or the data management, data scientist type capabilities that we need, that might drive you to rethink your technology strategy and go find those subject matter experts externally, or make sure that the tools you have are helping you solve that problem, right? So it's definitely an iterative process. And it's also a process that you almost have to go through on an annual basis to make sure, you know, what's changed, why we need to modify, how have our needs evolved, are we meeting the needs of our clients. So it's this idea of put your scope of responsibility in place, then look at the organizational requirements, make sure those two are in alignment. Once you've got that, you can move on to that activation phase.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's so fascinating. I mean, I've been founding companies pretty much all my life, and we all know these RevOps teams of one memes out there. Right? Like, what you're basically just saying is, like, okay. This is one of the hardest jobs out there. Right? Like, because, obviously, to be able to have a data strategy and measurement, which I think is often a core reason why, you know, initially you want to hire somebody. Right? Like, okay. I actually wanna have more process. I want to have more repeatability. I wanna have better predictability and accountability, meaning, you know, you have to introduce certain tools to then measure them, right, to basically have the data ready and also specific processes to be able to plan better and have better oversight and understanding of what's actually working, what's not working — if you think about kind of the Series A, Series B kind of startup. Right? So, you know, even if you have just one person, this scope is actually still there, and I think that makes it so challenging. But I'm super curious. Right? Like, if you think about enterprise, right, like, where would you say — like, how does this develop over time? Right? Like, I mean, if you differentiate out the teams, I mean, is this, like, kind of often a blueprint for more responsibilities, or is it then rather you have somebody who's leading RevOps and then they actually have still the CS ops, sales ops, and marketing ops people that are responsible for certain scope of responsibility? I mean, how have you seen that play out? I'm super curious.

Steve Silver: Yeah. I'd say there's no one right model. I have my opinion on that, which I'll share in a moment. But we do see oftentimes sort of this coalition of the willing, if you will, where you still have separate marketing ops, sales ops, customer success ops, and there's some sort of steering committee that sits over that and coordinates all the activities, and that can work with varying degrees of success. The other end of that spectrum is a true revenue operations leader, and that individual has responsibility for marketing ops, sales ops, customer success ops. My personal opinion is that's the right model. I just don't think you can have, you know, a disconnect, a silo between those organizations and meet the demands of your customers, which is for that seamless buying and usage experience that they're looking for. Right? Customers don't care if they get an answer from marketing. They don't care if they get an answer from sales. What they want is a solution to their problems. And they want that easy to buy, easy to use, easy to consume. And so having that single focus of revenue operations — in my view, it's good for your customers, and it's good for your stakeholders. And I include in that stakeholders, investors in the organization. You know, we haven't really talked about the drive behind the rise of RevOps, but much of it is driven by those two factors, the demand from customers for a seamless experience, and then the demand from external investors for greater profitability, you know, the ability showing the ability to manage your business, knowing what your data says, trustworthy data, accurate forecast. And I just don't think you can get there if you continue to maintain these silos in the organization.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I very much love what you're saying there because it actually boils down to, hey. How do you ensure you understand what the customer wants, you know, before they even talk to you, when they talk to you, when they buy? And then also, how do you deliver on that value proposition you're talking about. Right? And having that end to end view, you know, we had Jacco van der Kooij here on the show where we talked about revenue architecture, right, left, and right side of the bow tie. We hosted Daphne Lopes from HubSpot who was talking about, you know, CS and CS excellence. And I think, you know, the right side of the bow tie is an extremely important piece to growth, especially these days. Right? So I think it's really nice to hear this because I think sometimes we get so lost in, you know, all the nitty gritty details, but this is what really truly matters. And then obviously understanding where are the drop offs, where do you lose revenue, where's friction within the engine that is essentially causing revenue to be lost. Right? I mean, how do you go from, you know, kind of, let's say, okay, we got the scope — right? Like, the scope you outlined beautifully, and I think it's easy to understand even without seeing all the slides — like, how do you then kind of design the RevOps charter?

Steve Silver: Yeah. I mean, like I said, we have a template which we can share with your listeners. I'll send it to you after the call here. But I think keep it simple is a guiding principle. Right? It should be a very high level document. One page is best, although we do sometimes see, you know, a couple of pages. It has a description of the RevOps organization. It's gonna document your high level priorities. It's gonna identify your key stakeholders, both internal and potentially external. It's gonna look at those process interlocks, and that might be, you know, funnel management, customer onboarding, the key places where you're touching customers, if you will. It's gonna lay out the high level scope that we just talked through, and then it's gonna lay out the success metrics. How will you measure the impact of the organization? And I think the challenge here for a lot of RevOps leaders is they over rotate and focus on activity metrics. Right? How many reports did we produce? How many leads did we assign? How many customers did we onboard? Instead of success metrics that align to the charter of the organization. What is the organization trying to achieve? And even though RevOps doesn't, quote, own lead production or they don't own opportunity management, they can still influence those heavily through these areas that we talked about, technology, data, you know, process management, etcetera. So you've got to make sure that those metrics are real, that they're aligned with the broader goals of the organization, and that you have a way to hold yourself accountable for them.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's one of those areas where — I mean, we have a lot of debates about this. Right? Like, how do you measure yourself as a RevOps team? And, honestly, I still don't have the answer. But I think what you're saying is essentially aligned with the actual business KPIs. Right? In terms of key stakeholders, I mean, you mentioned this initially. You shouldn't just, you know, write down the charter and then present it to the team, right, like, and to the wider team. But, like, who do you think are core stakeholders to be aligned with here? Yeah. Who would you emphasize to get alignment from?

Steve Silver: Yeah. It's gonna be, of course, your chief revenue officer or chief sales officer, right, depending on whether you have a CRO or a CSO. Your various heads of sales if you're a large organization with regional heads of sales or, you know, territory directors. So everyone in the sales organization. You need alignment with sales enablement and that organization. Of course, marketing — and that's product marketing, it's portfolio marketing, it's demand marketing. And then on the customer success side, if you have a customer marketing function, you need to align with them. Customer success obviously is a key component of this. So start by thinking about who is, I'll say, touching the customer throughout that journey that you just described, Janis, that sort of bow tie. Right? From the very first second we engage with them, whether that's in person or whether that's via digital means, all the way through the buyer's journey through contracting, and then on the other side of that, onboarding, activating, retaining, renewing, and growing. And so if you map out that process at a high level, you're gonna start to identify those key stakeholders. And then the other side, you also have to think about some of these sort of non-customer facing functions. And here, I'm thinking about channel partners could fall into that category, finance, legal, IT, other c-level executives. So it sounds like RevOps is sort of interacting with the entire organization, and in many cases, they are. Right? That's the nature of the job. That's what makes it so exciting and also so challenging.

Janis Zech: I was actually speaking about a Pavilion event yesterday evening about pipeline management forecasting. Obviously, that's basically, you know, the products we offer. And, you know, I think this kind of — you know, like, we are in planning phase right now, and I think the CFO organization and FP&A and RevOps need to be closely aligned. Right? And the reality is often you have kind of the CFO organization coming up with the budget for the next year and, you know, RevOps having the bottom up view, and they're not aligned. Right? Like, what's your view? Like, any tips on solving this? Because I think this is such a big problem because the ripple effects of that are, you know, like, CRO and CFO not being aligned on actually the goals. The CRO is saying, okay. I have to hit the goal, but, you know, if you look at the past six months, that's just not realistic. And then, obviously, the board thinking about the shareholder value, right, and thinking about kind of what they need to hit to be attractive in the market, whether that's in private or public. So, like, how do you solve this disconnect?

Steve Silver: Yeah. It's definitely a disconnect, and it has in my, you know, career, it has always been so. The CEO or the CFO says, well, we need to grow by fifteen percent this year in order to meet shareholder expectations. And, you know, sales and marketing step back and go, well, but the broader market's only growing at four percent. So how are we going to do that? And that's the question you have to have — is how do we take those growth goals and start to break those down into, well, what does that mean in terms of how many customers we're going to have to onboard, what our retention rates have to be, you know, what our profitability has to be, all that kind of stuff. So I, like you, Janis, I've struggled with this throughout my career. I've never found a single way to break through that sort of barrier other than don't wait until planning time to have that conversation or to build that relationship with the finance organization. Right? You've got to be working with them cross functionally even before annual planning season starts, and you've gotta have rock solid data. You have to be able to come into that conversation knowing what's our average sale price, what's our average sales productivity, you know, how long does it take to onboard a customer, what's our retention rate. You've got to have rock solid data in order to have a consequential planning conversation. And you may not be successful pushing back, but at least you can say, okay. If we're gonna hit that fifteen percent growth number, here's the assumptions that we're making. We're gonna hire new sales reps. We're going to expand into a new territory. We have a new product release coming out. And that's sort of your backstop, if you will, to having that conversation. But I definitely agree with you. It's not always easy, and it's not always realistic, some of the goals that get handed down to us. But again, the rock solid data is the way to build that plan from the bottom up.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's such an interesting topic. We're actually gonna host Ben Murray on the show. He's like the SaaS CFO, you know, or known as the SaaS CFO, and he has a lot of great templates on SaaS metrics. And I think it's really important from a reference perspective to understand the shareholder metrics. Right? Like, that's, you know, rule of forty, you know, ARR growth, revenue recognition, right, like, net dollar retention, all those metrics because that's often what's being discussed in the boardroom. And I think, you know, FP&A and RevOps, like, they need to team up, right, on a constant basis. I think there's, like, a trend in the CFO world to be more like go to market CFOs. And I really hope that, like, the go to market organization and the finance organization come closer together because it's good for everybody. Right? Like, it's never good if you forecast something and you totally miss it. Whether you're public, right, you cannot do that, or you're private, that's just never good because these are obviously also official processes that have compliance reasons, and you cannot just say, well, we didn't budget that. Right? But, I mean, super curious. Have you seen, like, a lot of RevOps organizations reporting to the finance organization? What's your take on that compared to kind of the revenue organization or the go to market organization?

Steve Silver: We typically see that in smaller organizations where, you know, the RevOps will roll up under finance. As they grow, as organizations grow, they tend to break it out as a separate function and have RevOps reporting into — the most common place is the chief revenue officer, which I think is the right place if — and that's a big if — if that chief revenue officer is actually a chief revenue officer and not just — and I don't mean this in a negative way — but not just a head of sales with a different title. Right? And it's, you know, it can be hard to find those individuals who can really be a chief revenue officer, highly aware of and appreciative of what marketing does, what sales does, what customer success does, and how those three functions need to align, need to work together. You know, the danger is if you take someone whose career has been in sales, make them the chief revenue officer, they may tend to discount what those other two functions are doing. And that's just a recipe for, you know, poor performance. So it's a mindset shift. And I talk a lot about this with clients. It's a mindset shift from these, you know, here's what marketing does, here's what sales does, here's what customer success does, into starting with the customer. How do we deliver the best experience across those three organizations? And then let's put the people in place and the processes in place to make that happen.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I love this. I think that's, like, the theme. Right? And then how do you build the organization around it to support that? So good. Maybe completely different topic, but I think you've seen so much about it. And, I mean, you basically are probably one of the few people on the planet that spend as much time about it. Like, the trends of the sales technology stack. Right? Like, what has changed in the last couple of years when you think about that? Yeah. Super curious. I have to ask you because, I mean, you spent so much time on it now.

Steve Silver: Yeah. I think there are a couple of things that have changed. First of all, we're finally seeing technology that actually works for the seller, right? And that's a huge difference from even ten or fifteen years ago where, you know, we used to jokingly say SFA instead of standing for Salesforce automation stood for Salesforce accounting. So a lot of the tools that we saw in the early days were really designed to capture information from the seller and make it available to the rest of the organization. And so, you know, truthfully, there was very little benefit to the seller other than keeping their manager off their back. Now in five, seven, ten years, we're seeing tools that automatically capture seller interactions, whether those are in person or digital. They're helping sellers write emails. They're suggesting content. And tools were already starting to do this even before the explosion of AI driven tools. So I think that's been a major shift — that these tools are now helping sellers do their job better by removing manual work and then delivering these sort of actionable insights at the moment of need. Then, of course, you've got AI. Right? And we're only at the beginning. We're just starting to touch on the capabilities of AI for helping us understand our customers, understand our buyers, be smarter about their journey, know when to engage, know who to engage with, what's the right message at the right time to the right buyer, right, which has always sort of been that sales north star. I think the other big change in sales technology, and this kinda comes back to the driver behind RevOps, is you can't build your tech stack in these silos. And so for far too long, we've seen marketing goes off and builds their tech stack. Sales goes and builds theirs, and customer success is off building theirs. And they're not built to talk to each other. They're not built with the process in mind. And so I saw a stat, oh, probably eight or nine months ago, that the average deal requires the sales rep to use ten different systems. Right? And that means there's a lot of duplicate data entry. There's different interfaces. So the sales rep becomes this sort of, you know, armchair integrator. And that's just a waste of time. So in the same way that we're trying to deliver a unified and smooth customer experience, we have to think about the experience of our internal users and what they can do or are prohibited from doing through that tech stack. Right? I just think it's a super exciting time where sales technology and broader revenue technology is concerned as we're starting to use technology to get smarter about the entire experience that our customers and our employees have.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Obviously, building Weflow, we've always seen ourselves as a bundled solution that automatically captures all the data, enables the sales organization and CS organization with insights to take action when needed, and then also provide the insights to quickly identify risks and, you know, spot them, act on them to then essentially lead to accurate forecasting. And, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, often the metrics, dashboards, and reports, they're not broken. Right? It's the underlying process, data capture, you know, and whether you talk stage exit criteria or methodologies. Right? All these things can be automated by now. And then I think what we still need to see — right? And I think that's where we are driving — it's like, how do you take all the data to then, you know, not just provide better visibility and insights, but actually actionability. Right? That's something I'm really excited about because I think that's really the ten x change. Right? And I don't know — you know, there's obviously a lot of talk about, like, automated outbound, and that's different to me. That feels like, you know, something that is — like, I can see it for some industries which is working, for many not. Right? Like, because if I think about, like, scaling up, you know, AI agents to just kind of do automated outbound — I don't know. Maybe I'm too old, but, like, it feels super risky to me, especially if you're in certain segments. But I think more about, like, how do you have these copilots that help you do your job better fast and, you know, and then actually measure the outcome and show you that you can do it. I think that's such great potential for the future.

Steve Silver: I totally agree, Janis. Like I said, I think we're only scratching the surface of what AI can do for sellers, and hopefully, this results in a better buyer experience. Right? It helps us figure out, well, who are our ideal customers? Not just who's likely to buy, but who's likely to stay with us for the long term, who's likely to renew and grow and buy other products from us, and feed that actionable insight all the way back up to the very start of the funnel so that marketing and sales are targeting the right customers. And it just becomes this virtuous circle of we get better data about our buyers and our customers. We use that to inform our activities that then, you know, leads us to better data, and we just get smarter and smarter about it. And I just see AI helping us accelerate that virtuous circle.

Janis Zech: I mean, this is the very short version. Right? I think we could probably now spend, you know, a lot of time talking about the future of RevTech, but we're coming up on time. So two questions. One, where can people find you?

Steve Silver: Best place is gonna be on LinkedIn, and I'm still active on LinkedIn as Steve Silver. You'll see a note that says I'm retired, but I'm happy to chat with people and still love to connect. So that's probably the best place to reach me.

Janis Zech: Well, that sounds awesome. And then maybe one closing question before we dash off. Like, what is the kindest thing somebody has done for you to move your career forward?

Steve Silver: Oh, boy. I don't know if it was a kind thing, but they hired me back in nineteen ninety seven — I'm really dating myself — as the director of sales operations. I've been a sales leader for, you know, five or six years and got hired as the director of sales operations at a startup, high growth startup. And that was both a, you know, a blessing and a curse because it was something I loved doing, but I had no idea what I was really doing. You know? I learned quickly, you know, a lot of trial and error, lots of errors. But as they say, that's how we learn, right, is by making mistakes. So I'm very appreciative to the individual that gave me that opportunity, and it led to a lot of fun times and ended up at Forrester, which was just a phenomenal place to be.

Janis Zech: I mean, if you find something you love and you keep doing it for many years, I think that's actually a true gift in life. Right? It's not easy to do. And so yeah. Steve, thank you so much for coming on. Really enjoyed the conversation. We'll link to the RevOps charter template in the show notes. And, yeah, thanks, everybody. Have a great week, all of you.

Steve Silver: Thank you, Janis. Pleasure chatting with you.