The Mentalities and Habits of Highly Effective Revenue Operations

The Scientist and The Empath

I still remember the moment I realized what Operations was really about.

It was 2016, and the term “RevOps” hadn’t quite entered the business lexicon yet. I was wearing a lot of hats including “Sales Operations Manager” at a fast-growing SaaS company, and my world was a chaotic whirlwind of Salesforce reports, territory disputes, and frantic requests from the VP of Sales to “just pull the numbers” for a board meeting in an hour.

My days were spent in the trenches, fighting fires. A lead routing rule would break, and I’d spend half the day manually reassigning leads. A rep would mess up a quote, and I’d dive into the CPQ to fix it. I felt busy, I felt essential, but I also felt like a hamster on a wheel.

I was fixing problems, but I wasn’t preventing them.

I was a reactive mechanic, not a proactive engineer.

The turning point came during a quarterly business review. We had missed our number, and the blame was flying. Marketing blamed Sales for not working their leads. Sales blamed Marketing for poor lead quality. Customer Success was worried about the down-sell risk from disgruntled new customers who felt they’d been over-promised.

Sitting there, watching the finger-pointing, I saw it. I saw the invisible threads connecting every team’s actions. A change in Marketing’s lead scoring model last month had, in fact, created a glut of lower-quality MQLs. To hit their MQL target, they had loosened the criteria. Sales, overwhelmed, had started ignoring marketing leads in favor of self-sourced opportunities, tanking the MQL-to-SQO conversion rate. And the reps who did work those leads were setting poor expectations to close a deal, which was now landing squarely on the lap of Customer Success.

It wasn't a Sales problem or a Marketing problem. It was a revenue problem. It was a systems problem. And I was one of the only people in the room with visibility into the entire, end-to-end process.

That day, my job description changed in my mind. I wasn’t just there to support Sales. I was there to architect, protect, and optimize the entire revenue engine.

Over the last 15 years, running operations across a half-dozen organizations from scrappy startups to Series-E VC heavyweights, I’ve seen this function evolve from a tactical reporting service to the strategic core of the go-to-market team. The best RevOps professionals I’ve ever worked with (the ones who become trusted advisors to the CRO and CEO) aren’t defined by their mastery of a specific tool. Their technical skills are table stakes. What sets them apart is how they think and how they act, day in and day out.

It all boils down to three foundational mentalities and four critical, non-negotiable daily habits. If you can master these, you will transition from a simple operator to a true revenue leader.

Part 1: The Three Foundational Mentalities

Your mindset is the operating system that runs your RevOps function.

Without the right perspective, all the tools and processes in the world are just noise.

Mentality #1: The Systems Thinker

A junior ops person sees a request. A senior ops leader sees a system.

When a sales manager asks you to build a new report, the junior mindset asks, “What fields do you need and when do you need it by?” The systems thinker asks, “What business question are you trying to answer with this report? What decision will you make based on this data? Where does this data originate, and what downstream processes does its collection impact?”

The revenue engine is not a collection of discrete parts; it’s a deeply interconnected ecosystem. Think of it like the plumbing of a house. Changing the water pressure in the upstairs bathroom (e.g., tweaking lead scoring) might seem like an isolated fix, but it can unexpectedly lower the pressure in the kitchen (sales pipeline) and cause the washing machine in the basement (renewals) to work less effectively.

A Painful Lesson in Systems Thinking:

Early in my career, I made a classic mistake. The VP of Marketing wanted to implement a “hot lead” fast lane. Any lead that downloaded our “Pricing Guide” + some other logic would bypass the normal SDR qualification process and route directly to an Account Executive. The request seemed simple enough. I built the workflow rule in our marketing automation platform, created the Salesforce assignment rule, and flipped the switch.

For the first 48 hours, it was a success. Leads were flying over to AEs. But then the chaos began.

1. Compensation Breakdown: Our SDRs were compensated on qualified meetings set. I had just removed a whole category of high-intent leads from their pool, effectively cutting their potential pay. Morale plummeted. I was focused on how to action the request, not communicating “hey, this is a major change in how the SDRs work, did you change their comp?” That was above my pay grade.

2. Territory Conflict: The direct-to-AE routing rule didn't fully account for our complex territory rules based on employee count and state. AEs started getting leads that belonged to their teammates, leading to infighting.

3. Data Incompleteness: The SDR qualification step was where we enriched key data points needed for forecasting. Without it, the AEs were getting records with missing information, which meant our pipeline reports were suddenly full of holes that the AEs weren’t trained to fill.

I had treated a complex request as a simple, linear task. I fixed the immediate "problem" without mapping the system. A true Systems Thinker would have paused and brought the stakeholders together: Sales, Marketing, and Finance. They would have mapped the entire lead lifecycle, identified every touchpoint and dependency, and pressure-tested the proposed change against the entire system before writing a single line of code.

Classic ready, fire, aim. I learned the hard way and got smarter.

How to Cultivate This Mentality: Before you execute any request, force yourself to answer these questions:

• What is the origin of this data/process?

• What other teams, processes, or systems touch this?

• What are the downstream dependencies? (Think reports, compensation, territories, handoffs).

• Who will be negatively impacted by this change, even in a small way?

• What is the second-order effect of this change? And the third?

Mentality #2: The Empathetic Scientist

This might sound like a contradiction, but it’s the secret weapon of every great RevOps leader. The "Scientist" in you is obsessed with objective truth. They live for clean data, rigorous A/B testing, statistical significance, and creating processes that are logical and efficient.

The scientist builds the perfect, frictionless machine.

The "Empath" in you understands a crucial truth: that machine is operated by flawed, busy, and emotional human beings. Empathy is the ability to step out of your data-filled world and see the process through the eyes of the user. It’s understanding why a salesperson isn’t filling out the “MEDDPICC” field, not just that they aren’t.

The Scientist sees a data compliance problem. The Empath sees a workflow problem. By nature I am more Scientist than Empath.. but I have been working on this area (and getting married has helped a lot).

The Case of the "Useless" CRM Field:

At one company, leadership was convinced that if we could just get reps to consistently document the customer’s primary pain point early in the sales cycle, our win rates would improve. The Scientist in me agreed. The data correlation was clear. So, we added a required, picklist field called "Primary Business Pain" to the Opportunity object, to be filled out at Stage 2.

A month later, adoption was abysmal. Reps were either choosing the first option in the picklist just to get past the requirement, or they were complaining loudly about the "annoying new field."

My first instinct was to double down. Mandate it. Report on it. Get managers to enforce it. But instead, I decided to put my Empath hat on. I spent a full day shadowing our top-performing SDR and AE. I didn't say a word. I just watched and listened.

Here’s what I learned: The discovery call was a fluid conversation, not a checklist. The exact "Primary Business Pain" often wasn't clear until the very end of the call, or sometimes not until the second call. The picklist options we provided were generic and often didn't capture the nuance of the customer's real problem, and we were forcing them to be captured too early in the process.

The solution wasn't more enforcement. It was a better-designed system built on empathy. We made the field optional at Stage 2 but integrated a tool that automatically transcribed their call notes. Then, using AI, it suggested a "Primary Business Pain" tag at the end of the day when the rep was doing their admin work. They could then confirm or correct it with one click.

Adoption skyrocketed. Data quality improved dramatically. And I learned that you cannot just impose logic on people. You have to weave it into the fabric of their existing workflow.

The Scientist identifies the what while the Empath solves for the how.

Mentality #3: The Proactive Architect, Not the Reactive Firefighter

This is the hardest transition for any ops professional to make. The dopamine hit of solving a problem and closing a support ticket is addictive. It feels productive. Your stakeholders love you because you’re responsive and helpful. But if you spend 100% of your time fighting fires, you’re implicitly accepting that your job is to live in a flammable building.

An architect’s job is to design a building that doesn't catch fire in the first place.

Reactive work is answering a question. Proactive work is building a self-serve dashboard that answers that question for everyone, forever. Reactive work is manually fixing a broken record. Proactive work is building the validation rule that prevents the record from breaking. Reactive work is joining a deal desk call to build a complex quote. Proactive work is redesigning the CPQ to handle that complexity automatically.

The "Tyranny of the Urgent" will consume every minute of your day if you let it. Your inbox and Slack are filled with other people’s priorities, not necessarily the business’s priorities. The Proactive Architect ruthlessly protects their time and focuses on leverage. They ask themselves, "What is the one project I can work on this week that will eliminate an entire class of problems for the next year?"

This requires a fundamental shift in how you measure your own success. Stop valuing yourself based on the number of tickets closed. Start valuing yourself based on the number of tickets prevented.

I once had a RevOps analyst on my team who was beloved by the sales floor. He was brilliant and fast, and he’d solve any problem thrown at him within minutes. But at his performance review, I gave him mediocre marks. He was shocked. I showed him a chart of our support tickets. The total volume wasn’t decreasing. He was a world-class firefighter, but the fires were still starting at the same rate.

I challenged him to dedicate 50% of his time for the next quarter to root-cause analysis and systemic fixes. Stop closing tickets and start focusing on reducing their count.

It was painful at first.

Reps had to wait longer for their individual fixes.

But by the end of the quarter, he rebuilt our broken territory assignment logic and created a series of short video tutorials for the top 5 most common "how-to" questions. Our overall ticket volume dropped by 40%. He had gone from being a great firefighter to a great architect.

The Four Critical Daily Habits

Mentalities are the foundation, but habits are what build the house. Great RevOps leaders operationalize their mindsets through unwavering daily discipline. These four habits, which take no more than two hours of your day combined, will have an outsized impact on your effectiveness.

Habit #1: The 15-Minute 'State of the Funnel' Review

When: First thing in the morning, before you open your email or Slack.

What: Open a single, curated dashboard that shows the vital signs of the revenue engine from the last 24-48 hours. This is your dashboard, not a report for leadership. It should include leading indicators, not lagging ones.

• Volume: New Leads Created, MQLs, Sales-Accepted Leads, Opportunities Created.

• Velocity: Average time between key stages (e.g., MQL to SAL, SAL to Stage 1 Opp).

• Conversion: Key conversion rates (Lead-to-MQL, MQL-to-SAL, SAL-to-Opp).

Why: This habit builds intuition. You begin to develop a sixth sense for the rhythm of the business. You’ll be the first to spot an anomaly before it becomes a full-blown problem. Is lead volume down 30% day-over-day? Maybe a web form is broken. Is SAL-to-Opp conversion suddenly cut in half? Maybe a new SDR class is struggling with qualification criteria.

By checking this every morning, you can catch these issues hours or even days before a VP of Sales sees it in their weekly report and sends a panic email. It allows you to move from being asked about the problem to being the one who informs others of the problem—and that you’re already investigating it.

Habit #2: 'Go to the Gemba' aka Walk the Floor

When: 30 minutes, 3-4 times a week.

What: "Gemba" is a term from Japanese manufacturing that means "the real place." For RevOps, it means going to where the work is actually happening. In today's world, this is often virtual.

• Listen to a random Gong or Chorus call from a SDR.

• Join a sales team's daily huddle or pipeline review meeting as a silent observer.

• Ask a rep to share their screen and walk you through how they build a quote or log a call.

Why: Your dashboards tell you the what. The Gemba tells you the why. You will discover more about process friction and user frustration in a 30-minute screen-share with a sales rep than you will in 10 hours of staring at Salesforce reports. You’ll hear them sigh when they have to copy-paste the same information into three different places. You’ll see the five clicks it takes them to do something that should take one. This is the raw material for the Empathetic Scientist. It’s how you identify the problems worth solving.

Habit #3: The 'Documentation Coda'

When: The last 5 minutes of any task or project.

What: A "coda" is a concluding musical passage. The Documentation Coda is the act of finishing every single task by documenting what you did.

• Fixed a complex workflow rule? Don't just save it. Go to the Description field in Salesforce and write a one-paragraph summary of what it does, why it was built, and who requested it.

• Built a new report for a manager? Don't just send the link. Spend an extra five minutes recording a quick Loom video explaining what each filter does and how to interpret the data. Save it on your company’s wiki.

• Answered a complex question in Slack? Don't just leave it in the ephemeral chat history. Copy the question and answer to a "RevOps FAQ" page in Confluence or Notion.

Why: This is the single most important habit for enabling the "Proactive Architect" mentality. It is an investment in your future sanity. Every time you document something, you are building a scalable, self-service engine that prevents you from having to solve the same problem twice. The next time someone has that question, you can send a link instead of re-doing the work. It also makes your systems more resilient and easier for new team members to understand.

Habit #4: The 90-Minute 'Deep Work' Block

When: Daily. Ideally in the morning, before the chaos hits.

What: Schedule a recurring, 90-minute, non-negotiable meeting with yourself on your calendar. Name it something serious like "Strategic Revenue Initiative" or "Project Bedrock." This is your time for proactive, architectural work.

• Turn off Slack. Turn off email.

• Work on the one most important project that will reduce future inbound requests and drive long-term value. This could be planning a new lead scoring model, prototyping a new forecasting dashboard, or writing the project brief for a territory realignment.

Why: Without this sacred block of time, the urgent will always defeat the important. Your entire day will be consumed by the pings, requests, and meetings of the reactive world. The Deep Work block is your formal commitment to being an architect. It’s where you build the fire station, so you can spend less time driving the fire truck. It is the single most effective way to ensure you are making progress on the things that truly matter, not just the things that are making the most noise.

This is one of my biggest life hacks.

It’s the work equivalent of “pay yourself first”

The Journey from Operator to Leader

Becoming an elite RevOps professional isn’t about knowing all the answers. It’s about having a framework for finding them. It’s about shifting your perspective from seeing isolated tasks to seeing an interconnected system. It's about blending data-driven rigor with a deep understanding of the humans who operate within that system. And most of all, it’s about having the discipline to rise above the daily chaos and build something better and more scalable for the future.

These mentalities and habits aren’t a quick fix. They require conscious effort and practice. But over my 15 years in this field, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are what separate the good from the indispensable.

Start small. Pick one mentality to be more mindful of this week. Choose one habit to try tomorrow. The journey from a reactive firefighter to a proactive architect starts with a single, intentional step. Now go build.

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I started this in November 2023 because revenue technology and revenue operations methodologies started evolving so rapidly I needed a focal point to coalesce ideas, outline revenue system blueprints, discuss go-to-market strategy amplified by operational alignment and logistical support, and all topics related to revenue operations.

Mastering Revenue Operations is a central hub for the intersection of strategy, technology and revenue operations. Our audience includes Fortune 500 Executives, RevOps Leaders, Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs.