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 Market…