RevOps Best Practices to Increase Quota Attainment
RevOps Best Practices to Increase Quota Attainment Eddie Reynolds, RevOps Leader and CEO at Union Square Consulting recently spoke to Abhijeet Vijayvergiya about how misunderstood RevOps and quota attainment is. And what can be the right way to approach both, in a way that they work symbiotically. Let’s dive in. Sales quota attainment rates continue to drop as we speak. Digital selling has been harder for reps, exacerbated by the current market conditions when buyers have a tight grip over their budgets. Revenue operations comes as a respite to aid this situation for businesses. But terms like quotas are often misunderstood. RevOps is still fairly new to help sales teams succeed better in uncertain times. We spoke to revenue expert Eddie Reynolds on what he thinks of the two facets independently, and together. He busted some myths around quotas, sales productivity and our favorite – RevOps. Read on to hear what Eddie has to say about the selling world today, rep productivity and what areas of RevOps he is really passionate about. If you’re short on time, here is a quick summary of the conversation. If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode. Revenue Operations is Beyond Just Setting Up Tools Abhijeet: Hi Eddie. Love what you’re doing at Union Square and I think it’s great to see your focus on revenue operations. It’s so exciting. Eddie: Yes, it is exciting! I’m very passionate about this topic. A big part of revenue operations is setting up tools, but something that I’ve always been so passionate about is all the other areas of revenue operations. How do you take these tools and turn them into part of an overall revenue engine that ultimately drives revenue and provides visibility to leadership on what’s working, what’s not, and what direction you’re headed in? And that’s something I’ve been very passionate about, probably since the first moment that I ran into Salesforce and even before, and trying to think, okay, as somebody who’s actually selling every day: How can I use this tool? How can I use the data in this tool? How can I build a better process so that I can sell more, market them or serve customers better? It’s really interesting to see how much revenue operations has grown in the last few years, where a number of years ago you didn’t even hear that term. And now you hear it everywhere. And I think it’s a really amazing thing for business in general. Abhijeet: I love the fact that you’ve been an operator yourself. You’ve sold, you’ve been into the weeds. So you understand it quite well compared to a lot of folks who are not into sales. You have that unique experience and you can appreciate what the user goes through, and you can actually bring that into practice. Eddie: I was just going to say, I think that is a big piece of maybe not what’s missing, but challenges that folks have. And I have no issue with somebody entering RevOps that comes from a technical background, an admin background, a finance background or just starts in operations. But one challenge is that those folks really need to sit down with the sales people, sit down with the marketers, sit down with people in customer success and understand what they do every day, what motivates them and the challenges they face. If you’re working in a silo and you’re just looking at data and tools, you’re going to miss a lot of the nuance of what makes jobs like sales so challenging, and you’re not going to understand why. You get resistance to trying new tools. Why do you get resistance to adoption? Why are things like data entry difficult? You have to be in their shoes, or atleast sit down with them to try to understand the challenges in their job. Eddie Reynolds The Link Between RevOps & Quota Attainment Abhijeet: Definitely. The next thing I want to know more from you is as a rep, the most important thing is quota, right? I think more than half or at least half of the salary is linked to variables or commissions that are all quota. You’ve been an AE yourself, you understand how quota is important for salespeople. And RevOps plays a very important role here. They can really create the right process, systems, tools, as well as enablement in some cases to make salespeople become more successful. Now that you’ve been an AE, and you’re also into RevOps consulting through your company, what’s your take on improving sales quota attainment? There are reports out there which talk about the quota attainment dropping year after year. Whereas the proliferation of tools, if you look at it, they’ve grown like 7X from the number of tools that existed in anybody’s tech stack just a few years ago. These two don’t seem to correlate, right? There are so many tools out there to help the sales people, but at the same time, quotas are abysmally low. So I’d love to hear your perspective on what’s going wrong. Eddie: Well, in regards to the tools, they’re only as good as the team using them. You can give me Tiger Woods’s set of golf clubs and since I don’t play golf, I’m not going to perform very well. And he could go buy a set of golf clubs at a garage sale and wipe the floor with me. It’s the same thing with any tools that you’re using, whether it’s revenue tools or any tools in life in general. They’re not going to fix broken processes and broken strategies. Or poor assumptions on things like quotas. One of the biggest problems that we see with quotas is that oftentimes they’re based on hopes and dreams and not real data. Eddie Reynolds The cliche is that the revenue leader says, “Well, we