30-60-90 Day Guide for Director of Revenue Operations ft. Hassan Irshad

Randy Likas (00:02.222)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Revenue Lounge. I’m your host, Randy Likas. And today we are going to talk about the framework for a 30, 60, 90 -day guide to building a high -impact revops engine. Joining me today is Hassan Irshad, who is the director of RevOps at FEVTutor. He has almost 10 years of revenue operations experience at SaaS companies of various sizes and also consults with his own company with other organizations to unlock the potential of their revenue teams.

Hassan, thank you so much for joining us today. Great. So let’s start and talk a little bit about, just get to know you a little bit. So we had a chance to meet personally last week. I really enjoyed that conversation. for our audience here, can you tell us a little about maybe how you got into your current role, how you got into rev ops, and some of the responsibilities that you have at FEVTutor today?

Hassan Irshad (00:33.91)
Pleasure be here.

Hassan Irshad (00:54.605)
Absolutely. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I’ve been in revenue operations for almost 10 years, which is as much as the length of revenue operations. But yes, out of college. So I graduated in economics. That was my general background. Did actually political economy as well. And then I started working in sales operations at a startup, which is a lot of times like a very natural progression towards revenue operations.

But this is what I say always is like sales operation at a startup was revenue operations because there was no person to do CXOPS. There was no person to do marketing ops. So I was just, what do you call wearing different hats and different days. So that was a very natural progression for me to work into those. And the company that I worked with had this amazing program to start with is they make everybody who join a revenue or sales org do one month of BDR work.

So I went through a little bit of like that BDR grind and kind of gained a lot of respect for what sales does. And from there on was I had the love of working with sales operations and working with marketing and CX teams trying to solve a lot of the problems. And problem solving was at the heart of what I really enjoyed. From there on was the rest is history in the past decade. I’ve worked with, this is my fifth.

organization building our revenue operations from ground up in a B2B SaaS space particularly. So yeah, it’s been very enjoyable, And happy diving.

Randy Likas (02:31.36)
So what does revenue operations encapsulate at FEV today? Is it marketing, sales, CS, or is it one area? Maybe a little bit more in terms of what revenue operations means for FEV.

Hassan Irshad (02:45.729)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, Revenue Operations at FEV is sales marketing CX, which is a very standard revenue operations model if done right. But then I feel like revenue operations is always just a lot more because you interact with a lot of different other departments that are not really on the book. It’s like, you kind of like, this is not part of your job description. then

You work with product very closely. You work with finance very closely. You work with HR very closely and like onboarding salespeople. yeah, it’s all in all everything that revenue operations touches is what I’m doing at FEB Tutor, setting up a department from scratch here as well.

Randy Likas (03:30.776)
Yeah. Do you have a large team or individual or what does the organization look like at RevUps?

Hassan Irshad (03:36.991)
Yeah, I have a team of two people right now and I’m hiring a third person. So in the world of revenue operations, relatively medium size, I would say.

Randy Likas (03:46.828)
Yeah. And for those that might not know what FEV Tutor does, do you maybe want to talk a little bit about what business you’re in and maybe also like what are your sales cycles look like? Who do you sell to? That type of thing.

Hassan Irshad (03:57.195)
Yeah. No, absolutely I can. So I’ve in my career I’ve worked with various different business models and I would say this is a very unique one. So what FEB Tutor does is high impact tutoring, online tutoring for students who are lagging in public schools in the US. let’s say if you have a district that doesn’t have enough funding and you have students that are kind of lagging behind, they don’t have enough resources.

FEB Tutor kind of jumps in with the high impact tutoring that you can do online. The business exploded in COVID, of course, like, you for online tutoring. So there’s a lot of like positive impact that they’re generating, but they, the selling actually happens in two public schools, which means to government. So the sales cycle tend to be relatively longer and more political. But I think that to me was a very interesting challenge to kind of like solve revenue operations in this world.

Randy Likas (04:51.458)
Yeah. And I have a little bit of experience selling to organizations that sell to public schools. And I understand the sales cycle and buying season is a very defined moment. And so maybe talk a little bit about that. Your sales reps, do you guys have BDRs that support the sales reps or sales reps responsible for all pipeline generation?

Hassan Irshad (05:15.403)
Yeah, so we have BDRs that support the AEs, and then we have a larger team of CSMs that take care of renewal, but the AEs are generally in charge of new business and renewals because it’s a lot of relationship building in this, and I’m sure you have the experience for that as well. There’s a lot of networking that actually goes in, a lot of familiar faces that you see again and again to have those renewals and everything done.

It’s still, I would say, decent size go -to -market team. And yeah, very general structure for BDRs helping the AEs there.

Randy Likas (05:54.167)
And when you think about the buyers and the people that the reps need to interact with, it could be anything from school boards, superintendents, even down to the principal level, if I’m correct, right?

Hassan Irshad (06:07.511)
Correct. So it’s a very interesting market where within COVID, they had basically district level fundings and then yeah, superintendents has the budget. So it is like who holds the budget basically at the end of the day, who’s the decision maker. But then when decentralization of these budgets happened, then yeah, principals and know, more who’s the head of schools who have the power to kind of make that decision, kind of like just, so we have like all over the place.

Yeah, so it’s very interesting because your biopersonas kind of differ by district to site level schools.

Randy Likas (06:43.906)
Yeah, yeah. And I imagine there’s also probably a lot of things going on sort of regulatory or other things that are, laws are being passed that also impact the sales process as well, correct?

Hassan Irshad (06:54.413)
100%. And I think this is where, like, I personally have a nerd for revenue operations doing this, so I really enjoy it. But this is like, to your point, like, there’s seasonality. So one of the things I did here, and I’m only actually like, this is my 60 to 90 happening right now. And what I did was like, we created a sales calendar and got feedback from all the teams to know where the seasonality actually hits, what is the top priorities. And to your point,

how does politics impact? Because that’s like funding cycles. like, so I started creating a repository of like, which states have which funds available at what time, and then kind of like collect it together because that goes into the sales arsenal as like, hey, I have the background of this and I can have those conversations with that kind of authority saying like, I know where you can get the funding for these.

Randy Likas (07:44.684)
Yeah, great. This is really, really good context. guess one other question that I’m just curious about is, the buyers, whether they be principals or superintendents, whoever they might be, do they move around a lot? Meaning the relationships that people develop one year, they might be completely different than next? Or what does that look like?

Hassan Irshad (08:01.687)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think this is where it gets even more challenging, where there are superintendents who move around, and there are district assistant superintendents who get promoted. So all of a sudden, decision maker has changed immediately. And then it can get more political, where it’s like, you have to understand what the superintendent or district superintendent is actually expecting as your next step in career.

And then you have to kind of anticipate that when you’re putting like relationship or kind of saying like, hey, we’re working this specific champion and all of a sudden this champion moves. So yeah, you’ve got to do the backup strategy for that for sure.

Randy Likas (08:46.574)
Yeah, yeah, great. Well, this is really fascinating. So thanks for providing that context. Let’s actually dive into the first component of the 3060 90 -day plan, which is the first 30 days. Can you walk us through maybe what that 30 -day plan looks like? How do you set it up from sort of a new rev ops department from scratch? And what are some of the immediate priorities in that 30 -day plan?

Hassan Irshad (08:54.807)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (09:08.461)
Yeah, absolutely. think one thing that I would just lay out is like the 30, 60, 90 is more like, you you have the control over it, right? So it’s how you design as a new leader coming into revenue operations. It’s your narrative. So the way I see the 30 day, I see it as like most important for this journey. And I have actually like names for these. So I would call the 30 day is like your discovery phase. So I take it as like how you’re doing sales. You are meeting the keys.

stakeholders, right? Whoever you work with, like I finance, HR, not only your standard stakeholders, you want to understand where they are, what drives them, what their priorities are, right? What are they looking for as the short -term and long -term goals, right? Understand their pain points, which is going to dictate how your 60 -90 works from there onwards, right? So a lot of, would say, the discovery work happens there.

create a document, something I call lay off the land document. And then you just take all the resources that are available. You want to understand how the product works. Because being in four different industries in past decade, revenue operations core problems remain the same, but you want to make sure you understand how the product is sold. So one of the few things that I do in this discovery phase is take a product demo. Sit through those.

conversation intelligence tools, walk through a demo, listen to the call, listen how the selling is actually happening because you want to make sure you have all the data points you’re there to help the end user. there’s a gap if you don’t know what the end user is selling. And a lot of times I felt like the revenue operations can be a little detached from that reality. So one of the things I do is I dive in and we become a sponge. You soak it all in.

Randy Likas (10:51.458)
Mm -hmm.

Randy Likas (10:57.26)
Yeah.

Hassan Irshad (11:07.679)
you have to understand the pain points that are going to help in terms of layout your plan later. So we do that. Then another thing that I do is like just dive in into the CRM and kind of like play around myself, right? What it allows again, it’s the discovery work. So what do you want to do is that you want to understand, okay, is it easy for me to just pull a reporter dashboard on some data or do I need to go through like five different hoops to

Randy Likas (11:22.158)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (11:35.821)
together and that just dictates however it was designed or whatever, like the ease of the end user if you were DevOps and you wanted to extract it. So how much work is there pending? Like that will just tell you immediately. So again, that doesn’t even need 30 days. You can do this in like the week, right? So this kind of analysis just helps. And then what I would do is like establish those key relationships with these key stakeholders, right? Because

Randy Likas (11:47.426)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (12:05.985)
One of the core things that I feel like revenue operations need is that trust between the go -to -market teams and saying, yes, you are here and you’re going to help us achieve our goals. And that requires trust. No one’s going to come in and I say, yeah, all of your system is bad. Let me just remove it, create something new. That doesn’t really create the trust building part. So what I try to do is I listen. And listening is…

Randy Likas (12:16.866)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (12:34.373)
you know, a scale I think revenue operations need to have just generally across the board. So what I take is when I’m listening, one of my questions to them is like, how can rev ops help you achieve this? Right? And that opens up a whole different world where people are like, it breaks down the barrier and people are like, okay, this person is here to help me. Let me lay out my problems. And sometimes it could be a lot of problems, right? Lay it out. So discovery work involves that.

Randy Likas (12:46.84)
Hmm.

Randy Likas (12:55.0)
Yep.

Randy Likas (12:59.842)
Yup.

Hassan Irshad (13:03.437)
One other area that I do is like tech stack audit. Of course, that’s a no -brainer to start with, but that also, as you’re talking to the key stakeholders on like go -to -market leaders, VP of marketing, VP of sales, you have to be able to go steps beyond that. You need to go further. You need to talk to the end users. You need to talk to the BDRs. You need to talk to the sales.

Randy Likas (13:30.168)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (13:31.469)
A few things that I do like when if it is possible for you to actually go into the office, even if it’s remote, I would shadow. Like I would sit there. I was like, show me how you enter data. It’s here and show me how you do a call. Show me how you log a call. All of that I feel like just opens up a different perspective because I’m not then making decisions in a vacuum, right? So.

Randy Likas (13:40.066)
Mm

Randy Likas (13:55.726)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (13:57.857)
That discovery phase and you’re from sales, you know, that discovery phase requires a lot of asking a lot of questions. So I think that’s exactly my approach to that is like, just ask the questions where the pain points is and get to that point. Do a kind of spice on them because they’re your end customer, right? And then process mapping, like figure out A, how the selling is happening, but if

Randy Likas (14:04.354)
Yep. Yep.

Hassan Irshad (14:26.507)
the process has already been mapped, perfect, like don’t reinvent the wheel. But if not, create those documents, have your team create those documents, get the research out, lay it out in a way where you have a process map so you can find where the redundancies are, you can find where the gaps are, and then kind of help them in a much more powerful manner because you can show, hey, if I did this, the impact of this is gonna be like very immediate.

Randy Likas (14:28.493)
Yeah.

Randy Likas (14:55.053)
Yep.

Hassan Irshad (14:56.331)
And then I would say just to close it out, it’s all about the quick wins. Because like I said, trust building is a key, key area and the quick wins allow you to actually build that trust. Because it’s like, hey, I know you have two books of problems. Let me take the ones that I can like that are low hanging fruit and let me just solve that for you. Immediately you get the trust where like, hey, this person just allowed me and this could be

Randy Likas (15:20.568)
Yep.

Hassan Irshad (15:26.615)
from tiny little things, like which I have experienced where it’s like, hey, we are doing this, we get a flow error, but like there’s no description of the flow error, so we don’t know what we’re looking at. That could be just like how it was positioned in the past. In my discovery work, I learned that I was like, okay, let me just change and let me just train you on this. And they were like, this just solved me like an hour of me figuring out in the CRM system what was going on. So yeah, I think that’s important.

Randy Likas (15:52.174)
Yep. So I have a couple of follow ups before we transition over to 60. So where does, in your discovery process, does the KPI discussion happen? Does it happen early as far as understanding your key internal customers’ KPIs and how they’re measured and what problems they have to hit those? Or do the KPI conversations come a little bit later after you’ve got more of a sort of general understanding of kind of what’s going on?

Hassan Irshad (16:19.401)
That’s a great question. think the conversations happen when you’re meeting the key stakeholders on getting the lay of the land. You want to know what drives them, ask them about their KPIs. That is definitely in the discovery phase trying to find what motivates you. KPIs could totally be not aligning. That’s where revenue operations become a need.

departments are actually working in silos, they have different KPIs driving. So I would say when you’re doing that, understand what the overall business is focused on and then make a judgment like further down the line is like, are these departments that have their individual KPIs aligning with this overarching goal of a business? And you’ll notice a lot of times when they hire DevOps is probably the answer is no, right?

They hired rev -ops to kind of come in and like to kind of fix it. Yeah, so I think that KPI discussion happens a little early on, but you do not stop learning about it. You do not, you keep on asking about those KPIs because at the end of the day, you want to know what they care about and for you to help them. It’s like, I feel like you’re like a doctor. Like you want to go in and you got to, if you don’t ask those questions, you don’t know what the way the pain is, you cannot resolve it.

Randy Likas (17:42.636)
Yeah. And what about KPIs for the RevOps organization? When are those discussed and what are some examples of maybe the KPIs that RevOps is measured against?

Hassan Irshad (17:50.593)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (17:55.085)
No, no, absolutely. think those conversations probably because after the discovery phase, I would say like it comes in slightly between the transition of 3060, right? Because now you’ve understood what the company’s goals are. You have understood what the department, individual departments’ goals are. Now you want to also, again, not operate in a vacuum and set up KPIs that don’t align with the entire business, right? So you want to make sure you’re aligning with

that exact overarching company goal. So I would say, yeah, you start setting up your KPIs accordingly. If you have a team, you want to make sure you understand first of all, strengths and weaknesses of those teams to create certain KPIs internally. I have a process of you can always rank projects within because with revenue operations, it can get little tricky on how you actually

rank, right? You can, of course, have very clear metrics of saying like revenue increase, conversion rates grow up, like win rate goes up. All of those are very viable, trackable metrics that I would say do. But then there’s this qualitative part that nobody talks about. And then you want to quantify it. Whereas like, you’ll find in revenue operations talking to a lot of people is like, hey, I do a lot of other things that are basically not really like direct number related like that. But that is

creating positive impact every day. So the way I do it is I create internal KPIs on like how a project was actually executed. And part of this 30 day setup would be, do we have a project management system? Do we have some things that, how do we take requests? How do we get back to our stakeholders? How do we summarize this is what we have delivered, right? And all of that, if you have that in place, allows you to create those revenue operations KPIs much easily. It needs to be

Randy Likas (19:34.158)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (19:50.893)
Basically, you use the smart methodology to kind of like go towards that.

Randy Likas (19:56.494)
Yep. And then let’s leave CRM out of it for a moment, but you mentioned something about like the tech stack audit. In that sort of first 30 days, what are the kind of key areas that you focus on there and how do you identify either inefficiencies or gaps that you might have in your stack?

Hassan Irshad (20:04.596)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (20:15.053)
Absolutely. yeah, keeping this here, I’m out for a second. right, there’s a few things that like I’ve noticed in the trend of revenue operations for the past couple of years is like, people have a lot of tools, right? And then, especially if you’re a revenue operations leader who just joined an org and you’re like an individual contributor, it could be overwhelming. We have like 10 different tools doing 10 different things. I would say take a step back.

take the holistic view of what these tools are doing, because it could be someone who predates you’d purchase because they used it at a previous company, they love that tool, and I’ve seen those legacy things there, which is not really planned for scale. So one of the things that I do is when I’m auditing it, I just start creating a map of these tools in a place where it’s like, how much of this is actually integrated with your CRM right now and how much kind of just sits outside?

Randy Likas (21:13.602)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (21:13.793)
And then knowing as revenue operations with years, it actually comes in like, you know the capabilities of these tools, right? So you’re like, okay, if outreach I have, for example, can do three other things, but we are spending X X amount of money on a tool that just does forecasting, can I consolidate something here? And again, I’m not saying the answer is always yes. The answer is like, you ask those questions and then you’ll get there.

Randy Likas (21:39.394)
Let’s have a conversation about it, right?

Hassan Irshad (21:41.727)
Exactly. And you open up and I’m sure, because part of revenue operations is like optimization, right? Optimization in my head is a very simple formula. You reduce costs or you increase performance, right? You increase revenue, reduce costs. So I’m like, okay, where can you actually do that? So when you’re doing your tech stack audit, one of the key areas would be like, you want to look at utilization, right? People, if you have seats that nobody actually use, you have login.

timestamps and you see like, people are not even logging in. Do you have a use again? This will be part of your discovery phase as well, right? When you’re doing it, you understand, okay, from this stage to this stage, you have, let’s say you’re assigning a CSM, like what tool do you use? Like, do you have a process for it? How do you assign these people in what timeframe? Do you have an SLA? You ask all these questions and you’ll come text, text starts. Basically, you’ll notice like flipping into these conversations.

We’re like, yeah, well, we have something. We use a ChilliPiper. We do this. You will get to those conversations as a wider net, but always have the bigger picture here, because this is a discovery phase. And you want to understand how things are used, how they’re utilized, is there an impact there you can make immediate?

Randy Likas (23:00.184)
Yep. And so now let’s bring the CRM back into the picture. Now, we’ve kind of looked at things like utilization and over. How do you then look at CRM as a component of that overall stack? I guess what are some of the essential elements that you consider when you have these other tools? I don’t want to leave the question, so I’ll leave it at that.

Hassan Irshad (23:04.237)
Yeah.

Hassan Irshad (23:14.54)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (23:22.999)
Yeah, no, absolutely. think the way I see it is like the go to market tech stack is an ecosystem, right? And right at the center of that is the CRM. Like the way I see it is like you want to create any as you start asking like teams where their data relies, you’ll notice that like, you know, there could be no single source of truth. And again, it’s not a

Utopia you cannot get to. You can absolutely get to a single source of truth if you put the CRM at the heart of it and then all the other things are actually supporting it. like if you’re using CRM systems like Salesforce or HubSpot even, all integrations are already available there. It’s just how you design and how you architect this system. And then bring it all into the same place that it will also increase your adoption because people don’t really have to leave the system to go other places to find this data.

you’re in there and this will allow you to kind of increase the synergy between these tools. So yeah, I would definitely see this as a heart and then everything else is kind of like complimenting it, like going a little further down and specializing in something.

Randy Likas (24:33.102)
Right. Yep. No, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So let’s transition to then after the first three days and after the discovery process, we’re going to go into the next, into the sort of the 30 to 60 or 31 to 60. How do you balance sort of continuing that audit that you beginning to implement with like new processes and new technologies?

Hassan Irshad (24:43.767)
Easy.

Hassan Irshad (24:51.629)
Yeah, absolutely. I think once you do the analysis on the discovery phase, there is a fine balance that you have to keep here, which is like, you do wanna, now it’s like 30 to 60, so there’s a certain level of expectation that it comes with here from Revaus. It’s like, hey, Revaus is gonna start producing some things here and start flexing their Revaus muscles to say. So what I would say is like, keep a fine balance between like that experience

roaring phase and kind of like the impact here. So the way I named the 60 day phase is basically it’s alignment and it’s control. So you want to create alignment between your teams. And again, like when we said like APIs, are these teams operating in silo? Do they even meet on a regular basis? Do they even talk on a regular basis? Do we talk about as a company goal? Like, hey, this is our quarterly, you know,

metrics that we have to hit across the company for this is this, are they all actually doing those? That’s again, that cross collaboration sits at the heart of it. So I think when you are in the 3060, you want to create that alignment between the teams. want to create, you want to be the catalyst for that change if it’s not happening too. And that is creating immediate impact, right? But it’s also, no one’s going to say like, no, we don’t like collaborating with our teams. Right? It’s like,

Okay, you move towards that, you find the internal politics, you kind of navigate towards it or bring them all into the same space. Again, there’s going to be like controls after that that you want to put in place. Now that you have kind of like learned about priorities, pain points, and there’s certain controls that you want to put in place that is like, let’s say you are working with a marketing team or sales team and there’s this

tiny little things that can, if you add like, let’s say, a classic example for sales is like, there’s close dates, like people don’t manage their closes very well sometimes. And you pull a certain report, you find out how many of these close days are actually usually, let’s say, in the past, you find the problem, have the conversations and interviews with sales, like is like, why is this happening? Get to the root cause. And sometimes they’ll be like, hey, I do this on my spreadsheet, right?

Hassan Irshad (27:15.597)
It’s just not in the CRM. And then in this discovery, you’re going to go a little deeper and say like, okay, would it be good if I made you a report that you can inline edit that kind of works like a sheet? Right? We were like, most of the time we were like, sure, yeah, it’s not going to hurt my process. It looks better. I don’t have to do double work. You basically justify it by logic and say, you know, I can help you get this better. Again, this, the 3060.

Randy Likas (27:28.194)
Yep. Yep.

Hassan Irshad (27:44.461)
is a time where I just put a control in place and said like, hey, there is something that will stop this bad behavior from happening. But it comes from logic. It comes from the trust I built in the first 30 days with these people. And kind of I’m helping them. And that’s an immediate impact you start putting in place. So yeah, alignment and control is I feel like that. also I would say remove barriers. I mean, depending on your org, I’ve worked on

bigger odds such as ADP and then smaller startups. And there’s a lot of like politics sometimes to also navigate, right? So I would say put the controls in place where revenue operations is not like your hands are not tied. You people, you always find a sponsor in the art that is like, you have my blessing to go fix things, right? Because change is always met with resistance, sorry. And then what you do is,

you kind of make sure that trust overpowers that, right? It’s like, okay, you have the ability to kind of make people’s lives better, then why not?

Randy Likas (28:51.47)
Yeah. So it sounds like, and I’m going to replay this back to make sure I’m capturing correctly. So it sounds like, you know, if you’re looking for sort of some indicators of success by that 60 day mark, you’re looking for things like, you know, am I improving alignment of the different teams together? And if we are, like, that’s one indicator of success, right? Am I putting the proper controls in place that are fixing things like bad forecasting processes or procedures? Are we moving the needle there?

Hassan Irshad (29:02.817)
Mm -hmm.

Randy Likas (29:19.782)
And are we removing barriers that is preventing us from achieving some things? Would that be accurate to say like those are reasonable indicators that your plan that you are putting in place is actually starting to have an impact?

Hassan Irshad (29:31.841)
Yeah, absolutely. think there’s those and I would also even add a further layer. There’s the standard metrics. Like I said, those are very clear indicators, right? I would say in the discovery phase when I’m doing it, I usually find the baseline, right? If you don’t have a baseline, it’s very hard to give you a measurable impact. So if somebody says like, it takes me this, this, this amount of time to do that. Okay, that’s my baseline. And when I’m making the impact, I can show

the vent here, I can show the impact. And then you have standard revenue impact, you have conversion rates, you have other things. So I would say those are fair indicators of success with all the other ones that kind of like loop in there as well. Yeah.

Randy Likas (30:18.242)
Yeah. So is this also the point where you start thinking about maybe how you evolve the tech stack? So for example, you might identify that a tool that you’re currently using is capturing data, but it’s not writing it back to Salesforce, that’s preventing some of these barriers that we talked about. Or we have a gap in our stack that’s not meeting that. Is this kind of where you’re thinking about evolving what identifying the gaps, but evolving what

tools waiting to purchase in the future.

Hassan Irshad (30:49.645)
I think the 3060 is where basically you’re starting to give your strategy a design and kind of shape. It’s like, okay, now I’m well far enough into these problem statements and other things where I can start envisioning like a picture. And again, this is just setting the foundations of that. It’s like, okay, where do we wanna go as a company, as a department, as a go -to -market org, and then start

Randy Likas (30:56.44)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Randy Likas (31:09.26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Randy Likas (31:16.973)
Yeah.

Hassan Irshad (31:18.381)
tackling those like eventually, like I would say, yeah, it starts making the shape of your strategy plan on what it’s gonna be. And we’ll dive that deeper into that on the 90 day plan for sure.

Randy Likas (31:29.198)
Okay. Can you share some, like, let’s get tactical for a moment. Like, what are some examples of maybe some creative solutions that you’ve implemented where maybe you’ve taken what was before a manual process and automated it for sales marketing or customer success?

Hassan Irshad (31:33.654)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (31:41.974)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, a classic example I give is like the company I was working before FEB funders up had a very unique business model. So it was like a B2B sales that did not have contracts. Again, that makes revenue operations a very big question mark. How do you do revenue operations with no contracts in a B2B SaaS space? But one of the core areas that challenge that I was trying to solve there is like, how do you comp people

and how do you actually pay them out and what the system is? And in my discovery phase, I figured out there’s no good way that the company was running on. It was more animal. When we went down in analysis and talked to these commission softwares, it was a little complex thing to solve because it’s more transactional based. So a lot of those tools were not able to kind of like equip. Now a lot of that improvement has happened through these tools.

Well, this is a couple of years ago. So one of the things that I saw is we created an in -house commissions app in Salesforce that kind of read every single data point for a customer’s revenue for each day into Salesforce in the backend. And we were able to kind of create a more custom commissions app. Again, going back to my discovery phase, I learned there was a lot of pain points here. Reps would complain they’re not being paid correctly.

It was a manual cumbersome process. There was no clear leader on who was actually managing it. It’s like sometimes it’s fine and sometimes it’s this person. So what I want to do is like basically move towards a newer world where we had this commission app natively built in Salesforce again, bringing in the CRM adoption and everything. Had those data points fed in, kind of parsing out like who gets paid when.

Hassan Irshad (33:40.353)
And then create that visibility to just close the loop. Like everybody had a running dashboard of their commissions on daily basis that they can pop up and they’re like, I know what I’m getting paid this. And we even created like forecasting of like, if you close your pipe, what are you gonna get paid?

Randy Likas (33:56.354)
You probably made reps a whole lot happier too with that process.

Hassan Irshad (33:59.917)
absolutely. mean, my theory is always like, if you do not see where you can go, you can’t control it, right? So you work in sales. So if you do not know what you’re hitting on a daily basis, if you do not know how your quota looks, if you do not know what your payout is going to look like, you’re just like operating in a vacuum again. Like, and you want to make sure we give the reps.

Randy Likas (34:09.132)
Yeah, yep.

Hassan Irshad (34:25.101)
And again, this is not only for sales, you wanna do this for marketing, you wanna do this for CX because Revenue Operations has a much wider net.

Randy Likas (34:32.942)
Yep. Great. OK. Now let’s transition then to the third phase, right? And as I was thinking about this, it’s probably not so much like the days. It’s the phases, right? Because you’re to be accomplishing some things ahead of others. But when you get to that 90 -day mark, right, how should a fully operational rev ops department or model look like at that 90 -day mark?

Hassan Irshad (34:38.188)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (34:57.197)
Yeah, absolutely. think at that 90 day mark, general expectations are like, now you’re setting the, you have kind of almost set the foundations for your vision. Now this is the phase I called basically, you know, your vision and execution phase. So now the expectation is that you’re actually creating a roadmap for DevOps that goes for the next two quarters for at least, right? That aligns the priorities

of the business, but also you have figured out like what are the your wins that you need to actually put in place now for this to bear fruit, let’s say a quarter, two quarters out, right? You’re starting to create that roadmap along with the end users, right? Not like again, operating separately, you want to make sure, okay, if I know sales has this thing that needs to be tackled in the next quarter, and that makes sense. Again, it’s not like…

A lot of times you’ll find departments like my things are the most important, but you want to make sure you cut through the noise and know like, okay, is this going to make, because DevOps is a strategic role, not only like just like, we’re clearing out tickets. So you want to make sure that like, this is going to generate a revenue impact for the business immediately or in the next quarter, or it has a larger purpose for the next two quarters that if I put this in place now, let’s say you,

I’ll go with the simplest example. If you put a field that was not being tracked before, you want to have the next two quarters of data to be able to go into third quarter and say, like, we have the analysis on this, right? But you want to put that in place now. So that dictates your basically roadmap plan. And within this roadmap plan, also want to, we talked about tech stack earlier, you want to go further.

Randy Likas (36:35.522)
Right. Yep. Yep.

Hassan Irshad (36:50.355)
and deeper into that. Like it’s not like just changing it, but you want to meet the point of contacts for all these tools. You want to see what extra support you have available that’s going to help you relieve some of this pressure on your roadmap, right? It’s like, Hey, you have some vendor that does something for you. Great. It’s lifting something out of my team, taking my work. Amazing. That’s those are good vendors. I want to make sure I double down on those relationships again.

So the way I see this phase is like it brings everything together, but now you’re executing right now. You’re like, okay, the plan is there. I’m going to launch her again. Like I’m very mid this phase right now. So publishing a plan for like roadmap for the next two quarters and start executing on some of these quick wins that you have identified and celebrate and show the wins. think a lot of times again for the people who

have worked in rev ops or sales ops for long enough would know it has always been a challenge like previously to show the impact of revenue operations or sales operations. Over time now it’s something that people focus on more. So people are like, hey, now you have the seat on the strategy table. So it’s very different conversations, but it’s always good to show your wins. Like if you make the impact,

Randy Likas (38:01.272)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (38:16.811)
and it’s measurable, you have the baseline, you know what the impact you made, show it, like, celebrate it like you close a deal.

Randy Likas (38:24.622)
Yep, yep. So I imagine as you’re implementing the 90 day plan, you’re introducing a lot of change to an organization, right? You’re introducing a change that maybe, you know, it’s easy if something is broken and you’re going in and kind of fixing it, but there’s probably instances in which you’re trying to align, you know, more senior stakeholders around, you know, changing the status quo when maybe they don’t want to change the status quo because they’re kind of comfortable with the way that it is. And so,

Hassan Irshad (38:35.991)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (38:49.751)
Mm -hmm.

Randy Likas (38:53.608)
I guess the question is more around how you address the change management.

Hassan Irshad (38:53.644)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And 100 % that happens, right? It’s like change is difficult, especially if you do not know what the impact is going to be. So the way I try to do is interviews with these people. Again, if you approach this change as if you were selling a product, right? If you know that this person wants this change in your discovery phase and getting to that point,

you’re not giving them something they didn’t want. Like if they’re like, there’s a version two and version three of something that is gonna make their lives better, easier. Again, there are ways you can remove the barriers for this change and then get the stakeholders and senior leaders aligned from day one, right? You’re like, okay, I’m gonna help you achieve this, this, this, but you know, I need a little bit of like backing there for your teams and sit in those meetings with sales, with CX.

be the fly on the wall, hear the problems. If you hear the problems and come back with a solution, like nine out of 10 times, you would not meet with resistance. And again, it’s not like something broken, but there’s something that you can improve. There’s something that you can show them like, hey, there’s a better way of doing these things. Again, it’s hard to take change, but I think always be questioning status quo, even if you created the process. So yeah, but I hear you. Like there’s definitely…

Randy Likas (40:17.772)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hassan Irshad (40:22.569)
resistance that does come in, but there are ways to overcome it.

Randy Likas (40:24.817)
Yep.

Yeah. And it probably also goes back to like, why did why are they looking to create this process to begin with this whole this function to begin with, right? Like there’s there’s there’s going to be necessary change. so to what degree do you have to have executive sponsorship to sort of backing backing you up on a lot of this change? And how important is that for you to make sure that this that what the plan you’re putting in place is effective?

Hassan Irshad (40:49.665)
No, that’s a great point. think executive sponsorship is very important, right? Because again, there are, that also is a lever you can pull to remove the barriers for change. So I would say good thing is as the trend has changed for revenue operation to sit in those strategic meetings with, you know, all the C -level leaders, I think that allows alignment and get the executive sponsor there that kind of

keeps on pushing, it could be anyone. It could be your GTN president who’s running the whole arc, or it could go to head of sales, they’re saying like, hey, I can overcome this. Like you can find your champion, again, internally, you’re doing the sales process. So you can find your champion and double down on that. You find your detractors and stay away a little. And you’re like, okay, now I’m gonna implement this. And again, to an earlier point, you’re not…

there is going to be more resistance if you do not hear the pain, if you do not listen.

Randy Likas (41:52.11)
which is why the discovery portion is so important, right? It’s amazing, it’s amazing the parallels between what you’re talking about today and in a well -run sales process, what they look like, right? It’s a lot of.

Hassan Irshad (41:55.85)
Absolutely.

Hassan Irshad (42:02.889)
Absolutely. It’s that and even like if you were a startup or any other org just launching a product, like how do you do? If you’re doing a value listen to your customers and all go to market is your customer.

Randy Likas (42:18.19)
Okay, so I’ve got just a couple more questions and then we’ll transition to our lightning round here. So I know this was about the first 90 days, but help me understand what happens after that, meaning refinement or adjustments that you need to make. Because I would imagine you need to have the time and the data to help support the plan that you put in place. So you don’t want to change things too quickly, but that you do have to optimize, right? So how do you do that? How do you go about doing that?

Hassan Irshad (42:20.428)
Hmm?

Hassan Irshad (42:31.691)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (42:45.471)
Yeah, I think that’s a very good point. think one of the core areas that I think revenue operations and and is seasoned revenue operation leader and instill in your team is don’t be reactive, right? Be proactive on those so that will allow you to say like OK, I launched for example going back to my commissions app. We launched version one like I’m making a road map and down the road map. I know that this needs a refresher down the line.

where business priorities have changed, comp plans have changed, things have changed. So second quarter, I’m also gonna add it into my roadmap as there’s a version two that needs to be worked on. Again, versioning is perfect. I think every single process, every single tool you launch, there has to be a continuous improvement in those. that’s going back to my economics days. There’s a concept

by an economist called creative destruction. And this is more like macro level, but I think you can apply it here where it’s like every couple of years, the process that you’re going to create is going to kind of like overcome and you can kind of like in a creative way, destroy what you had created in the past. Right. Again, all global companies do that. Like you use any app, it’s going to constantly come in with newer versions. You use any

Randy Likas (44:02.466)
Yep. Yep.

Hassan Irshad (44:13.485)
software is going to come up with versioning for this because they’re listening to you and making continuous improvements in those tools. So I would say that never ends. But how you prioritize is like, you want to make sure that something is in your roadmap so you’re basically listening to your end user, but then prioritize what’s going to actually come in first because you know what’s going to make the most immediate revenue impact for your org. And that gets you

Randy Likas (44:39.564)
Yup. Yup.

Hassan Irshad (44:43.463)
like other people’s trust and like they become your champion internally. So yeah, I think that’s definitely very, very important.

Randy Likas (44:54.606)
So the last question I have is more of, I guess, an organizational design sort of reporting structure, right? So there’s a lot of conversation happening around where should rev ops report, right? Should Rev Ops report to the CRO, to operations, to finance? And so you’ve worked at four companies over the last 10 years. Where have you seen it be most effective for where Rev Ops should report?

Hassan Irshad (45:15.127)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (45:21.761)
that’s a great, you know, is a hot debate, right? And I have definitely strong opinions on it because working in revenue operations from internal, to me, it’s a very basic reasoning for it. It’s like, do not report, you do not report into the same people that you’re actually holding accountable for, right? And people do it,

like so wrong sometimes is like, hey, revenue operations reporting to sales. I’m like, is that sales ops? Are you looking at it like totally different lens? This is not revenue operations if you’re reporting to one department out of the three departments you serve, right? That’s not how any reporting channels should work because there’s conflict of interest. Like, would you wanna show those bad numbers to everyone for your own leaders? again, do you wanna…

make sure revenue operations doesn’t have that conflict of interest. So the best revenue operations that I’ve structures that I’ve worked with is revenue operations reporting into finance sometimes and reporting into CRO or reporting as a go -to -market department independently. So you have sales, marketing, customer success, and revenue operations that is sitting on the equal level right there. And it’s like,

Randy Likas (46:45.57)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (46:49.515)
I’m holding everyone accountable here. I’m making sure everyone optimizes. I’m listening to everyone’s problems and solving those. I think those are the structures where you do not have conflict of interest that allows revenue operations to sit on those strategic meetings and kind of be a brain trust there. Like you wanna basically use this extra secret sauce that you have in your end versus all the other companies. And you wanna…

make sure you empower them. You don’t want to look at it as like IT ops. you you’re, want to give them the value that they can actually create.

Randy Likas (47:26.647)
Yeah. Okay, so just out of curiosity, where does RevOps report today at FEV?

Hassan Irshad (47:33.633)
Yeah, so FEV Revenue Operations reported to Chief Customer Officer that holds sales, customer success, marketing, and revenue operations.

Randy Likas (47:44.206)
Got it, got it. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, well let’s transition. And this is more around, I guess, personal. you know, having the hindsight of the past 10 years of experience working in rev ops, what advice might you give your younger self who is just kind of getting in to help save some of the frustrations that you’ve had over the years?

Hassan Irshad (48:04.525)
Yeah, I would say to my younger self, be patient. There’s a lot of things that are usually thrown at you. And I feel like one of the few things is you have to be patient with all the people you deal with because a lot of this is like people management. If you have cross -collaboration, you want to make sure the patient is going to help you listen.

And if you break through that, right, then there’s success through this path. And I’ve learned this over time, right? It’s like, okay, now I’m sitting in these meetings and I let the people talk and I’m like listening, I’m taking notes. I’m like, okay, and then I’m coming like, where can I help you? Just change the wording on how you approach it. Like, it’s like, hey, I can do this and that and let me do this. Like, no, where do you need my help?

Where, because going back to like how you do discovery and sales, you want to ask the right questions. You want to, you don’t want to tell them what the product is and it was going to solve this and this in your life. No, you want to know what they need. So I think just having that patience when you’re dealing with the go -to -marketing and yeah, be grounded with that.

Randy Likas (49:22.828)
Yeah, great. What’s your favorite part of leading revenue operations at your company?

Hassan Irshad (49:30.121)
I would say just the constant cross collaboration with teams is something I enjoy a lot because what it gives you is like as a whole go to market organic company, gives you the Hawke’s eye view that not a lot of departments get. So that keeps like your entire, every day is like kind of like fun because like it’s a different problem you can tackle different departments and the

The connections you make through it, I would say the favorite part is when you solve the problems and then you get the gratitude. I think that’s very satisfying.

Randy Likas (50:12.673)
Now, there’s always a flip side to that question, which is the least favorite, or I often ask it a different way, which is like, what’s the hardest part of your job?

Hassan Irshad (50:15.287)
Mm

Hassan Irshad (50:22.603)
Yeah, I would say just keeping everything together can be challenging at times because revenue, especially like over the career, like now I have like a lot of more resources from senior leaders also giving resources to revenue operations. But I’ve been in those situations where you’re an IC, right? You’re an IC managing eight different tools and three departments kind of like problems.

Previously, if you were in sales operations, let’s say, or moved, you were doing one department at a time. Now you have three departments problems thrown at you and everyone’s like, solve, solve, solve. So I think what that allows or what that leads into is a little bit of burnout. think that’s something, that’s something like I would say my least favorite part is like at a point as a DevOps leader, you can have like 10 meetings a day and you do need time to actually work.

But I think, that’s, but again, like if you can take it, I think that’s amazing because that’s when it unlocks a lot of other things.

Randy Likas (51:29.046)
Yeah. Now what about when you’re not doing your job? What do you like to do personally and kind of what recharges the batteries?

Hassan Irshad (51:35.201)
Yeah, I DJ and I produce music. I produce house music. And that’s kind of like, I live in Brooklyn, so I have, I’m at the Macau house music. So that’s definitely something I enjoy. And then to just like get out of the burnout, I travel a lot, go to a different country or kind of like, you know, check out of all the problems and kind of like, you know, again, reset. And that allows you to kind of go back.

Randy Likas (52:05.198)
Yeah, 100%. What’s the next destination that you’ve got in mind?

Hassan Irshad (52:05.288)
to that law.

Hassan Irshad (52:11.533)
So the next destination I have in mind is probably going to be somewhere in Southeast Asia. So yeah, I’ve been there before, but I think that’s something that I have. I want to refresh.

Randy Likas (52:27.522)
Yeah, I always say, like, so I went on my honeymoon, we went to Thailand and we went to a couple different spots and I’m like, you have to go back because there’s no way you can cover everything that’s there in a week, two weeks, right? There’s just too much and so, yeah, yeah.

Hassan Irshad (52:43.309)
No, 100%. No, I have to do a revisit on my honeymoon I did last year in Japan.

Randy Likas (52:50.782)
And I want to go there. Yeah, for sure. OK. I want to be cognizant of time. I know we’re running really close here. What haven’t we discussed yet? Or what should I maybe have asked you about that you’d want to share with our audience in terms of being able to build an effective rev -ups plan?

Hassan Irshad (52:52.609)
You can go over and over again. It’s beautiful country.

Hassan Irshad (53:11.149)
Yeah, would say if I were to just look at it in like 30, 60, 90 again, is something that is in your control, right? You derive it, but I would say publish it, right? Again, have the visibility in the org to get to that point. That’s something that I would say is key. And again, I think we’re riding a wave for DevOps right now.

which is amazing. There’s a lot of like people just asking like, hey, what is revops? And kind of like, you know, getting that limelight, I think now is the time for people to kind of constantly be learning because there’s so many things happening. I would say, yeah, I’m forever a student. Like even if I’m going to be like 60, 70, I’ll be learning. I would say always, always do that. And again, 30, 60, 90 is subject to

Randy Likas (54:01.506)
Yeah.

Hassan Irshad (54:08.685)
change if you find something that can impact. Let’s say don’t take it as like a rigid, here’s a 30, 60, it’s true what we discussed, like it’s a phase, right? See it as a phase, again, like listen to people, right? Learn and help improve the next place you go. Like I’ve in the past, I get word in, this is my fifth company. The next place I go every single time, I take something new with me.

Randy Likas (54:25.378)
Yup. Yup.

Randy Likas (54:36.44)
Mm -hmm.

Hassan Irshad (54:37.707)
And I’m like, okay, now I’m a collection of so many good ideas. Right by the time you’re doing this again, you have learned something, you have improved something. Again, this is your version. This is your version to version three.

Randy Likas (54:49.622)
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Well, look, this was a really good episode. I think there’s a lot of very practical and pragmatic advice that people can take from this. So thank you for sharing your insights and your experience. Had a really good time talking with you. We’re looking at Friday afternoon right now, so I hope you have a really good weekend.

Hassan Irshad (55:08.823)
Yeah, you too. Thank you.

Randy Likas (55:09.742)
All right, thanks, son.