Revenue Operations pros are often the unsung heroes of revenue teams. Through their brilliant strategies and Revenue Operations Software they help provide insights, optimize processes and align teams to provide customers with a unified experience across their journey. And they’re only becoming more indispensable as time goes on – according to research by Gartner, “more than half (53%) of Chief Sales Officers are executing or considering developing a ‘revenue operations’ function” within the next year. So here at Revenue.io, we think it’s high time to give our ops stars the recognition they deserve!
With our 2022 Heroes of RevOps Contest, we hand-selected the top 25 RevOps practitioners of the year from an impressive list of over a hundred nominees. Our winner and finalists all demonstrated their commitment to one or more of the following:
So without further ado, let’s hear it for our RevOps heroes!
Our grand prize winner and top #RevOpsHero is Jen Bergren. Jen revolutionized the partner program at Remotish, and actively helped grow it into a channel that accounts for 35% of the company’s revenue. She did this by creating a system that spans every aspect of partnerships, from the partner onboarding process (which is integrated into their CRM) to the gifts or commission that partners receive when a deal closes (which is integrated into their direct mail service and accounting program).
She also created a custom “Partner” object in Remotish’s CRM which allows the team to track revenue for commissions payments, along with the impact that different partners have on sales. The custom object where their info is stored also serves as a directory that Remotish employees can use to refer clients to partners for services that they don’t offer in-house.
Jen’s partner infrastructure spans multiple departments, team members, and platforms, and her coworkers insist that growing their partnerships would have been untenable without her. She truly embodies the spirit of RevOps, and we’re excited to honor her at the top of this list!
Briana just made a move to ASAPP but at her last organization, she wore many hats, leading three departments at once: FP&A, BI & RevOps. And if that weren’t impressive enough, the RevOps function that she implemented helped contribute to a 3x jump in revenue over the course of a single year. She’s also a respected leader who grew a cohesive team from 1 to 30 to oversee Sales, Marketing, CX & Product Development. She’s passionate about RevOps execution, and seeing more diversity/intersectionality in Tech across the board. She is an active member of community and is continually looking for opportunities to level up and share her knowledge with others.
While Steven currently works at Logikcull, a former coworker of his wanted to make sure he got recognition for the work he did while heading up Revenue Operations at Welcome Software. He took an organization that was siloed and far from data driven, and helped them work together as one revenue function. Two of his most impressive results were increasing retention from 65 > 85% by helping the customer success team identify key indicators of churn prior to renewal time, and decreasing the sales cycle by 15% by enabling the sales team with target accounts and an overhauled outreach scheme. He did all this while starting out as a team of one and then hiring junior employees and training them up to become key members of the GTM team.
Asia Corbett is a prominent voice in the world of RevOps, where she heads up a community of 18K revenue professionals. In the words of Tom Slocum, Community Manager at RevGenius, “Within just a few months she has fixed processes, introduced SOPS, tech & key workflows. She is deep within the Revops communities & always bringing fresh ideas. Her brand on LinkedIn is all about tactical advice & starting discussions we need to have. I cannot say more about her & why she would be fit for the Top B2B Revops Leader!”
Drew orchestrated a thoughtful redesign of how Alto was using objects within their CRM. While initially multiple departments in the Revenue team were using the same Ticket object to record multiple types of data, they were running into issues with the limitations of the object. To solve this, Drew created different objects for each team that made the system cleaner and more efficient to use and report on (Sales = Deals, CX = Tickets, etc.). He also ensured that the objects spoke to each other and records could be associated within the system, so that no data was lost in the handoff from one team to another – prioritizing the customer experience every step of the way.
When Everfi went through a big round of hiring, Caroline leapt into gear to make sure that the new employees felt set up for success even in a virtual setting. She worked closely with revenue leaders and talent to redesign our hiring process to make it easier for prospect reps to get a sense of working at Everfi, then created a robust 7-week program that combined classroom training (virtual facilitation), manager-led coaching activities, weekly emails with activities that new hires could complete on their own and with their manager, weekly 1:1 coaching opportunities, and 5 critical certifications to ensure that new hires could apply the critical skills they needed to build & close business (lagging indicators). Thanks to Caroline’s hard work, new employees at Everfi are ready to hit the ground running right after they finish onboarding.
In an industry that often says sales is an art, Em is a firm believer that sales is a science. She’s spent her career advising teams and building training on how to make data based decisions, which is how DataRobot ended up hiring her as a consultant – but they quickly realized her value to the organization and asked her to join the team full-time. She had one condition: that the company would prioritize LGBTQIA issues and would pledge to DEIB initiatives. Coworkers say that she’s not only been instrumental in the new sales motion and direction of the company, but has built an engaged and inspired PrideBots community, and helped pioneer the DEIB vision as well. Em motivates them all to be better people and professionals.
Eric has spent the last 8 years working with companies to build the sales and revenue operations functions from the ground up, often starting with disparate systems and processes that require a lot of cleanup. At Demostack, he’s particularly valuable to the product team, ensuring that what they’re building meets the needs of RevOps practitioners everywhere. His coworker Paige Robinson, Marketing Manager at Demostack, says “He enjoys taking chaos and turning it into efficiency, building processes, and implementing tools to enable people to work productively and happily without feeling burdened.”
Darren joined the RevOps team at Instructure with the intent of driving business intelligence for one of their regional teams, but quickly grew to providing insights for the business across Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Pacific countries, in addition to half of North America. One of his biggest achievements was optimizing a forecasting process that now has 97% forecast accuracy by the sixth week of each quarter. Darren truly epitomizes the goal of driving predictable revenue growth.
Marisha is a patient and tireless revenue operations manager, who always shows up and is willing to do whatever it takes to make her tech stack work well for the revenue team. When ITPro TV was acquired by ACI, she championed the products that her sales team depended on most, to make sure that they had continuity and the ability to continue doing their best work.
Mahesh has been at AppViewX for almost a decade, and he has a long history of helping the company leave behind old ways of working to embrace new paradigms. He built a marketing function from the ground-up within a sales-driven organization and introduced both a marketing automation platform and a CRM to meet the business’s needs, then built out a marketing operations and a sales operations team before “sales ops” was even a word. He now spearheads revenue operations at the company. As a former colleague of his put it, “AppViewX is a leader in Implementing the Ops stream, and the entire credit goes to Mahesh.”
Kate has managed multiple projects for Brainshark over the past year (including a change in GTM structure), but the standout was her management of the organization’s move over to Lightning. Throughout the process of moving a 20 year org over, she and her team completed lots of field analysis, reviewed processes and optimized them, and updated the UI with role-specific home screens customized utility bars to help everyone access data more easily and be more productive at their jobs.
Toral manages commissions at Tempus, and has been instrumental in making sure that everyone across the organization has a very clear understanding of where they are at, and what they need to achieve, thanks to her easy-to-follow weekly activity and financial reporting. She continuously prioritizes the growth and stability of the sales team, and has been instrumental in gaining their support for new business initiatives. Jessica Clover, Director of Sales Operations at Tempus FX, said “While she is always actively conscious of the company’s bottom line, she is equally as conscious of how decisions impact salespeople’s lives. It’s the humanity in her work that really sets her apart from other revenue operations staff members that I have worked with before.”
Anna was nominated by a former coworker for her contributions at Voltera, where she engineered a CRM that had the potential for incredibly clean data. Yet after her maternity leave, she came back to some data inconsistencies – and then worked tirelessly to correct the data and ensure that all future data collected would be correctly categorized. All this while reporting on the important metrics the marketing team used to determine success, and running new and existing promotional campaigns.
Matt built a partner referral system in ezyVet’s CRM that only takes 3 clicks (3-5 seconds) to refer an active/won deal to one of their partners. Prior to this system, the sales team was submitting demo forms on behalf of their customers, sending manual emails across to partners, CC’ing customers in introductions, and in some instances simply passing up partnership opportunities because of the amount of effort involved. Not only was this inefficient, but it was almost impossible to report on. Matt’s new system has saved the team time, driven up referral rates, increased partnership adoption rates and also taken their reporting to another level. In Matt’s own words, “ I really love coming up with ideas like this and implementing them. All these small changes compound to grow our revenue.”
Olga has focused on the intersection of Marketing, Sales, Finance and Business Operations throughout her career. “Her deep understanding of the dependencies each of these functions has with each other has enabled her to work across the RevOps teams, driving alignment and a connected dialogue that has driven growth in all of the organizations she’s been associated with. It’s been exciting to observe her career flourish, leaning into new experiences, leading her teams through ambiguity and driving world class revenue operations outcomes,” said former colleague Tom Rogers, VP of Global Growth Marketing & Operations at Rapid7.
In the time since Demar started at Zift Solutions in May 2021, he’s already made an impact – making Salesforce more approachable, continuously answering questions for team members, and bringing a sense of cross-departmental unity to the revenue team. “Because of Demar, we are a more data-centric organization as a whole. As someone in Marketing who can often feel siloed from Sales/RevOps, this is incredibly valuable for me getting a deeper understanding of our business,” said Kelsey Worsham, Content Marketing Manager at Zift.
In just the last two years, Leore has established two RevOps departments, in addition to founding the first Israeli professional community of operations leaders, named “The Optimizers.” At Buildots, she’s known for boosting sales and renewals while reducing churn, thanks to a strong focus on operational efficiency, employee productivity, team cohesion, and organizational profitability.
When Anastasiia was at IRIS Software Group, she ran into an interesting problem: the business had nearly a dozen different CRM systems, with no opportunity to consolidate them. The sales team’s data was scattered all over the place, and they were forced to rely on retroactive reporting from the finance team, rather than on real-time sales figures. Over the course of just a few weeks, Anastasiia figured out a way to create a sales orders book, relying on a business productivity suite that the team already had. It allowed any salesperson to log the sale of any product at any time, and in turn presented the data in live dashboards so that managers and reps could easily see how they were doing in relation to the team’s goals. While uptake was initially slow, the dataset generated by the sales orders book started making appearances in every report, every dashboard, and every board presentation across the sales department, effectively solving the data visibility issue that had plagued the sales team for so long.
Tyson was a founding member of the marketing team at CrossCountry Consulting, where he was continuously frustrated by an inability to tie marketing efforts to won opportunities. But just within the past year, he made the business case for a RevOps team and within one month was able to complete the necessary changes to their marketing automation and CRM, test the reporting, and present a dashboard to executive leadership that finally gave them insight into how well their marketing campaigns were performing. This was a huge win for the marketing team, not only because it helped them prove their worth to the business, but also because it helped them prioritize the campaigns that helped to generate the most revenue.
The ultimate goal of RevOps practitioners is to make sure that every member of the revenue team feels supported and like they have a resource they can take all their questions to. Annie hits this out of the park, as Michelle Hayes at Sendoso explains: “As an SDR, new to tech, I ask a ton of questions about our tech stack, how things work, and why sometimes they don’t. Who’s always there? Annie is. From day one, she has always been there to help, educate, fix, listen, and remove roadblocks! She is also one of the first ones to shout out team wins. In short, she makes my life easier, and I have no doubt that the whole Sendoso team would agree. Everyone needs an Annie, and I’m so grateful that she is ours!”
Corey McGarr, Director of Global Digital Marketing at Instructure, had nothing but praise for Ryan’s ability to lead a RevOps team. “Ryan is the perfect balance of an empathetic and analytical leader. She is a stellar communicator, both in building relationships and delivering on results with external teams, and in establishing trust and understanding within her own team. As a leader, she is fully capable of digging in and performing the tasks that she asks any member of her team to do. She is committed to supporting and mentoring young talent, and the RevOps team at Instructure would be a shadow of what it is today without her on the team.”
When George first started at Invicti, he was the third leader in the role in less than twelve months. The team was struggling, because they didn’t feel empowered to make business decisions and they continually had to jockey for the right to be heard within the company. But George immediately turned this around, improving the team’s morale and standing within the organization to facilitate cross-functional alignment between Marketing, Sales, CS, Finance, and BI. A member of his team said “It’s truly refreshing having a leader who cares about our well-being and is willing to be the objective party that fights for what’s right, both for ourselves and for the business.”
Siva previously led RevOps at Freshworks, where he was instrumental in helping the company grow from $30M to $200M ARR. During this period of >6x revenue growth, he built and led a team of twenty-five revenue operations professionals that supported the global revenue organization (direct sales, channel sales, customer success, marketing demand-gen and sales engineering). He’s also an active member of the global RevOps community, sharing the knowledge he gained from his experience at Freshworks with other operations professionals.
Charis started her career as an ADR at Greenhouse, but was incredibly metrics-driven and eventually pivoted into Sales Ops. During her time at Unqork, she’s made great strides in establishing processes, start-to-finish implementation projects, and in depth analyses – ultimately being promoted to Rev. Ops Lead in less than a year. In the words of Aparna Muralidharan, Global Director of Sales Operations at Unqork, “She is a brilliant star and can accomplish anything – everything she touches turns gold. Charis is the best!”
Want to learn more about RevOps, or find some tips to get onto the list next year? Check out these great resources: