Combining Ops, HR, and Finance with Kenny Hsu, VP of Revenue Operations at AuditBoard

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Kenny Hsu, VP of Revenue Operations at AuditBoard. They discuss how sales leadership differs from the sales ops function, how sales reps can bring out the best value of their company through pricing flexibility, and how internal relationships can help secure investment in sales ops team expansion.

• Kenny’s Linkedin
• AuditBoard Website

How many of your sales reps hit quota? 

Ideally, 50-70% of the sales reps should hit their sales quota, but it’s only a best practice. Sales leadership needs more context than just a percentage to provide more accurate and effective help to the sales team. 

Sales ops vs sales leadership 

Sales leadership has to work on establishing a collaborative relationship between ops teams, HR, and finance. Ops teams help strengthen decisions that finance, HR, and other critical business teams make by providing them data. Likewise, sales, marketing, and customer success must collaborate to create and implement a solid go-to-market strategy. 

AuditBoard’s main focus with revenue ops

Kenny’s team has been working hard to put AuditBoard on a fair footing with their pricing. They’re close to hitting a $100M revenue year and building up foundations that help them scale through reliable forecasting.   

AuditBoard has forty sales reps in the US and Canada and is growing with an eye toward international expansion. Kenny’s revenue ops team has four members with an internal expansion on the cards.

How can ops teams guide sales reps to bring out the best value?

Pricing of smaller startups can be moulded to bring out the value in the positioning of the company and its evolution. As the company grows and establishes its reputation, the brand becomes the anchor of the value and pricing can remain untouched to a large extent. Value, in the case of large companies, is a matter of the right mindset and right level of confidence during sale negotiations. 

How to convince your company to invest in your team? 

Building beneficial relationships with key stakeholders helps smooth the adoption of your strategy. Convince C-suite executives by either showing results for those investments or laying down solid, reliable plans to get an ROI on their investments. Then request your new hires as a part of these investment plans.

Recommended episodes

• The Most Difficult Job in the World with Carl-Johan Färnström, Head of Business Operations at Mynewsdesk
• The Six Pillars of Revenue Operations with Rhys Williams, VP Revenue Operations at Convercent
• Revenue Operations Manager: Ondrej Bosak of Exponea

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