How to Kick-Start Your RevOps Career with Cyndi Dozal

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt is joined by Cyndi Dozal, an expert in Revenue Operations. They discuss the need for financial exposure early on in your sales/rev ops career, creating a strategic sales and customer service workflow for high-ticket leads, and how Cyndi’s Rev Ops team works across functions to support them as they pivot in the post-pandemic world.

• Cyndi’s Linkedin

Inspiration for a Sales Ops career

Cyndi’s love for corporate finance and analysis took root in her undergrad years. After graduation, she joined a tech company in Silicon Valley, where she worked her way up to operational finance. She had a strong focus on business modeling, business forecasting, and working with the end decision-makers. 

Gradually, her role evolved to include working cross-functionally with multiple teams such as product and BI for metrics and their presentation through dashboards. From there on, she was recruited to work more directly in sales and marketing ops and analytics roles, which eventually led her to work in Rev Ops. 

Should you get exposure to finance early in your Sales Ops career? 

Sales ops and revenue ops professionals work in a revenue-generating function that directly connects to company finance. Everything from planning headcount, compensation design, budgeting, building business cases, and building forecasts requires that you understand how budgets are created and how corporate finance works. This makes an early exposure to finance crucial for a sales ops/rev ops professional. 

You don’t have to start in finance, but at the earlier stages of your sales/rev ops career, it’s important to get a solid understanding of finance, modeling, and budgeting. 

Rev Ops structure 

On the sales side, in her previous role, Cyndi worked with roughly one hundred reps across three teams – inside sales, field (outside) sales, and strategic sales. Her previous company also had about thirty people in post-sales performance management and another thirty people working on onboarding and customer experience. They also had around thirty people in growth marketing and marketing ops. 

They also had a team of about 300 which included high-touch performance managers for key accounts and low-touch support teams, including off-shore support staff for more generalized customers. 

The biggest success in her 2021 Rev Ops team 

Cyndi started when her former Rev Ops function was in its infancy. COVID helped ramp up their client base and fueled their growth quickly. As they grew alongside the COVID-affected economy, they successfully pivoted to a B2C focus as a company. RevOps was able to provide cross-functional support for new campaigns and help the company increase its B2C customer base. 

Integrating a strategic sales focus across the company 

Through a partnership with sales leadership, Cyndi’s RevOps team analyzed different key stats. They identified a gap where they were unable to assist their larger-sized leads during onboarding and support them through great customer experience. 

These conversations lead to the company creating a whole strategic workflow with a strategic sales reps team, strategic onboarding experts, and strategic performance managers focused on helping close those larger leads. 

2021 RevOps Focus

Cyndi worked with her previous team to execute a pivot with their launch of a B2C marketplace, to implement the lessons from early in the year. They will now focus on continued lessons by executing short-term and long-term tests in the marketplace. The RevOps team will also continue to support workflow restructuring.

Recommended episodes 

• Sales Operations Strategy with Tim McGee, VP of Sales & Commercial Operations at Elsevier
• How to Balance Sales Strategy and Operations with Stephanie Kaup, Head of EMEA Cloud Central Sales Operations at a Big Tech Company
• From Sales to Revenue to Business Operations with Nicole Bradshaw, Sr. Director of Business Operations at Parsable

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