‘Let Sellers Sell and Buyers Buy’: Simplifying Revenue Operations with Olga Traskova, VP of Revenue Operations at TigerConnect

In this episode of the RevOps Demystified Podcast, Tom Hunt is joined by Olga Traskova, VP of Revenue Operations at TigerConnect. They discuss how syncing marketing strategies can help streamline RevOps, how to simplify RevOps and the role of the revenue engine committee in RevOps success. 

• Olga Traskova LinkedIn
• TigerConnect LinkedIn 

Olga’s journey of syncing marketing strategies into RevOps 

Olga specialized in Marketing at Saint Petersburg State University graduating in 2005. She started her marketing career fifteen years back from USG as a Customer Service and Marketing Manager. 

From 2004 until 2013, Olga dedicated almost ten years of her career to core marketing roles at renowned companies such as Trustwave, Guidance Software, Veeam Software, etc. During her marketing journey, Olga has always been keen to design result-oriented marketing strategies and understand why they work. 

“Analyzing strategies and their performing triggers help you become a proactive strategist rather than reactive.”

By 2014, Olga realized that to answer the questions like what is working and why is it working more accurately, she needs to explore sales processes and sync them more with the marketing. Hence, in 2014, Olga joined Connectivity as a Marketing and Sales Operations, Sr. Manager. 

With versatile marketing and two years of power-packed sales ops experience, Olga was ready to move into a more dynamic position and explore the core (heart) of any profit-generating company “RevOps.” 

Since 2018, Olga has worked on leading RevOps positions such as Director of RevOps at Saba Software, Cornerstone OnDemand, etc. As of March 2022, Olga works as a VP of RevOps at TigerConnect. 

With her versatile background in marketing, Olga aims to highlight the importance of marketing in RevOps. She believes that marketing controls pretty much all of the data and about 90 per cent of the budget; hence it’s crucial to consider marketing while analyzing a company’s overall and revenue performance. 

Saba Software – The tipping for Olga’s transition 

Olga attended Dreamforce, and she was significantly influenced and motivated by one of the sessions about revenue operations and how current businesses were struggling with data integrity and data misalignment between marketing and sales. The reference ‘stitched kilt’ used to describe a dysfunctional and non-scalable dashboard struck a chord with Olga. About six months later, they restructured leads from various departments such as IT, sales, revenue, and marketing and were brought to work together under the same umbrella. 

After some initial friction for two to three years, the team functioned like a well-oiled machine. With a very limited budget and resources spent, they could smoothly achieve efficiency across technology, sales, marketing and customer support departments. 

Marketing, sales or revenue-driven business 

According to Olga, it’s neither! She explains that TigerConnect is a revenue-driven business. TigerConnect believes in creating an alignment between marketing and sales ops and also focuses on finding out what happens after a deal closes, i.e., motions driving clients’ success and satisfaction. 

TigerConnect focuses on the complete buyer’s journey instead of studying sales and marketing separately so that all processes, tools, metrics, and PPIs are aligned.

Role of the revenue engine committee 

The revenue engine committee features representatives from key teams, including marketing and sales (enablement and operations). 

The committee looks at; 

• Forecasting
• Major marketing motions
• Pipeline development
• Key metrics 

The committee has a data board that they look at bi-weekly and are layering an AI tool on top of the data board to make it easier to assess key metrics such as an increase in MQLs (marketing qualified leads), RAM (research and analysis of media), content mapping, sales methodologies, pipeline coverage, forecasting, onboarding of clients, etc. 

Every representative of the revenue engine committee delivers on the main initiatives; for instance, sales enablement’s biggest motion is ‘let’s sell sales’. They’ll explain how to boost sales and the tools and methodologies required for that. Similarly, marketing ops would speak about lead scoring and “how to drive the top of funnel activities.” 

The revenue engine committee’s structure is very fluid; whenever there is an issue, the committee invites the department lead for their input to resolve the issue. For instance, if there is a problem with pipeline coverage, the committee invites sales leads to talk about key deals they’re currently seeing within the market. 

How to streamline RevOps in 2022 

As the world progresses towards more automation and immediate gratification; Keep things simple – “let sales sell and let buyers buy” – and plan to re-evaluate the processes now and then. The team at TigerConnect aims to keep all processes from the top to the bottom of the funnel as simple as possible to prevent any bottlenecks and avoid complications. 

To achieve RevOps efficiency, TigerConnect has developed its website repackaged products to help buyers easily understand and buy them. 

They’ve also trained sales teams and automated processes. Moreover, they’ve hired a client success operations director on the revenue engine committee who understands what it takes to onboard a client, keep it healthy, minimize the risks, and much more. 

Lastly, Olga is untangling all the complicated processes for marketing and sales ops and automating as much as possible, along with providing more visibility to her executives on the forecasting and analytic side so that they can identify gaps in the cycle early to tailor sales and marketing campaigns accordingly. 

Recommended Episodes 

• Sales Operations Best Practices: Kirsty Charlton of Signal AI
• Accelerate Sales and Rev Ops Efficiency Through Engaging Video Platform With Antoine Leprince, Revenue Operations Manager at EasyMovie
• Progression in a Sales Ops Role with Susan Metz, Senior Manager, Sales Operations at Turnitin 

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