The Six Pillars of Revenue Operations with Rhys Williams, VP Revenue Operations at Convercent

This week, we are talking to Rhys Williams, VP of Revenue Operations at Convercent. Having worked in both sales and revenue operations, Rhys shares the fundamental difference between these two functions along with what he believes to be the six pillars of revenue operations.

• Rhys’s Linkedin
• Convercent’s website

Rev ops: the secret to master operations  

After graduating from college in 2010, Rhys started his professional journey in sales operations. Rhys felt his inclination towards revenue operations, he shares: “Exposure to revenue operations helps your overall career in sales operations.”

Revenue operations provide you the opportunity to understand; 

• How to improve sales 
• Things not performing at par in the sales funnel 
• What would be the most efficient marketing  strategy 

Holistically, an effective revenue operations function will manage tools and generate insights to achieve targets. 

Sales operations vs. sales administration 

Sales operations is a rather versatile field that is mostly confused with sales administration. In reality, there is a huge difference between the two. 

Sales administration can be defined as the occasional run-through of reports and back-end work. In contrast, sales operations is designed to proactively act upon the analyzed data provided through sales administration.

Sales operations and administration should not be mixed, as they are standalone and hold equal importance in the annual forecasting exercise, sales planning, and forecasting. 

All leaders of a company should analyze the data extracted through sales administration and operations in an annual exercise and try answering the following questions to plan for the future;

• Where do we want to see ourselves in the next year?
• Tweaking which variables will help us grow sales?
• Will the current marketing investment help us achieve our annual goals? 

Sales operations vs. revenue operations

The key difference between sales and revenue operations is that rev ops gives a broader view of how the business is doing, how the product features and benefits affect the sales output, how to forecast based on these product observations, and which resources are under-performing. 

Revenue operations can be broken down into six pillars: 

1. Process: For example… what each rep does when they start a sales call
2. Tools: Tools that are used to streamline the sales process 
3. Data: How do you process and present the data?  
   1. Don’t analyze all the data, only consider the relevant information. For example, if you are presenting the data-driven plans to the board, consider the broader data sets,  but if it is only for the sales leaders, it should be narrower
4. Enablement: Data highlights the hot spot inside the customer journey and sales cycle that could have a massive impact on sales 
5. Planning: This ranges from conflict resolution to annual and capacity planning; where you plan investments 
6. Execution: Your ability to execute strategies 

Rhys’s biggest influence 

Rhys mentions that he tries to reach out to other companies’ revenue operation personnel; he listens to their great ideas and learns from them.

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