How to Transition from Sales to Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Moving from a sales role to a Revenue Operations (RevOps) career can be a natural transition for someone who is process oriented, likes to analyze data, and wants to contribute to overall revenue growth. If you enjoy problem solving, improving processes and working cross-functionally, RevOps could be a great next step in your career. Here is an approach that can help you make the transition.

What is Revenue Operations?

Before making the move, its important to understand some of the core pillars of RevOps roles. Understanding these functions can help you narrow down which role you want to target.

• Sales Operations: Managing the CRM, sales forecasting, automating sales processes, territory planning.
• Marketing Operations: Lead scoring, campaign attribution, and marketing automation.
• Customer Success Operations: Retention, churn reduction, customer experience optimization, revenue expansion.
• Revenue Intelligence and Analytics: Data reporting, dashboards, and actionable insights.

Action Step

• Grow your understanding: Follow RevOps experts on LinkedIn, read blogs like Winning by Design, Hubspot. Join communities like RevOps Co-op.
• Decide which function you want to focus on.

How to Develop Key Skills

Transitioning into a from Sales to Revenue Operations requires a blend of analytical, technical, and strategic skills.

1. CRM & Technical Proficiency
   • Understand your current tech stack. Learn about the ins and outs of the tools your team is using like Gong, LeanData, Outreach, and your CRM for example.
2. Data Analysis and Reporting
   • Learn how to create dashboards reports in Salesforce, Looker or Tableau
   • Develop your skills in Excell/Google Sheets (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, and data modeling)
   • Learn SQL basics
3. Process Optimization
   • Identify inefficiencies in your current process
   • Familiarize yourself with the current automations your team is using

Action Step

• Ask you manager if you can help with creating reports, CRM clean up, or process documentation
• Take the inefficiencies you have found to your manager or the exisiting RevOps team and ask to be involved in the project
• Reach out people who are on the team for the function you chose to learn how they currently utilize the tech stack, data, and process automations.

How to Gain Experience in Your Current Role

You don’t need a formal title to start gaining experience. Here are some ways you can contribute within a sales role. This will also help you transition into the new role in the future, as other team members will have already seen you performing the tasks.

1. Choose a focus related to your target function.
   • Example: Focus on CRM data hygiene, become the go to person for reporting and dashboards on the team
2. Find a way to improve an existing process.
   • Example: Suggest better lead routing, better automation such as email triggers when a lead opens a marketing article
3. Look for Opportunites to collaborate cross-functionally
   • Example: Give marketing content ideas based on what you are hearing from the customer. Make tech stack suggestions based on new tools that you learned about.
4. Leverage data to provide insights and strategic suggestions
   • Example: Build a report showing closed won leads and look for any trends such as leads from a specific industry or job title.

Action Step

• Practice building reports by rebuilding existing reports from scratch. For example rebuild a pipeline report.
• Duplicate an existing report and manipulate the data to show different trends. For example if you have a report that shows leads by lead source, manipulate a copy to show leads by rep.
• Provide one qualitative insight to a cross-functional team member.

Let your Work Stand Out

If your new to RevOps you may not be a master at one specific skill yet, however if you focus on that skill and work on projects related to it you can become a master and stand out. Find an area you are interested in such as process automation and tech stack, reporting and analytics, or documentation and enablement.

Work on projects within one of these areas and continue to build on your skill set.

Action Steps:

• Create documentation for existing processes
• Create a playbook that documents your own sales process
• Sign up for product demos of new tools to learn about what sales tools are available. Check out the “Invest in the Right Tools section of this article to learn more about how to evaluate tools.
• Create reports and dashboards for your manager and your team

Best Certifications and Courses

If you want to formalize your knowledges, consider these resources.

• HubSpot Revenue Operations Certification
• Salesforce Admin Certification
• Pavilion’s Intro to RevOps
• Google Data Analytics Certificate

Action Steps:

• Complete at least one of these and add it to your LinkedIn profile

Final Thoughts

Moving from Sales to Revenue Operations is about proving you can thing strategically, analyze data, and improve processes. With a solid understand of the sales process from being in a sales role, moving to a RevOps role can be an smooth transition.

Are you considering a RevOps role? What challenges do you anticipate? Comment below!