Interview with Stephen Diorio - author of “Revenue Operations”
This week I published a YouTube discussion I had recently with Stephen Diorio, one of the co-authors of the book “Revenue Operations”
You can watch the interview at the bottom of this post, or watch it on YouTube by clicking the button.
Stephen and his co-author Chris Hummel are the reason why we have RevOpsCharlie - and not GTMCharlie or SalesCharlie.
When I read “Revenue Operations” the book laid out a vision for a strategic revenue ‘system’ that any company, from SaaS, to manufacturing to healthcare, could use to drive their revenue upwards.
The book defines two inter-related systems:
The Revenue Management System
Think of this as the top level revenue strategy. How will you lead this system, how will you architect your teams and routes to market, what metrics will you use to measure success?
In our discussion we talk about leadership - who owns revenue in an organisation.
There are three common options:
The dictator - a single revenue leader, maybe a Chief Revenue Officer
The alliance - a close knit trio of marketing, sales and customer success leaders
The chief of staff - a RevOps leader sitting beneath the functional leaders that ties it all together.
In our discussion Stephen makes the point that it is extremely hard for the dictator - a single revenue leader to work effectively.
They just don’t have enough breadth of experience to lead the other functions as well as a domain leader would have. Stephen believes the alliance, the federation, the trio is the most effective route.
The Revenue Operating System
Having built your management system, the book then breaks down the operating system - how do you run this machine?
The operating system is split into three core pillars:
Growth assets - what do we need to have in order to grow this revenue system - tools, platforms, channels?
Commercial insights - how can we use the data we generate from our systems, our products and our people to derive business value for our customers and our sellers?
Value drivers - how can we apply our people, our pricing and our packaging to drive more revenue out of the system?
You start to see the breadth of responsibility that is included within this revenue system - the number of levers that can be pulled to improve the effectiveness of the machine.
Revenue Operations is strategic
It was the combination of these two images that helped me to realise:
Selling is much more than selling. For companies that are struggling to hit their revenue goals, just hiring more sellers, forcing more ‘enablement’ on them, making more calls is not the answer. The sales/buyer interaction is just one small part of the overall revenue system.
Silos kill growth. Watching one team high-five their success while the overall company misses their revenue goals is a symptom of mini-fiefdoms that are not working together. A single revenue management system brings them together.
RevOps is more than deal desk and territory assignment. I’ve worked in organisations where RevOps was tactical, locked in a bunker working on spreadsheets - “computer says no”. Instead, the images reaffirm that there is nothing more strategic than the system by which a company generates revenue.
I hope you enjoy the discussion - and to read the book itself, search “Revenue Operations” on Amazon.
Watch the interview
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