True RevOps Connects Marketing, Sales, CS & Product with Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io

True RevOps Connects Marketing, Sales, CS & Product with Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io

Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations

In this episode of OpsStars Podcast, Rachael McBrearty is joined by Jordan Henderson, Senior Director, Revenue Ops at Revenue.io (formerly ringDNA), a revenue acceleration platform that uses AI to transform sales teams into high-performing revenue engines. His background is spread across revenue operations, sales enablement, sales operations, strategic planning, and project management. He also hosts the RevOps Podcast.

This episode provides a detailed look at what a RevOps team looks like from the inside. We also look at how metrics fit into the RevOps equation, promising technologies leading the way for the future of RevOps, and the key skills needed to become a successful RevOps professional.

Key Highlights:

03:54 – 05:42 – Jordan’s Journey Into RevOps – Jordan went from being a lawyer to an entry-level tech position. Throughout his tech journey, he held a variety of roles in business development and customer service, all with a focus on Ops. He realized that his core passions were ensuring smooth communication across all teams and getting them to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
05:43 – 06:44 – The Tipping Point in RevOps – As true RevOps takes center stage, many companies are explicitly hiring for RevOps roles. Unfortunately, many of them are also renaming Sales Ops as RevOps without any change in their daily work.
06:45 – 08:59 – The RevOps Setup at ringDNA – Being a direct report to the CEO gives Jordan a chance to gain higher visibility for his work and makes it easier for him to get buy-in from the executive team and have productive conversations. Having a single RevOps team with individual experts in marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops – as they have at ringDNA – is better aligned with the revenue organizations and prevents the creation of metrics and data silos at the team level.
09:00 – 15:41 – Metrics and Success in RevOps – Success in this role comes from helping to achieve larger company-wide revenue goals, with some large initiatives but mostly through smaller, incremental improvements or slight tweaks everywhere. Jordan’s goals include retention, growth, total revenue, and product-adoption-specific goals. Jordan recommends setting new goals and revising them every quarter instead of setting long-term goals at the start and changing those targets every few months
15:42 – 17:11 – Tying RevOps to Product Roadmap – The RevOps team meets with the Product team on the roadmap and helps improve the product adoption. RevOps aligns teams to the product releases which is super important to staying aligned to buyers.
17:12 – 20:34 – Starting up With RevOps – Regardless of what specific Ops role you start with, it’s important to not pigeonhole yourself into that single perspective. To get better and go deeper into RevOps, it’s important to learn what other Ops roles do or even switch roles. Your problem solving and context-switching skills will also matter a lot in a RevOps position, as all your daily tasks can be short and yet be completely different from one another.
20:35 – 29:14 – Promising Technologies in the Ops space – ringDNA relies on LeanData and their own ringDNA AI tools with Salesforce. Jordan predicts that AI-based sales call coaching is a major upcoming shift in the industry. He does feel intent data platforms are headed in the right direction, but are not yet mature enough to recognize the context in the market, but AI-based solutions will help inform intent algorithms so that they can provide tailored predictions.

Who Would Jordan Like to Take For Lunch in the Ops World?

Episode Resources

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“My goals, as the head of Revenue Operations, are the company’s goals. If our topline revenue goal for 2022 is x million dollars, that’s my goal…Most of our job isn’t that sexy and fun, like we do one big thing that will get us there. It’s tiny little boring things that fundamentally change your business over time.”

Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io

“We talk about aligning to the buyer’s journey, the most likely people to buy from you are still your current customers. They are still the most likely to sign the contract to buy something. If I am trying to increase revenue on a product, I’m going to start with the customer base.”

Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io

“Product Adoption is an absolutely fundamental metric for your marketing team, and your sales team, and your business. It’s not that Product needs to do this and Customer Success will help them. Product adoption identifies upsells, identifies use cases for your marketing team to push into the market to attract new customers. It’s a powerful metric for your entire business and if you’re not using it in these ways you’re missing out.”

Jordan Henderson, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io