Behind the Scenes: Scaling Revenue Ops at Yugabyte
Behind the Scenes: Scaling Revenue Ops at Yugabyte
The Nue Team
Description
In this episode of The Lift, Mat Rodriguez, VP of RevOps at YugabyteDB, explains how his role brings together strategy, systems, and hands-on deal execution within a technically complex, high-growth environment.
In his conversation with Mark Evans and James McArthur, Mat explores the need to modernize pricing for infrastructure and AI platforms. He argues that traditional database pricing models are fundamentally broken, often failing to align engineering economics with the real value delivered to customers.
Mat also talks about excessive complexity, particularly an overabundance of product SKUs, undermines sales efficiency. This creates a “Wild West” pricing environment, where similar deals are priced inconsistently. To address this, he advocates for standardization and simplification, noting that most companies maintain far more SKUs than they actually need.
He emphasizes that clear, codified pricing provides sales reps with confidence, which in turn improves close rates and forecasting accuracy. By contrast, the absence of effective CPQ systems introduces friction and slows down deal cycles.
Transcription
Welcome back to The Lift, where we dig into how modern revenue teams move faster and work smarter. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Matt Rodriguez, the VP of Rev Ops at Yugabyte, a company offering enterprise-grade distributed SQL databases.
At Yugabyte, he's driving alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success while navigating product-led growth multi-segment, GTM, and complex enterprise deal cycles. Today I'm joined by James MacArthur, VP of Product Advocacy at Nue. We're excited to get into it, Mat. Welcome to The Lift.
Mat Rodriguez, Yugabyte: Thank you.
Happy to be here.
Let's start by setting the stage with your role as VP of Rev Ops at Yugabyte. What does your day-to-day look like, and how is Rev Ops structured inside the company?
Mat Rodriguez, Yugabyte: This is actually a really interesting question. Thinking about Rev Ops specifically, it's different for every business, and I was in consulting previously before joining Yugabyte. My idea of what Rev [00:01:00] Ops would be internally was a lot different than what it ended up being. At Yugabyte specifically, we focus a lot on forecasting. We focus a lot on integrations and systems. So, every single day, we're working with account executives and our reps and our sales leaders to adjust the forecast to make sure things are correct. Also, to work with people on deals, to push things forward, unlocking a million things related to deals. I was surprised when I joined here that it would be less systems focused and more strategic, tactical focused on individual deals, and then the systems are just a thing that supports it. So that was really the thing that every single day I'm working in Google spreadsheets and working in reporting.
I'm working with a lot of things like that. And it's not integrations like in consulting where you're saying, oh, I'm going to connect Gong to Salesforce. It's more like everything else that supports that.
Your background spans pricing, open source and enterprise GTM. How has that shaped your approach to pricing strategy at Yugabyte?[00:02:00]
Mat Rodriguez, Yugabyte: Yeah, especially with Yugabyte and VCPU cores and how we actually price things. It's a funny question. We're constantly looking over how we price things and how easy it is to price things inside of Salesforce and just in general to get quotes standardized across the business.
I think that's one of the biggest things for us is each deal is different. And so having standard rules and things like that are things that did not exist before I joined Yugabyte. We did a good job at trying to get similar deals across the line, over the line. And so, I can't go into super crazy specifics on a podcast, for instance. But two companies, company A, company B, would have a very similar sales cycle, very similar use case, and they would be priced completely differently.