Kate McCullough

I'm here today for RevOps review with two folks that are RevOps gurus. We have Eric Portugal Welsh. He is currently at Demostack rapidly scaling an ex-FiveTran. And then I have Lisa Kelly who has run RevOps, and been in sales leadership for companies that are tens of millions in revenue, but also billions. So we have different perspectives here, and we're here to talk about how you scale RevOps, when you're rapidly growing, like you are just 3X and 4Xing, maybe 5Xing in growth, and just really what the challenges are in that.

Kate McCullough

And so before I kick off with that whole conversation, Eric, you want to add a little bit of color on your background and your journey with RevOps and then Lisa, maybe the same?

Eric Portugal Welsh

Yeah. So I started in roles that could be classified as RevOps business operations, systems operations in the nonprofit sector about 10 years ago. Transitioned over, my first tech company was FiveTran, which got unicorn status right after I left. We grew while I was there supporting the sales team from about 15 reps to 150 in about a year and a half, year and six months. So I'm pretty familiar with the hyper growth mode. Currently at Demostack where we're at very early stages, but our growth projecting for the next year is about 5X over last year. So, right now we're in set foundation mode and I'm anticipating a lot of growth in the back half of the year.

Kate McCullough

Yeah. Then Lisa is actually a co-host of this podcast, but for this one we're actually interviewing her. But Lisa, tell us about your background?

Lisa Kelly

Yeah, I got started in operations via the sales leadership route. So I was a sales leader, went into sales enablement, then moved into full operations, ended up running operations for companies like NICE inContact, Talkdesk, LogMeIn, what now is known as GoTo and both in healthcare. And then I'd made a shift over to consulting and got to work with a lot of companies, companies that were in that rapid growth stage all the way up to companies that are starting to see that growth curve flatten out. And the fun stuff is definitely the rapid growth.

Kate McCullough 

So, we're going to start with this table stakes question. What is RevOps? This is maybe one of the most interesting terms that everyone has a different answer for. So I'm curious, how do you define RevOps? What does it encompass? For the purposes of this conversation, what do we mean? Eric, how would you color it?

Eric Portugal Welsh

I've always just called it, go-to market operations. I think it's like the operational support of your marketing sales, customer success, all the way through that handoff process with finance. So, it's really the support function for your customer lifecycle.

Kate McCullough

Lisa, what do you think about that answer?

Lisa Kelly

Yeah. I think revenue ops has a lot of clarity needed around that title itself. And I do agree with Eric that go-to market operations is a great way to define it. I think when you look at it, it touches the entire revenue cycle and how that gets operationalized from the point where it's entering the pipeline all the way to where you're recognizing the revenue and finance and everything in between from a new logo and upsell perspective.

Kate McCullough

Yeah. I think that the word has emerged and we have it. People have different definitions. I think you're more spanning all the full flow of the lifecycle. Some people shorten it down the sales and marketing, but in the definition that you just said, which I love it, we're just in agreement here. How would you say that the tech stack has actually changed over the last few years of just trends and how does that work itself out? I don't know, Lisa, you start.