Building a High-Performing RevOps Team with Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights

Building a High-Performing RevOps Team with Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights

Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights

Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights, joins us on this episode of the OpsStars podcast to share his expertise and experience building a top-notch RevOps team.

Previously, Chris was the Director of Global Revenue Operations for Uniphore, Director of Sales Operations for Honor and NextHealth, and Senior Analyst of Sales Operations and Pricing at ServiceSource.

His experience is heavily focused on providing sales teams with insightful and actionable recommendations about product offerings, consultative selling tactics, customer retention, and pricing strategy.

Today, Chris will share some of that experience to provide you with practical insights and advice you can apply to your business and RevOps team.

Key Highlights:

13:55 – 19:07 – What is Revenue Operations? – RevOps is a business function that defines the processes, develops metrics, and ultimately defines the outcomes you’re trying to achieve as an organization. Without a strong RevOps function to support, each siloed group is focused on their piece of the puzzle and it’s hard to see the big picture.
19:08 – 23:29 – Building the RevOps Team – Start by understanding your sales and marketing motions to determine where you need expertise from people, tech stack and enablement. Early on you can be and have generalists and as your team starts to grow, move to a specialization model to scale so you have experts who can focus on the areas that are most critical to your process.
29:39 – 35:35 – Analyzing and Reporting – The RevOps team’s responsibilities include analyzing data to get the right insights. At CB Insights, the RevOps team publishes a weekly funnel health report, as well as monthly, quarterly, and annual versions. The starting point for any data review should be the anchor numbers, such as average deal size, close rates, etc. However, RevOps can provide the most value when they are able to use the data to identify areas of improvements and collaborate with business owners to address the issues or improve the processes.
38:45 – 40:52 – Aligning the Business Strategies and Goals – RevOps needs to be connected to the core business strategy and be a trusted advisor to the business leaders. No one has more data available to them than RevOps! Storytelling with data is critical to drive any changes that may be necessary.
46:09 – 49:10 – The Three Things You Need to Build a High-Performing RevOps Team – First, you need self-motivated and curious people. Second, you should be nimble and emphasize minimum viable products. And third, you need a customer-first mentality and the ability to build relationships cross-functionality to learn how the business is operating so you can affect change.

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“You have to develop metrics and ultimately figure out the outcomes you’re trying to achieve as an organization. So for me, RevOps is the thing that ties the go-to-market function together. It’s defining the approach, the metrics, being able to measure the success, and see what we’re doing. Without a solid RevOps function, it’s very difficult to do that because you see the organization start to get siloed. Everyone focuses on their pieces of the puzzle, and it’s hard to see that big picture without a strong RevOps function to support that.”

Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights

“Early on, you want to be a generalist to recognize broadly where the gaps are. And then, as you start to grow, scale a team, and you move from more of a generalist to a specialization model where you’re starting to get scalable. You need people that can be that expert to focus on the most critical areas of your process. You need someone to see against that big picture across the different tech stacks and to be able to recognize where the gaps are that you need to fill from a specialist perspective.”

Chris Van’t Hof, Director of Revenue Operations at CB Insights