First things first…

I had a great time with our friends at Nobel Recruitment last night, presenting in the longer form of 'Mastering Sales Development’! I look forward to sharing more about that next week!

What am I seeing this week: Learn from your mistakes

Leadership is not a linear path; you won’t suddenly be promoted into a management role and then, after 6+ months, know everything you need to know about it. You must be self-critical. Learn from experiences and, of course, mistakes! I Posted something on Linkedin this week around the topic of self-development.

I'm sure this is only the start of a very long list; now, as a 2nd and 3rd line leader, there would be more to learn from.

Questions of the week: Travis Henry

We have a big one today! For those who have not had the pleasure to meet Travis Henry, he is a great guy and one of the best modern-day thinkers around Sales Development. He is the architect of the world-class sales development organisation that Snowflake runs. Today, he meets with Mastering Sales Development to give insights into his life so far!

Thanks for joining Travis! So, why did you pursue the career path of Rev Ops?

I didn’t pursue a career in RevOps so much as a career in RevOps pursued me. To explain that, I need to rewind the clock to my college years. At the time, I had no idea what a sales forecast was, would have thought pipeline was a term only used by plumbers, and didn’t even know that there was a (massive) field of professionals involved in this thing called “B2B sales and marketing.”

I was full steam ahead on pursuing a career as a lawyer until I graduated from school. I did everything from student government and mock trials to studying for and taking the LSAT. But I had an epiphany when putting together my law school apps. I finally asked myself, “Why do I want to do this?” and I could not give myself a compelling answer. Three years of full-time schoolwork and a big debt pile were not burdens to take a flyer on.

I was in the Bay Area then, so tech was the hot topic, and I started looking into what I could do to give that industry a shot. After talking to on-campus recruiters, I realised that sales were the best entry point for someone with a high work ethic, few technical skills, and an ability to communicate value and influence others. It kind of sounds like a lawyer, right?

Fast forward a couple of years. I did well in an SDR role, got promoted to an AE, and then realised what I enjoyed most in those roles was amplifying the impact of my teammates rather than banging the gong on my wins. So, I moved into a quasi-marketing ops role at another company, enabling a couple of SDRs without any formal structure. My charter was to build their funnel and optimise what happened from an inbound lead perspective. Wouldn’t you know it - as soon as the funnel was built, a glaring bottleneck stared us in the face: marketing spent a bunch of money fueling campaign responses and none of that converted into outcomes that the business cared about.

I was immediately called back into the SDR world, tasked with building a bonafide inbound team from scratch. I was thrust into management at the ripe age of 25 with no sales operations or enablement function supporting me. It was sink or swim. It was here that RevOps hit me in the head. As soon as I figured out the talent sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and essential onboarding for this team, a cascade of operational challenges knocked me back. How could we work inbound leads if we didn’t know what accounts they belonged to? What would my reps use to manage multiple touchpoints on multiple prospects simultaneously (we were creating and completing individual Salesforce tasks… poke your eyes out)? How could I tell what metric each rep was individually struggling with?

Those hurdles led me to three realisations. An emerging and complicated landscape of sales technologies offered elegant solutions to my problems. Two, those technologies required diligent and thoughtful effort to implement and become useful. Three, I was pretty good at realisation #2 (and I enjoyed it).

I eventually scaled that inbound SDR team to a specialised group of 30ish individuals around the globe, largely thanks to the operational structure I was forced to build. My career from that point has been pulling on the thread of RevOps, leaning on a fantastic community of smarter people to learn from, and constantly trying to make others around me better than they would be on their own.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to follow you in your footsteps in Rev ops?

Stories from others aren’t helpful because they necessarily give turn-by-turn directions for replicating success, but they offer core lessons and tips that you can make your own.

If I boiled down my RevOps journey into some key takeaways, they would be:

• Try New Things in Your Current Role - far too often, I have conversations with people waiting for someone else to “give them a shot” in RevOps. They might currently be in sales, marketing, customer success, a student, or moving laterally from another industry. Don’t let your current role limit you! I guarantee that there are operational pains that some poor, overworked RevOps team does not have the bandwidth for in your current organisation. Connect those pains to what you do daily and make time outside your day job to solve them. For example, you may be a sales rep who A/B/C tests different subject lines to a new persona and reports to your team and ops with insights on the top-performing one.

• Find a Mentor - my career is built on the brilliance and goodwill of many who have figured it out before me. And they made their careers on the same contributions from individuals who figured it out before them. Find someone willing to do the same for you. I will admit this is not an easy task. There is usually an inverse relationship between the value someone can provide you and the amount of free time they have. Said another way, successful people tend to be busy. There are two strategies I recommend. One, identify someone that you admire and reach out to them directly. The key here is to offer something of value in return (“I’d love to ghostwrite blog posts for you”), be extremely clear and specific about what you want to learn from them, or ideally both. Don’t expect to get a mentor on your first attempt; keep trying. Two, put yourself into contexts (usually uncomfortable ones) that maximise exposure to potential mentors. This was carving out time on weekday nights after work in San Francisco to go to “tech meetups” I found on Eventbrite and talk to strangers. Those strangers didn’t usually become mentors, but they connected me to networks where I found my mentors.

• Get Hard Skills - the more time I’ve spent in RevOps, the more I believe in this one. Aspiring RevOps professionals must build a set of hard skills to be competitive in the field, especially skills related to data. This is not to say you need a computer science degree or a year out of work to attend a coding boot camp. You need to get very familiar with how go-to-market systems work, how their databases are structured, how to manipulate data (definitely in spreadsheets, increasingly in SQL), and how to approach data in general from an insight-gathering perspective. Again, I urge you not to wait for another role to work on these skills. I recently had an SDR come to me with a requirements document for building a dashboard to make campaign follow up much more efficient for him and his teammates. It wasn’t a full blown data visualisation. Still, a very detailed set of measures and dimensions, with data sources, showed me he worked through some complexities and put together a very sound recommendation.

How do you feel SDRs can continue to be future-proof as a role?

Read articles and watch YouTube videos about how people in the sales industry implement Generative AI and LLMs like ChatGPT. Then think to yourself, what do I do that seems unlikely for AI to do better than me? To me, this leads to skills like “connecting the dots” between many different sources of information to analyse a prospective company. It also leads to skills like the much-feared cold call and having live, valuable conversations with potential buyers. Continue to sharpen yourself where AI is soft, and you will stay ahead in the short term.

Conversely, why not also leverage yourself to stay ahead of others in embracing this disruptive technology? The SDRs of the future (if we still call them that) will have no choice but to engage and work alongside AI models. Someone needs to be prompting the AI, defining its outcomes and providing context for successful outputs. That’s why you see so many sales tech companies racing to build the “co-pilot” for sales; they see an opportunity to augment the human workforce with artificial intelligence. Why not take that further and become a student of how these systems work and how to get the most value out of them?

Book of the week

And Finally!

Check out The BDR Summit here and keep up-to-date when tickets are announced for November 16th! Looking forward to seeing you there!