With Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue & Growth Operations at UpKeep
Thinking from a customer perspective helps align internal teams, including Rev Ops, Marketing Ops, and Sales Ops. Jeff Ignacio from Upkeep talks about the signs of needing to grow your team and what KPIs Ops should have.
Jeff Ingancio is currently the Sales Operations Lead, West at AWS. At the time of recording, he was the Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at Upkeep. Jeff works with high growth companies who have solved product-market fit and are looking to develop a scalable/repeatable selling process.
He previously worked at Visier, where he developed the Sales Operations function during a period where recurring revenue grew 5x ($10M to $50M ARR, 150 HC to 450 HC).
Jeff maintains that thoughtful execution around scale, automation, partnership, and process is needed to reach the mountain top. Revenue generation and excellence starts from the front of the funnel activities to customer acquisition and continues on to post acquisition.
His background was in technology consulting and finance prior to taking on his current role in sales operations.
What does Rev Ops in the lifecycle from marketing to sales look like to the customer?
I always like to tell people that it's revenue operations internally, because you're thinking about the revenue, but for the customer it's value.
I always think of Rev Ops as Value Operations. We’re the folks behind the scenes that enable the folks that you speak to as a customer that make you ultimately successful with our product or our service.
What are some signs you need to grow your team?
Some telltale signs are your roadmap getting larger and larger. If you use a priority system for requests (P1-P4, for example) and see priorities essential to the business you can’t address.
I started seeing a cascading number of priority twos and threes that were actually priority ones to the business, but yet I could not address them. There was a mismatch of what the business wanted versus what I personally could provide. You should start looking at growing your team when that happens.
What KPIs do you recommend for OPs?
We use a balanced scorecard of management by objectives combined with the overall OKRs at the company and the management level.
There are a few areas I want to address. One is the perspective on priorities. You need the ability to deliver on projects. You have to decide on what parts of which projects you should take on in the first place.
The second piece is the capability to execute set projects on time and under budget. That's just the tactical executional piece.
The third piece is process driven. For example, for marketing, you're going to want to have SLAs around campaign launches. Campaigns are hopefully going to be proactive, but can be reactive. That happens particularly in paid marketing or performance marketing because of how those marketing platforms function. They’re almost like stock trading in terms of driving your cost per lead down.
To be process driven means being a great partner around servicing both reactive and proactive campaigns.
