Filling The Growth Leadership Skill Gap

Forbes

14 hours ago

Stephen Diorio
The Next Generation of Growth Leaders Needs a Revenue Operations Curriculum and Skillset
There's a gap in the curriculum at business schools in the science and management of revenue growth. For starters, the vast majority of business schools and executive education programs fail to include business development, sales management and leadership in their core curriculum. This issue is compounded by the failure to connect the disciplines of marketing, product management, finance and increasingly technology and analytics in a real world operational context towards the end of revenue and profit growth. Consequently, most business school curriculum, as currently constructed, fails to prepare students and executives to manage a growth digital, data-driven, and capital intensive team sport.
This has become a problem as discipline of Revenue Operations has emerged as one of the fastest growing professions and executives with Chief Revenue Officers (CRO) and 'CXO' titles and a broad remit to manage the growth resources, assets, processes and functions become fixtures in the C suite.
Why? Because Revenue Operations (or RevOps) is unique in the business world. It blends many traditional management disciplines taught in a siloed fashion - marketing, product management, sales, finance, IT – into a coherent system for managing company teams, assets, processes and system to generate more reliable, scalable and profitable revenue growth. Another problem is Revenue Operations is inconsistently defined. Its leaders can have many titles. The most familiar is the CRO. But as almost every business (over 90% of B2B businesses according to the book Revenue Operations) reconfigures their management systems to connect these functions on some meaningful way – all sorts of 'CXO' titles emerging. The can include Chief Operations, Commercial, Growth, Customer and Transformation officers. And many more.
But these advances in modern growth engines – and the organizations, systems and analytics within them - are getting out in front of management science and skills required to run them. For example, the CRO role is expanding so fast that job postings for CRO will subsume the traditional VP of Sale and Marketing role in business. But to succeed as a CRO, sales leaders are going to need to understand Revenue Operations, according to Warren Zenna, the Founder of the CRO Collective. 'VPs of Sales have and will always play an important role on the revenue team, but the functionally-siloed sales leadership position is becoming antiquated,' says Zenna. 'But as commercial models evolve, companies need leaders who can drive alignment across marketing, sales, customer success. This makes RevOps a strategic competency underlying the CRO role.'
The same goes for the dozen or more specialized functions that are now essential to run the modern revenue engine. 'Revenue Operations teams are full of very smart people who are brilliant in their own domain, such as marketing operations, sales training, territory and quota planning and CRM administration,' says Ashmi Pancholi, who has over a decade of experience leading RevOps teams at GE, Amazon, and Affirm. 'What holds many revenue teams back is that the individual players on those teams don't understand how those domains connect and work together to drive reliable, scalable and profitable growth,' adds Pancholi.
The interconnected nature of growth, and the number of disciplines involved is why RevOps is fundamentally different than any other growth role out there, adds Matt Volm, the CEO of the RevOps Coop, a community of over 15,000 professionals in the field. 'RevOps spans over a dozen established but discrete roles and domains across the revenue team. For example, Marketing Ops just focuses on the marketing function, sales enablement just on training and developing new sales reps, CRM admins ensures the data around accounts, opportunities and buyers is correct and reliable.' What Matt Volm is referring to is the fact that the management of growth has expanded to over a dozen such domains, each with its own job function, association, skill set and technology stacks. They include the deal desk, bid and proposal management, CRM administration. the operations, training and enablement teams that support marketing, sales and customer success, data and financial analysts. 'In all it takes forty five different competencies to run the modern revenue engine,' adds Volm. 'Very few managers, leaders and professionals understand them all, much less how they connect to generate scalable, profitable, and reliable growth. And as of now, they don't teach that in business schools. They don't include that in job descriptions. And they certainly don't incentivize people to do all those things with legacy metrics.'
THE MODERN REVENUE ENGINE
The Revenue Operations Certification, Revenue Operations Associates
This professional education 'gap' is leaving the next generation of growth leaders with key deficiencies in critical areas like financial acumen, strategic perspective, P&L fluency and change management. Those gaps are a big reason they struggle to communicate their value to leaders, gain cooperation with peers, and garner the budgets, investment, and resources they need to deliver value. To a large degree this is a vocabulary and community issue. 'RevOps people struggle because they don't speak the language of business everyone in the C suite and board room speaks,' says Steven Busby, CEO of Revenue Operations Associates. 'This is because they didn't get the same education, work in consulting or join an established tribe in the company ecosystem.'
That is a problem Matt Volm and the thousands of Revenue Operations practitioners and leaders are looking to solve with peer to peer networking, best practices sharing and certification programs. 'I started RevOps Co-op to build relationships with people in RevOps and deliver value outside of technology solutions that support the revenue ecosystem to help them define their profession, excel at their jobs, make a bigger impact in their businesses and on their teams,' say Volm. 'Ultimately, our goal is to help RevOps professionals of every level, skill and focus to advance their careers and for the most ambitious become the next generation of growth leaders.'
A starting point is to define what Revenue Operations is, which is a daunting task given the nascent nature of the role, the wide variety of skills and competencies involved and the many parts of the revenue engine they must understand, enable, and impact. 'The role of RevOps is to drive revenue effectively, reliably, and scalably by aligning people, process and technology,' says Volm. 'Revenue operations analysts, specialists, managers and leaders do this by understanding the complete revenue engine end-to-end. Whether you are one manager wearing dozens of hats, or a specialist on a team of one hundreds – this requires a holistic view is important because so much of what generates leads, sales, and customer experiences involves hand-offs that occur between systems and people and teams.
According to Volm, Revenue Operations is a good career for smart people that like variety and hate the mundane. It's also a great way to generate value for the business by getting the most from the products, knowledge, systems and talent in a business. Unfortunately, given the nascent state of the function, in most businesses RevOps is related to the unsung hero, 'glue guy' role and does not receive the recognition or compensation commensurate with their contribution to firm revenues, profits and value growth. 'Being in RevOps today is like the utility player in baseball - one day you'll be asked to play second base, the next center field, the day after maybe just pinch hitting.,' says Volm, who talks with thousands of RevOps teams through his global professional events, forums, education, and certification platforms. 'All of that contributes to winning. Little of that shows up in the box score, or in KPI, incentives, and compensation in a business context.'
This ambiguity of role, and business outcomes it creates puts RevOps professionals in a 'no mans land' where they are perceived as 'back office' operators who fix problems, keep the lights on and run critical pipeline reports and dashboards. This ambiguity can really hurt professionals in terms of career success, advancement and 'burnout'. Without a clear understanding of the role, the many 'gears' in the revenue engine, and how they connect and convert investment into revenue dollars – many RevOps professionals are relegated to the role of 'fix it gal' and 'data cleaner' and report generators rather than revenue and value creators.
One factor leading to this ambiguity is the wide variety of people who go into Revenue Operations. The complex, interesting, and collaborative aspects of the job attracts professionals from many different backgrounds, roles, and circumstances into RevOps. 'Unlike legacy roles like Finance, Marketing and IT - most people in the RevOps community have unique and mixed backgrounds,' says Volm. 'Many have been lawyers, geologist, schoolteachers, and more. What they ultimately have in common is they get excited about facing new challenges daily and have a drive to learn new things. They're never bored with the same old thing day and day out -because RevOps is never the same from day-to-day and everything you work on is essential to the life blood of the business – generating revenues, profits and cash flow,' add Volm, who is a CPA by training.
Finally, clearly defining the role of Revenue Operations is the key to getting it added to the curriculum at business schools. The problem is that without a recognized 'domain' to define it, educators will not make RevOps a part of the core business curriculum as they have with finance and marketing, and more recently supply chain and distribution management, according to Joël Le Bon is a Full Professor of Marketing and Sales at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and Executive Director of The Digital Business Development initiative. This lack of a clear consensus on what RevOps is, what it is not, what it entails, and the business outcomes is creates is a core issue facing the field. 'In a sense, Revenue Operations is to revenue growth what a curriculum is to education – it's a system that aligns purpose, development and scalable growth', says Le Bon who is one of the few business school professors in the world who teaches business development and sales as part of the core curriculum.
One of the things Volm seeks to do is provide RevOps professionals with the role clarity and key skills they need to succeed. 'Most RevOps professionals are experts in their domain or the technology that support their role. And there's motivated software firms ready to teach the deep technical skills required in marketing, sales and customer success. The real missing skills fall into the areas of finance, strategy, change management and an overall business acumen about how the core growth functions (marketing, product, sales, customer success) work together in a business.
'Some of the most successful RevOps leaders I see are strategic,' says Volm. 'By that I mean they are good at separating day to day tactical tasks, keeping the lights on and fixing problems to focus time and resources on actions and investments that create scale and reliability. The best understand the 'cause and effect' implications of specific actions on other functions and the seller experience. Financial acumen and P&L fluency are key skills because most RevOps professionals really struggle to quantify, communicate the value they create with the leaders and peers who must commit funds, cooperation and effort to their endeavors. Leading change, even without a mandate or remit, is a critical skill because everything they do involves changing processes, procedures or company orthodoxy,' he adds. 'Overall, given the breadth and scope of the role, it takes a lot of business maturity to engage, educate and enable the key stakeholders in marketing, sales, product, IT and finance as peers and collaborators. That's difficult if you don't know the basics of their jobs, their key drivers and the specific ways your work connects to create growth. '
'Revenue Operations to a large degree requires a 'CEO perspective' because it is fundamentally a team sport where the team that connects the most gears wins,' says Steven Busby, a ten year CEO who led the development of the RevOps Certification with Volm's team. 'Just because a RevOps professional is perceived as a back office contributor, when in fact they have perhaps the broadest span of control in the business other than the CEO.'
Another issue is that the interdisciplinary, technology intensive and extremely dynamic nature of RevOps means teams need to learn different things very quickly. Financial Standards rarely change so a CPA exam will help a CFO throughout his or her career. But in RevOps, technologies emerge, functions merge and processes change so quickly that professionals cannot rely on a textbook or a single function skill. And when they wake up on Monday, their job and the behavior of the customer they serve, and the systems to engage them have likely changed. They need a different way to learn.
So where can ambitious RevOps professionals go to get those skills?
A primary way RevOps people learn is through peer to peer best practices sharing. 'Unlike the established domains of finance or product management which are taught in schools and relatively stable - RevOps people value peer interactions, best practice sharing and learning from subject matter experts in their domain,' says Volm. 'All of those things are provided through communities like RevOps Co-op. Communities lend themselves well to RevOps because revenue operators are typically small teams - sometimes teams of one – or highly specialized and poorly understood functions, like the Deal Desk, Territory Planning, CRM administration, Strategic Response Management, or Knowledgebase Management. So they don't have a huge peer group inside their company to go too or, until now, a certification they can take to become proficient. What they can do is all come together through the community things to learn from peers and mentors continuously gain new skills about emerging practices and now gain a credible certification that covers all forty-five of the competencies that are required to make the revenue engine run.'
Volm recently partnered with leading practitioners, academics and experts in the field of Revenue Operations to create an industry standard Revenue Operations Certification. To Volm, an industry certification is critical for RevOps professionals to excel in their jobs, generate more impact, facilitate teamwork and advance their career – because it addresses the biggest things that hold them back. These are fundamental things like strategy, financial acumen, change management and the business maturity needed to engage, educate and enable the key stakeholders across product, marketing, sales, customer success and finance that all support the revenue cycle.
'I believe Revenue Operations is the most important job at every company on the face of the planet, because revenue is also the first and most important metric on any financial statement - and revenue generation is a team sport led by revenue operations' asserts Volm. 'But it will only become more critical with the introduction of AI because no role better suited to own AI initiatives that impact revenue then revenue operations.'