Our host, Jeff Ignacio, sits down with Rachel Nazhand, Vice President of Business Transformation at Zelis. They discuss the differences between revenue operations and business operations. They discuss how to support businesses moving from start-up to scale-up, maintain a cross-functional mindset and optimise the business outside of software and systems. They also touch on what RevOps looks like outside of the SaaS space and how to transition into business operations.
The RevOps Review
The RevOps Review - With Jeff Ignacio and Rachel Nazhand - Revenue Operations vs Business Operations
(upbeat music) - Rachel, how's it going? - Hey Jeff, good to see you again, also here. - So I'm joined by Rachel and I always forget how to pronounce your last name is it. Nazan, they're Nazan. - Nazan, that's like a J sound. - Oh, okay, okay, very cool. I'm curious, how did we meet? Did we meet through pavilion four or five years ago? - We shared the stage in LA at a pavilion event several years ago. Yeah, it's nice to-- - Not in person, but virtually. - Virtually, gosh, the RevOps community, we've been running for so much time, so I had to have been through a WidsOps community or LinkedIn or one of those great spaces. - I think it is, that's for sure. So you're currently the VP of business transformation over at Zellis, but before that, you were the VP of business operations. I'd love to hear a little bit about that transformation, literally the transformation in your job title. What does it mean that you kind of reposition that title to what it is today? - A big catalyst behind where I am currently is it's a different playing field than where I came from. So I did the corporate thing for a bit and then went over into the SaaS ecosystem and really cut my skills, cut my chops in that space. And that's where I learned how to be an operator, that's where I learned the sales apps, the RevOps, the client ops, the business operations. And a couple of years ago, took that into the PE sector in the healthcare technology, which is a totally different space. And in that space, I stood up a business operations team, incredible experience, and we were at a time where we were moving from startup to scale up. And so transformation becomes a bit more applicable because we're taking projects and we're delivering them at speed. And it's not necessarily about operating the business, but really taking and pulling the levers it takes to really accelerate the business into its next chapter. So you'll see there's a couple of us across Zellis where several thousand person company and we apply these operational practices and this really curious cross-functional mindset and deliver these projects and strategic outcomes at a pace where individual contributors aren't able to because they're absorbed in their day-to-day role. - That's amazing. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Now, before business operations, I think business operations can be a bit of an umbrella or a tent term that's in organizations. Did revenue or ops report into business operations at some point and like, what does that look like in your current organization? - So I have sat in formal revenue operations seats and I've managed sales ops and revenue ops in a couple of different companies. So everything from being the very first person that was setting up the sales force instance and setting the territories and creating the opportunity flow and doing all the real fundamental things. And I've managed marketing ops, sales ops, client ops, product operations, legal operations. I think I've managed every single brand of business operations that exists. And so when I had come into the organization and now we had a need to take something that had been working in a company that had existed for 10 years and modernize it and make it a little bit more agile. So I've stood that up, helped mature our sales force instance, helped influence a coming together of six disparate instances into one sales force or one sales file, which has been a really amazing opportunity, especially since I'm an influencer, not a driver on that one. It looks a lot of different ways, especially when your revenue is much larger, your pipeline has a lot more variability. We're not, I'm no longer in the 30,000 a year SaaS space, right, where you've got a six week close timeline. We're in a much more drawn out, much more mature process. And so it looks a lot different. And your spot on that business operations does tend to be a little bit of a catch on. I love how much it's changed in the world in the past five years or so. And the public relations of revenue operations has helped drive all kinds of operators to be at the forefront of the conversation and be a little bit more strategic and really be able to make an imprint on companies at scale, which has been a really cool time to be in this space. - Yeah, I have to agree with you. I teach this revenue operations course on a quarterly basis, it's a live cohort. And the first year and a half was a lot of experience operators, anywhere between two to eight years of experience we're taking the course. I mean, now getting a lot of folks who are outside of the industry or outside of the function, taking the course. And the number one thing they tell me is, oh, you know, on LinkedIn, I keep hearing about this career path called revenue operations. And I'm finding that I have to do a lot more background context explanation as opposed to just jumping in from the middle of the race. I'm like, all right, here's an SQL, here's an MQL. All right, let's go through win rates. I have to start from the very beginning and explain a lot more context because it doesn't necessarily make sense. And they are in operator type roles in their organizations, but they're supporting finance or they're supporting product. And they have their own KPIs or own metrics. But at the end of the day, they have their own inefficiencies that these operating teams are trying to solve for. So I'm curious in your mind, the difference between go-to-market operations, we can call it whatever it is, wrap-up, sales ops, product ops. And then some of these functions that most folks don't talk about, how can we make finance more productive? How can we make legal or human resources for people more productive? You know, what are the differences between these different groups? - There is so much to unpack there. The biggest differentiator I see is you think about, and this is becoming a lot more common terminology, but the folks that work in the business first on the business. And the folks that work in the business are a lot of who used to carry the operations type titles. So this would be folks that actually delivered the product or service that was being sold, or executed something that was maybe repeatable or predictable in nature. And they were operating almost the original factory operators not saying that these folks are clogged, but it was a different type of operating because you were delivering. And the pace of business was such that someone can set up a process and folks executed on it. And now we're in such a software driven world. Even if you're not a tech company, your backbone is software and systems. And so to that end, you're seeing these folks that work on the business, the people that optimize the business, that create the infrastructure that the associates work in. And that's who our business operators are now. So that is the folks that a sales operator is optimizing a sales team and driving the revenue. And there's a lot of consistency and what great looks like in that role. Similar to there's a lot of consistency to what a great seller looks like from company to company. And there's a lot of frameworks and nuances you can apply, but that's where I really believe that sales ops and rev ops and go-to-market ops and all the different permutations of it, that's how it's had such a strong rise. And to your point, you're seeing folks come in and jump on that wagon, which is really cool to see. And from my seat, I am seeing it translate really clearly into the back office function of people ops, HR ops, legal ops, on the finance side, in the bigger companies prior to... So SAS thinks they kind of created sales ops. FP&A folks in big companies have always been doing this type of director of revenue type work of monitoring pipeline, of monitoring cashflow in and out in such a way that it's ripe for this agile operating methodology to come over from our business operations folks and really expand into these other functions. Because you got to move quick and you have to have visibility. And those are the two pillars that a good, strong revenue operator, sales operator, business operator, whatever term you apply here, those are the tenants that are required to be successful in those roles. Every department in a company needs that now. Engineering ops is another space that is becoming really hot and really trendy because predictability, measurability, consistency, especially in a nearly fully remote world at this point, all more important than ever to stay alive as a business. It was interesting, I find that the language is going in reverse as well, right? The six sigma or the yield or revenue leaks, you're seeing that kind of language permeate into revenue operations. And it's not a one-way street, I see it as a two-way street. I do think, yeah, I've been into the VC backed sales software, SaaS companies for quite a while. I do think we tend to take credit for, you know, quote unquote, revenue operations. But I remember when I was an FP&A at Google and my core partners were folks in sales operations. A lot of the work we did was actually overlapped a ton. I would help model the business. I would have a lot of context that I might be missing and that's hence why the sales operating partners was so helpful to help me determine who's who in the zoo, how are they organized, what teams, what segment of products are they selling. That would inform the modeling that we were doing. And I remember the tools that I had at my disposal weren't world-class and there was a whole other team that provided finance operations. They had to take the data that I was building in an excel sheet and put it into all the different planning tools and that would cascade across people that are HRIS systems, who would cascade into our planning tools. Some folks might use tools like hand a plan or something to that degree. And then we had to start breaking down those targets and that would have real world impact for a selling organization because they would have their territories and the accounts in their hands. What I do find in revenue operations is that we do bring a lot of frameworks and I think it's because when you're measuring a funnel, you want to give it language, right? Like what is the volume of the funnel of like the shape of it? What is the progression? I think it lends itself pretty well to having these type of targets. But my finance operating partners, the one real tangible example I can think of is closing the books. Can we close the books and faster than 20 days? BD16 is not good. We need to get it down to like BD8, BD9. So yeah, it's super interesting. You've been in this role for inverse transformation and before that business operations. How can revenue operations evolve and work outside of tech? Because frankly, I see the Vanguard is in technology-based companies, but I think a lot of what revenue operations does can apply and help companies that are not necessarily tied forward. It's super applicable. It's an interesting muscle and skill set to bring back to the space. And you touched on this a little bit earlier. A lot of the fundamentals have always existed in these companies, especially as a big differentiator between the startup ecosystem and the VC-backed ecosystem versus established, mature companies that have a lot of history. You have to have framework and modeling because you're basing on the startup side. You're basing your predictions on gut and on models and on ratios and industry standards and benchmarks and guesses. And when you're in a more established company, you're able to rely a bit on status quo. We expected close a million dollars in August, not because of the sophisticated model, but because we always close a million dollars in August. And there is a bit of, this is the way we've always done it, that permeates those cultures, but the speed of change and the speed at which competitors can come into the market and steal lunch from these legacy companies is a true threat. And so when you bring in this predictive modeling and this structure and a way to create an experience that the next class of working folks can enjoy, it gives energy back into established companies. It gives an edge to companies that might be kind of relying back on their old systems and their old way of working. And millennials came in and changed a lot and not to make this a generational thing, but it's the way that the millennials work, kind of by default squarely in that generation, the way that we've always worked. I mean, we entered the workforce with email, with texting, with all of these rapid fire communications. And so your business has to adapt to that and has to be ready for that because if we think we work fast, Gen Z and whoever's following them, they're expecting their answers in real time. So your systems and your company has to be designed to cater to attract that kind of talent so that you can stay successful. So back to your question, those business models were what allowed companies to kind of start and become very successful very quickly in the BC backed moonshot model. And now all of this incredible trained workforce is aging out of the grind and is coming back into these more established companies in a way that you'll see a new influx of energy and of talent and of people that are looking to take predictable businesses and make them that much more of a cutting edge best employer type workplace. So I think it's bringing together proven business models and proven business tactics that the revenue operations community has honed over the past five to years. And bringing that together, I think we'll really see an interesting shift where people choose to move towards in their employment careers. So I'm curious, there's a lot of synergy between these folks and business operations and revenue operations. This isn't just an opinion. Do you think that folks are going to move from one direction over the other, like rev ops, bus ops or from bus ops to rev ops? You think we'll have more of a tour of duty for a lot of these different folks who are in the kind of the op space? I will lose your followers on this one. But business operations is so much bigger than revenue operations. And I think it's easier for bus ops to move into rev ops because rev ops is a much more narrow discipline of the field. I would love to see more revenue operators expand out. There is a bias towards it, especially again, I keep beating this drum in the SaaS companies because revenue is needed to pay paychecks in a way that, of course, revenue is always needed to have thriving business, but it becomes much more urgent. And so revenue operations gets to sit at the table in a way that the glory is there, where it wasn't always another kind of business operations, back office type operations. But when that skill set, the rev ops has honed, can translate into product operations and really infusing visibility into how things are built and delivered. And empathy into how we onboard employees and deliver great cultures through HR teams and people teams and through visibility and our finance team so that we can buck this reputation of finance versus the world or heck versus the world. And I would love to see this incredibly talented pool of sales and revenue operations continue to pivot into sales adjacent roles and kind of break out of just the go-to-market functions. I think there's a lot of great learnings that they can take with them. That's awesome. Coming up to the end of the segment, I always ask this question to my guests. I'm curious to hear about a moment of impact that you've had on others or someone's had on you that's been meaningful in your career. So we talked a little bit about this before we started recording. There's a couple of reasons that people post a LinkedIn and I started posting a LinkedIn not because I needed something out of the platform several years ago, but because I found it to be a way to process my thoughts. And I sometimes forget there's people on the other side of the internet. And so the online communities that we have in our current ecosystem are such a low-hanging fruit opportunity for people to make an impact. Where oftentimes I will get messages six months, years later about, hey, do you remember that one time you posted X? I use that almost every week in my job. And that to me is one, surreal, but two, I think about that. And that's happened for me as well, where I've been able to glean wisdom from someone else in these collision spaces that we wouldn't have had without these communities. So social media and all those things, it's like, you can't make it your full time. You've got to give yourself a little bit of a break now and then. But I think there is so much potential for people to create impact and pay it forward in these spaces. So if you haven't already found your community and on a Slack community, a LinkedIn or what have you, consider this your call to action, find your people, and use that as your way to learn things that you didn't even know you're missing. I love that. Collision spaces. Speaking of collision space, where can folks connect with you? I am mostly on LinkedIn these days. So first and last name, there's not many of me out there, so easy to find. Connect, say hi and let me know if any of the ramblings resonate. Amazing. Thanks Rachel. Thanks, Jeff. Take care.