Interview: Gabe Rothman at Rescale

The Interview

The full interview with Gabe below:

Kluster's Take

We spoke to Gabe, from Rescale, on best practice forecasting. His take on the role of revenue operations is to be neutral and not have an opinion, other than the focus on finding out what is true within the business.

Gabe took a step back to consider the unique pressures that SaaS and private investment places on forecasting, and the need to drive predictable recurring revenue.

"We need to show that we're a worthy company to invest in" - so we're trying to illustrate retention, renewal, account expansion, and general SaaS metrics.

Top takeaways below.

What is the biggest problem in revenue operations?

How to get the bottom 50% of a sales team to be fully engaged with the operational processes within the company.  This is something which is very difficult to achieve, and doing soshould have a big impact on bottom line revenue numbers.

Revenue operations careers: how to get into revenue operations

It was great to hear Gabe’s route into the function:

• Moved to the Bay area, wanting to get into technology. Worked in multiple technology jobs before going to law school, in San Francisco.
• Graduated, and after decided not to work in law,got job Blue Wolf, which was Gabe’s first introduction to sales operations.
• Moved to PagerDuty, and has worked in the function from then onwards

Creativity in revenue operations

Creativity does not have to be just a musician, or and artist.  The definition of creativity is going outside of the traditional structures in which one works or exists. Sales operations is doing exactly that - dynamically solving problems, and build processes to resolve them as they arise.

Both reacting to changes in a company and the market they operate, as well as proactively pre-empting issues, often in fast growth companies, is a key skill set of a revenue operations professional. As such, creativity is a key component of revenue operations – both the challenge and enjoyable part!

Revenue operations and venture capital

Revenue operations gets great exposure to the detail of private investments. Gabe generally works with the CFO, COO and CEO, delivering the metrics and reports needed during the fundraising and investment processes.

Alignment between different teams

Gabe’s team, like most revenue operations functions, sits between multiple teams within the company. This is a difficult task, and as such Gabe says that it is very important to be neutral, and data-driven. "We're Switzerland"!

Neutrality of revenue operations, and the strategic role in a company

Revenue operations should not have a preconceived opinion, however they are entitled to build a hypothesis and test it based on data.

This is becoming increasingly important as the roles available to revenue operations professionals become increasingly strategic over tactical.