A four-time RevOps leader for unicorns, RevOps Revolution podcast guest Andy Mowat covers everything from scaling up, helping teams prioritize and focus, and the importance of bringing solutions to problems vs. just responding.
In the two-part episode series, our RevOps Revolution podcast hosted by Jeff Serlin (chief RevOps officer here at Revcast), it's all about how RevOps can be managed at companies exceeding $1 billion+ valuations. Their conversation offered actionable insights into prioritizing, strategizing, and scaling RevOps organizations for success. Below is a recap, but you can listen to the full episodes here:
- Cutting Through the Noise as the New Leader of RevOps (22 minutes)
- RevOps Needs to Bring Solutions to Problems Rather Than Just Responding (19 minutes)
What is the True Value of RevOps?
When asked about the value of RevOps, Andy shared a simple yet powerful framework: "We amplify three things: revenue, efficiency, and customer experience." He explained how RevOps identifies opportunities within the sales funnel, ensures scalable organizational structures, and enhances customer interactions with revenue teams. For Andy, it’s critical to align these three pillars for maximum impact.
The Importance of Prioritization & Listening
Starting strong in a new RevOps role often means navigating a chaotic environment of competing demands. Andy shared a memorable example of how prioritization led to success: "I once sat in on several meetings where a team leader kept voicing frustration about not getting what they needed. At the end, I outlined our priorities and asked if they had any issues with the list. Their response? 'Makes sense.' From there, we were able to run smoothly." By setting clear priorities and forcing trade-offs, Andy’s team not only delivered better results but also gained trust and alignment across departments.
Andy highlighted the dual importance of listening to leaders and frontline employees to uncover hidden inefficiencies.
"I always make time to join team meetings. For example, I discovered our mid-market team was spending 50% of their time just finding the right accounts. Fixing that one issue doubled their productivity."
Proactively identifying pain points, he noted, is key to building credibility and delivering immediate impact.
Shifting from Tactical to Strategic
RevOps teams often get bogged down in day-to-day operations. Andy emphasized the importance of shifting the mindset from tactical execution to strategic leadership -- especially when working across different groups, such as with marketing ops.
He said: "It's a lot of just like helping people force the right decisions. I think a lot of people I've observed, they're great people, they're well intentioned, they're just in silos, and I need to break down those silos.... And so you need to be strategic first before you expect other people to treat you strategically."
He also stressed the value of education, sharing how his teams at Box and Carta implemented programs to up skill employees on data analysis and strategic thinking.
Building High-Performing RevOps Teams
Andy shared his approach to evaluating and empowering RevOps teams, which includes focusing on key skills like managing up, forcing trade-offs, and cross-functional collaboration.
"One of my favorite concepts is that learning happens outside your comfort zone. I always ask, ‘Are you okay if I push you outside of that?’ It’s how we challenge and grow our people."
He also highlighted the importance of building trust with other executives, such as the CRO and CMO, and delivering early wins to demonstrate value. This can be helped by communicating more about what RevOps is doing and impacting -- "internal marketing," if you will. At one company, he had his team send out a weekly update with three sections:
- A key data insight they wanted to share
- Impactful stakeholder feedback
- A cool upcoming project and what to expect from that
Simplifying the Tech Stack and Data
RevOps often inherits a tangled web of tools and systems. Andy shared practical advice for managing this complexity: "Tech debt will always exist, but the key is educating the organization on how to buy software properly. For example, I inherited a tool that hadn’t been implemented for nine months because no one was aligned on it. We paused, realigned, and made it work."
Centralizing decision-making and budget ownership within RevOps, he noted, is also helpful to achieving alignment and long-term efficiency.
Working Towards Solutions
Andy and Jeff also spent episode two talking extensively about approaches to problem solving and how to drive alignment in that process. First, he likes sitting down with different team segments (i.e. SDR team) and reviewing their challenges and priorities, so you can start to develop a RevOps roadmap -- and adjusting that quarterly. But even with those prioritized plans, there still needs to be a way to adapt to the day-to-day requests and emergence of new priorities, especially driven from the C-suite.
Andy cautions: "How do you guard against an executive just kind of popping in and saying, 'Stop working on that and work on this other thing?' Do you allow them to do that? Do you have a way of making sure it gets into everything else, and it's appropriately prioritized, because you can get pushed all different directions without even finishing anything."
Jeff says one was to approach handling this is to make sure everyone is clear about the impact of changing priorities: "So we agree that if we do this, we can't do these three things. And if you are really good at managing up, forcing trade offs is the most important thing."
The Future of RevOps
When asked about what excites him most about the future, Andy spoke about the transformative potential of data: "I prefer to call it GTM (Go-to-Market) Ops rather than RevOps. It’s more encompassing, including CS, sales, and marketing. The way data will re-engineer our entire tech stack is what excites me most."
Andy’s insights underscore the evolving role of RevOps as a strategic driver of growth and efficiency. By amplifying revenue, efficiency, and customer experience, and focusing on proactive problem-solving, RevOps teams can help organizations thrive in an increasingly complex landscape.
Thanks Andy for being such an insightful guest!
