Taft Love's journey to becoming a Revenue Operations leader started in law enforcement, with a pivot to starting his tech career by becoming a Sales Development Representative, on to direct sales, sales leadership and ultimately to Revenue Operations.

This journey is exactly the cross-functional experience that builds a strong foundation to being a strategic revenue operations leader. Interestingly, Taft's experience as a sales lead at early stage B2B SaaS company, PandaDoc by identifying and then having to solve operational challenges that impacted his productivity.

When should a company consider a RevOps function? Taft's perspective is that RevOps starts with ensuring the revenue technology platforms and processes are aligned and optimized to the need of the front line sales personnel. Simply stated, start the RevOps journey with a RevTech resource and as you grow to $5M - $15M (Series B) start considering a RevOps team that has broader responsibility beyond managing revenue technology platforms.

As we discussed the RevOps framework of data, platform, process and analytics Taft doubled down on the "rev tech stack" administration is the initial catalyst to creating a RevOps team. When pressed on the traditional approach to bringing in a Salesforce administrator and then the marketing automation administrator - often positioned as a Sales Ops and Marketing Ops resource, Taft continued to support his belief that RevOps should not be the first ops resource brought into a company.

Next we discussed the pro's and con's of starting the RevOps journey with an internal hire versus leveraging the expertise of a RevOps agency. Taft's insights are that no one single RevOps resource can be good at every component of a RevOps function. Examples include trying to have the same single resource be a platform administrator, data guru, business analyst and technical integration expert.

Taft's recommendation is to bring in a RevOps leader, who is the RevOps architect and also work with an agency that can bring the right experience and expertise on an "as needed" basis.

Next we discussed why Sales Development can benefit the most from a close partnership with Revenue Operations. Sales Development productivity is directly impacted by having the right "target prospect" data, the ability to conduct high quality outreach at scale and ultimately being able to fuel the engine of company growth - pipeline development!

Recent research has shown that only 49% of an SDR's time is spent on outbound prospecting because they spend the majority of their time on administrative and operational activities, such as data management, list development and contact enrichment, that are the primary domains of a Revenue Operations function.

If you are considering an investment in your first Revenue Operations function or how to leverage your Revenue Operations team to increase revenue activity productivity, Taft is a great listen.