Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
We’re taking you straight to the floor of RevOpsAF with three senior leaders in Revenue Operations. Joining the conversation are Jeff Vanzant, Senior Director of RevOps at DailyPay, Matt Lauer, Director of RevOps at Consensus, and Tessa Whittaker, VP of RevOps at ZoomInfo.
After spending time with some of the world’s top GTM leaders, one consistent theme stood out: no matter how the function evolves, RevOps leadership is the force multiplier. It’s what drives GTMt alignment and revenue efficiency, especially across the famously strong personalities of marketing, sales, and executive teams.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Nailing Data & Processes
Matt Lauer, the Director of RevOps at Consensus, makes it clear that nailing your data and processes is the first step toward execution excellence. Without accurate data, making informed decisions becomes a guessing game. He also emphasizes the importance of implementing processes and systems that are simple and make life easier for the end user.
“When you’re looking at RevOps, I always frame it as data, process, and systems in that order,” explains Matt. “People think systems will solve everything, but they don’t. Take AI as an example, AI is just a way of looking at a large data set and pulling insights from it. But if your data set is malformed or not formatted correctly, what’s that going to tell you? It’s the same thing as having bad deal data or a bad process. The reality is, a business can run itself on good data and process out of a Google sheet, and the only reason to migrate to a bigger system is because you’re running into the limitation of that system.”
Before investing in new tools and technologies, Matt recommends organizations start with the fundamentals. Get the data right. Make sure the processes are working. Once those are in place, adding a new system becomes much easier. And it will happen at a time that actually makes sense for your business.
But getting execution right isn’t just about tools and processes. It’s also about navigating personalities — especially at the leadership level. When asked how he approaches aligning strong, often competing voices across sales, marketing, and CS, Matt didn’t mince words.
“The first thing you have to do is disassociate RevOps from sitting directly under a single VP,” he explains. “Too often, RevOps gets tied to sales and ends up siloed, without considering how those decisions impact marketing up-funnel or CS downstream.”
Matt suggests organizing all ops roles under a centralized RevOps function, one that rolls up to the CRO. This, he says, creates an impartial function that can see across the entire GTM engine.
“Now you have someone who can align data, process, and systems across all functions,” he says. “So a decision in sales doesn’t unintentionally hurt marketing or CS. Instead, you’re holding the entire funnel in view.”
Cross-functional Readiness
When it comes to driving execution excellence in RevOps, one of the most overlooked and underestimated elements is cross-functional readiness. Jeff Vanzant, Senior Director of RevOps at DailyPay, highlights how deals don’t simply live or die within the sales team. There are many moving parts behind the scenes, from legal and credit to security, all of which can create friction and delays if not accounted for early.
“Deals don’t just die during sales execution,” Jeff explains. “There’s lots of opportunities for things to go wrong. If you don’t build those functions into your process, it’s tough to create a repeatable, scalable sales process.”
When asked how teams can accelerate these internal dependencies that often slow down deals, Jeff said, “It starts with strong entry and exit criteria for every stage of the sales process. The earlier you loop in internal teams like legal or finance, the faster you can move deals forward.”
Jeff points out that the sales process needs to be tailored to different segments, such as company size or deal complexity. Data plays a critical role in gaining buy-in from non-commercial teams and driving change in their workflows.
“For example, we often see deals stall during the legal review or contract negotiation stage. If you look at the total sales cycle and where time is spent, you can identify bottlenecks like excessive back-and-forth on contract redlines that could be streamlined.”
He stresses that these insights come from analyzing the data, which reveals where the process slows down and what steps can be optimized. But data alone isn’t enough if you don’t have clear qualification standards from the start.
“Without high-quality entry criteria into discovery, you’ll end up with an inflated pipeline. That makes it really hard to diagnose what’s going wrong during the sales process,” Jeff says. “Whether you use MEDDPICC, Sandler, BANT, or another methodology, capturing the right info early and using tools like conversation intelligence and scorecards is essential. You have to ‘check the box’ on quality before you can understand pipeline issues.”
The bottom line? Successful RevOps execution depends not only on sales but on orchestrating the entire cross-functional ecosystem through data-driven processes and early alignment.
Aligning RevOps Around Shared KPIs
One of the biggest challenges in RevOps isn’t just building the right systems — it’s getting every team to move in the same direction, especially when everyone has different priorities, needs, and resource demands.
Tessa Whittaker, VP of RevOps at ZoomInfo, believes that alignment starts with clarity of purpose and a shared language. “If you're gonna sell to a revenue operator, you need to speak like a revenue operator,” she says. “You need to understand what their problems are and what they're trying to solve.”
That same principle applies internally. With limited resources and cross-functional pressure, RevOps teams must act as the connective tissue that brings clarity to competing demands.
So how do you get every function from sales and marketing to customer success and finance to row in the same direction?
“It’s about aligning everyone around the most strategic goals,” Tessa explains. “If we’re all focused on moving the needle on the same metrics, the same KPIs, then it becomes much easier to align around a shared purpose. Ultimately, we all want the same thing — for our businesses to be wildly successful.”
But alignment doesn’t just happen. It requires focus and intentional prioritization.
“First, you have to set the goals,” she says. “Go from 20 to five — or five to three. Then make sure those KPIs connect back to what each organization is trying to achieve. If everyone has that same North Star, it's much easier to align priorities and drive toward that common deliverable.”
For RevOps leaders, that means not just managing systems and data, but becoming translators, facilitators, and strategic unifiers across the org.
About RevOpsAF
RevOpsAF is a conference and community built for RevOps professionals working in GTM roles. It offers live events including sessions, workshops, offsite bonding experiences, and a party, plus year-round support through Slack, podcasts, and virtual meetups.
To learn more about RevOpsAF, visit the official or follow the organization on LinkedIn.
