Revenue Strategy - What, Why and How to Measure the Impact with Jeremey Donovan, SVP Revenue Strategy at SalesLoft

Jeremey Donovan is the epitome of the phrase "Always Be Learning".

Jeremey started his career as a semiconductor engineer, transitioned to be an analyst covering the industry, then transitioned to product development, then to product management, product marketing, and finally to sales.  To say he is a continuous learner is an understatement!

Most recently, Jeremey started his pursuit as a Masters of Data Science while serving in the role of Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy at SaleLoft.

What is Revenue Strategy?  First, it's about the people, programs, processes and technology in pursuit of meeting company goals.  As the SVP Sales has evolved to the Chief Revenue Officer, and integrated the responsibility for pre-sales, sales and post-sales, the need for an operations function and strategy that reflects the entire customer lifecycle has evolved.

One strategy that impacted revenue growth was moving the inbound Sales Development organization into marketing.  By moving the team to Marketing, it created more incentive for marketing to generate leads and create a better feedback loop into marketing on what the market was saying.  Jeremey thinks that having a CMO and a CRO that are peers is a better model for larger organizations.

Jeremey's perspective on Revenue Operations is different He sees value in having marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations report into the COO or CFO versus sales or marketing.

What is the segmentation of Revenue Operations versus Revenue Strategy?  Jeremey's role is unique, and more of a general corporate strategy resource (think Chief of Staff). In fact, the Chief of Staff is a trending new role in the B2B SaaS industry, and one of the four roles that Jeremey serves for the SalesLoft CEO.

Jeremey sees the operations team primarily working "IN" the business and Revenue Strategy works "ON" the business.   Revenue Strategy is responsible for coming up with strategic initiatives, Go-To-Market strategies, etc., and then initially collaborating with the Revenue Operations team to deploy the strategy and then over time Revenue Operations takes primary responsibility to measure, manage and refine the program as feedback requires.

When asked about the top lagging and leading indicators (metrics) that he uses to measure the return on a particular revenue strategy,  his answer included an "Issue Tree" which is a process to deconstruct higher-level metrics into their component parts.  The example was "Net Dollar Retention" metrics break down into Gross Dollar Retention + Expansion, and then the next level breaks down into metrics such as Customer Success team productivity.

We next discussed leading indicators and their correlation to the top-level, outcome metrics like Net Dollar Retention.   Jeremey highlights adoption, configuration, and customer sentiment (CSAT and NPS) as part of a composite health score that directly impacts Net Dollar Retention.  

Analyzing the correlation, using logistic regression is used to predict retention, using the composite inputs of the sentiment score, per the above.

 They also use similar models to predict the probability of winning an opportunity. Using Bayesian logic, they analyze predict the likelihood of an opportunity closing using inputs such as activity, time, events, and historical trends that predicted opportunity closure.  In fact, this customer engagement score (opportunity score) is even available as part of the SalesLoft platform.

Every metric may matter, but  they may not always matter at the same time or have the same predictive value.  Figure out which are "out of kilter" and which enable "decisions and prescriptive actions".

Jeremey is a great listen for any B2B SaaS revenue and/or revenue operations professional!

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