As a founder, leading your company’s sales efforts can be exhilarating. In the early stages, wearing multiple hats and being involved in every aspect of the business is both challenging and rewarding. We know – it’s difficult to take a step back from something you’ve worked so hard to build; however, as your business continues to grow, it’s important to distribute those hats so you can focus on strategic growth and allow your team to specialize in the operational execution of your business model. 

During the webinar: Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales with RevOps, Tom O’Neill, CEO and founder of Parallax, and Kurt Schmidt, Consultant and founder of Schmidt Consulting group, shared their experiences as founders doing just that. They explained the importance of building a solid GTM strategy by utilizing revenue operations best practices and building habits that allow for growth beyond founder-led methods.  

Why Move Past Founder-Led Sales?

In the beginning, founder-led sales work well because of the founder’s passion, vision, and deep understanding of the product and market. However, as the company scales, this approach can become unsustainable. The constant need to juggle multiple roles—sales, delivery, HR, strategic planning—leads to burnout and limits well deserved attention to the strategic growth of the company. 

Professional service organizations often experience a continuous cycle of too much work or not enough work, making revenue streams unpredictable. This uncertainty affects the ability to pay bills, manage payroll, and scale operations effectively.

Because of this, founders are constantly switching between roles or “wearing a lot of hats”—selling, delivering, hiring, and strategic planning, trying to level out waves in the pipeline. There isn’t enough time or resources to track efforts, improve processes, and forecast financial health. This reactive approach prevents founders from focusing on long-term growth and strategic initiatives, ultimately, causing passion to fade. 

To enable growth and scalability, it’s essential to transition from founder-led sales to a more structured go-to-market approach. This is where Revenue Operations (RevOps) comes into play.

What is RevOps?

RevOps is the strategic approach that aligns sales, marketing, customer success and other operations to drive revenue growth in a consistent and predictable manner. 

RevOps ensures that all teams are working towards common goals and are equipped with the information, tools and best strategic operational procedures to help the organization succeed. With this, revenue operations aims to reduce the occurrence of unpredictable revenue streams through analyzing and implementing operational best practices that make a measurable impact on the organization’s revenue growth initiatives.

Responsibilities of a Revenue Operations Manager:   

• Align Cross-Departmental Teams: Ensuring that sales, marketing, customer success, and other parts of the organization are working towards common objectives such as revenue goals, project timelines, and resource requirements.
• Streamline Revenue Operations: Identifying key opportunities to streamline operational processes that impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization’s revenue operations. 
• Connect Revenue Trends: Connecting key revenue trends in customer acquisition and delivery, recommending areas of improvement that aid in the organization’s current objectives.
• Enable Team Success: Providing teams with the data, tools, and insights they need to perform efficiently and effectively.
• Strategic Planning & Revenue Forecasting: Working with finance to align revenue operations with financial goals, providing insight on operational costs to maintain and plan for profitable operations.

Steps to Developing a RevOps focused GTM Strategy:

1. Distribute the Hats: The only way to allow leadership to focus on strategic initiatives, is to pass off the many “hats” or responsibility ownership. Start by defining supporting roles and responsibilities across the organization to help distribute the hats and encourage efficiency in each business function. 
2. Define a Cadence: Establish clear expectations for each role. Define how and when responsibilities will be delivered, how teams will work together, and which goals are independent to each function. Creating standardized operational best practices streamlines your workflow and makes it easier to see where adjustments need to be made or where you are seeing success! 
3. Measure Success: Determine how success will be measured in these new roles. Set clear, achievable goals and establish metrics to track progress. RevOps ensures these metrics are aligned with overall business objectives.
4. Empower Your Team: Build a healthy foundation by empowering your team with the necessary tools, feedback, trust, and support. A well-supported team can exceed expectations and drive the company forward.

Getting Started

We’ve developed a guide that includes helpful and inspiring resources, designed to help set leaders on the right path to scaling beyond founder-led sales methods and on to a strategic GTM strategy.

Plan for Future Success

Developing a strategy to ditch unpredictable revenue streams and encourage growth may seem daunting – we’re here to help get out of the unpredictable cycle in revenue and get ahead of unpredictable revenue trends before they occur through resource forecasting.

If you want to chat about professional services operations, reach out to hello@getparallax.com.