Sales Ops Leaders: Interview with Brian McTeague

fullcast.io is launching Sales Ops Leaders, an interview series featuring sales ops professionals in all industries, company sizes, and stages of their career.  Each month we’ll feature different leaders as a way to learn from each other, answer tough questions, and connect the sales ops community. This week, we’ve interviewed Brian McTeague, Vice President of Revenue Operations at FastSpring. FastSpring is the trusted e-commerce partner for companies that sell software around the world. Companies using FastSpring’s full-service e-commerce solution sell more, stay lean, and compete big. Prior to his role at FastSpring, Brian was the VP of Sales Operations at Cylance and the Director of Sales Ops and Strategy at AppFolio.‍

fullcast.io: How do you define success in your role?

Brian: Since my role is Revenue Ops, we’re successful when we’re able to impact revenue growth through scale and productivity across the full funnel (Sales/Marketing/CS). We’re most successful when we’re able to do this in a way where we eliminate friction in the business and provide insights that drive action in real-time.

‍fullcast.io: How do you demonstrate ROI?

Brian: I like everything to be measurable, including ops.  For most major initiatives and systems investments, we establish the metrics that we expect to influence as part of our prioritization process (i.e. BEFORE we execute) and then follow the impact to those metrics.  It’s not always easy to isolate, but we can extrapolate a revenue impact to measure against the cost from there.

‍fullcast.io: What tools are you using? Is there a tool that’s been a game-changer?

Brian: We have a pretty extensive tech stack as most businesses seem to these days. Actually, Salesforce Lightning has been a real game-changer as far as creating a much more elegant sales experience, easily aligning to best practice, and providing insights front and center. Another game-changer for us is combining video prospecting within our outbound prospecting sequences – we use Soapbox and Apollo to do this. Because we sell to online software sellers, we can look at their websites and customize based on where we can add value to their online sales experience – this gets us great response rates.

‍fullcast.io: What is your biggest roadblock or unsolved problem right now?

Brian: We don’t have many, but we have built a very sophisticated systems architecture with many workflows, so making changes with so much interconnectivity can be difficult without having downstream impacts.

‍fullcast.io: What’s the top goal for your team right now?

Brian: Lots going on, but some of the top goals are migrating to Service Cloud for Support, driving revenue growth through a robust customer health motion using Gainsight and Salesforce, and increasing lead conversion with a number of systems and workflow enhancements along the top of the funnel customer journey.

‍fullcast.io What advice do you have for other growing sales ops teams?

Brian: Don’t try to boil the ocean. My experience has been that most Sales Ops teams have no shortage of vision, but often lack focus. The beautiful picture in your mind of a perfect sales motion is more likely to happen when you prioritize and get small wins more often. Eventually, all those small wins add up to big progress.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.