What if I told you the future of sales enablement is doing even more with even less? What if your teams could accumulate years of RevOps experience, in less time than it takes to type “Ctrl+F”? That world isn’t far away; in fact, it may be close at hand.
No one peers into the future of sales engagement and RevOps better than Jason Westerberg, Head of Revenue Operations at Mixmax. Mixmax is the #1 sales engagement platform for Gmail. It enables revenue teams by eliminating “busywork”’ at every stage of the customer journey.
Jason’s approach to RevOps prioritizes knowledge and lean processes. I spoke with him to learn about being crafty with resources, the new world of RevOps knowledge transfer, and what to expect five years from now.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity.
Nick Bonfiglio: What drew you to Mixmax?
I’ve been a customer of almost all of our competitors and had mixed experiences with all of them. In some ways, I would say Mixmax is a “dark horse” in this space. There’s a bunch of companies that do similar things: extra functionality within your inbox to enable you to sell more effectively. But my experience is that no single solution has worked for all of the revenue teams across the customer journey, except for Mixmax. Before it, I always had to mix and match solutions based on different use cases. Personally, I enjoy being the “dark horse” because it forces our team to prioritize, motivates us to make quick, strategic decisions with data, and requires close team collaboration to build a really good product to fuel our company’s growth.
What RevOps lessons did you learn early on?
I learned to become crafty by always assuming there’s no money to spend. I’ve worked at small and large companies where the goal is to always reduce spending. I’d scour the Salesforce AppExchange for free apps to test for specific problems we had. Or I’d reach out to someone in my network to see how they resolved similar issues.
Through that process, I’ve built my own RevOps playbook from different roles. Sales has different strategies for breaking into new accounts, or sales plays they run. I have my RevOps playbook, which I’m confident I can apply at any company, small or large. I’ve just started sharing some of this knowledge in an attempt to boost my network, build a brand, and help others. I was taught that if you make a mistake, you don’t make the same mistake twice. So, why not share ideas and solutions?
Speaking of your brand, you often post raw code on LinkedIn. You’re one of the few people I’ve seen share knowledge in that way. Tell me more about that.
Like a lot of things in my playbook, I sourced that code from other people or I discovered it because I couldn’t spend money (laughs). I’ve become a sponge when it comes to learning—I will listen, read, or watch literally anything to make myself a more well rounded Ops professional. It’s also really important for me to regularly ask for constructive feedback and apply it. Then when the pandemic hit, it occurred to me that I should start leveraging LinkedIn more. I didn’t see many people in the RevOps space having these conversations. So I wanted to connect with people and share my knowledge.
What is the state of RevOps communities right now? How are our sources of knowledge evolving?
In the last week, I’ve learned three new things that I could implement tomorrow to solve problems we’re facing. A year ago that never happened. People in RevOps tend to be more reserved—they don’t need acknowledgement, praise or awards. They enjoy what they do and get affirmation by seeing their company and teams be successful. In the past, it wasn’t as easy to share best practices and connect with others quickly, but also people weren’t as willing.
Now we’re more vocal about the function of what we do. I would like to see more RevOps people recognizing their unique position—we’re in demand more than ever and have access to a lot of best practices from some great minds. I’ve seen more RevOps knowledge sharing in the last six months than I’ve ever seen in my career. Why not join that conversation?
I seek out those conversations and solutions in Slack communities. I’ll search for keywords on the problem I’m facing and usually find the solution. Or I’ll start the conversation myself. RevOps professionals should be leaning on those communities and engaging in that knowledge transfer. I guarantee other people are talking about what you’re struggling with. There’s a wealth of talented people out there who are becoming more outspoken. We should all jump in and help where we can.
One productivity tip?
It might be odd, but I sign up for a lot of webinars, not because I plan to watch them in real time, but because I prefer to listen to them on-demand. I have a 15-month-old son, so I don’t have a lot of time to read blogs and listen to podcasts in my spare time (laughs). But I will regularly multi-task during project work and listen to webinar recordings. Usually, someone at a company has done something successfully and they get tactical in the webinar about how they did it. I find the best nuggets that way.
What are your strangely specific RevOps predictions for five years from now?
In five years, I believe there’s going to be a mass consolidation of sales and marketing tech software. It’s so fragmented. Eventually, there’s going to be a big bang where bigger players gobble up smaller players to build fewer, better sales enabling platforms. I know there will be other players re-imagining the CRM space and more closely competing with Salesforce. Some of them already exist and some are still to come, but we need that competition to continually push innovation.
Follow Jason on LinkedIn to see more of his playbook—like tips on data cleanliness.
