Because of how holistic RevOps is by nature, requiring you to essentially master the entire (revenue) engine from “traffic to churn”, it’s tempting to want to know it all. You’ll see this especially in start-ups and early stage scale-ups without a structured RevOps department and clearly defined roles. You often feel like you need to get into the nitty-gritty of every process and every tool.
After all, if you want to succeed, you have to take ownership. Depending on the company and team structure, you either hustle and do the work yourself, or have a team you can almost blindly trust to support you with the right data and information at the right time.
For most SaaS companies, when it comes to tools and processes with the biggest impact on RevOps performance, the heavyweight is generally your Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
What is a CRM?
Just for kicks, since Salesforce is the star of the article, let’s take their definition of a CRM. According to Salesforce, “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that companies use to manage interactions with customers and potential customers. CRMs help organisations streamline processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability.”
For most companies, it acts as the single source of truth (SST) for the bulk of your customer and revenue data. It is critical for smoothly running sales (and often marketing) teams and gathering critical insights. This ultimately leads to better decision making and accurate forecasting to understand the future of the business.
Alternatives to Salesforce are HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday.com, Salesloft, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho and a bunch of others.
Do you need Salesforce expertise for success in RevOps?
So let’s get to the crux of the matter. Do you need to be a 25x certified Salesforce wizard with 15 years of experience, earning badge after badge to have a successful career in RevOps? The simple answer is “Not really”. The slightly less favoured answer is, “It depends”.
Salesforce is generally the CRM of choice of larger global organisations primarily because of how robust and customisable the platform is. This post by Cloud Kettle is a good read if you want to understand when and why companies might transition to Salesforce. It costs heaps (often hundreds of thousands) and once a company commits to Salesforce, it’s generally going to stick with it till death do them part.
Whether you “need” Salesforce expertise and whether it’s critical to your RevOps career success depend on questions like:
- Does your company or the kind of companies you want to work with use Salesforce?
- Do these companies have Salesforce experts on board already?
- Do you really need Salesforce expertise for the role? I.e., are you signing up to be more of a CRM admin than a strategic RevOps contributor?
What is Salesforce’s market share?
According to this analysis on Salesforce’s market share, about 80% of the fortune 500 companies use Salesforce as their CRM. The Tech Report’s analysis concludes that about 150,000 companies globally use Salesforce. But hey, HubSpot is rapidly growing in popularity, releasing features left, right and centre. It’s also gearing their product suite more towards enterprise. Hubspot also already has over 205,000 customers and counting.
Let’s not forget the plethora of other CRMs out there, used by organisations of all shapes and sizes. The CRM you’re likely to encounter most often in your career also depends on other factors.The size of the company, geographical location and even industry all have an influence.
As a general rule of thumb, in smaller start-ups and scale-ups, you’ll tend to see HubSpot, Pipedrive and other CRMs widely used. More established enterprise organisations will generally have migrated to Salesforce. Important to note though, that HubSpot and others are starting to compete more in the enterprise space. With an army of fans and competitive pricing, the market share is likely to shift in their favour.
Side note: If you’re hired for a RevOps role and the company runs on Google Sheets, RUN!
so do you really need salesforce expertise?
To understand how important Salesforce knowledge and expertise is for you, first understand the opportunities around you and what you’re looking to achieve. If your goal is to work for enterprise clients in the professional services industries and you want to aim for an executive role, then yes, Salesforce knowledge and eventual expertise will be a great asset. Especially in scale-ups expanding rapidly, you could often involved in Salesforce migration projects as part of the RevOps function. The more knowledgeable and hands-on you are, the more effective you’ll be. Sure, the company might also be open to bringing in Salesforce consultants but you’ll still want to speak their language and be able to influence decisions that will eventually impact RevOps’s success.
You could however decide that you’re in love with the start-up and scale-up world. From your research, perhaps found that 80% of companies you’d like to work with swear by HubSpot. If that’s the case, choose accordingly. I’m more in this bucket and just adore the simplicity of HubSpot.
The fact is, it depends
The best way to find out whether you need Salesforce expertise to succeed right now is to be pragmatic. First and foremost, understand the market around you. What CRM do most companies that you want to work with use? You might be able to rock a 30 year career without ever encountering Salesforce. Or, your dream company might migrate to Salesforce next year.
You definitely don’t NEED Salesforce expertise or experience to succeed in RevOps. If the companies you’d like to work with prefer Salesforce, you might be good with just working knowledge, or have to build your expertise, again depending on the other resources available.
The nature of RevOps roles vary significantly depending on a lot of factors. If you don’t have any Salesforce experience and want to get into RevOps asap, it’s not hard. Just find companies that use other CRMs and/or don’t require much Salesforce experience for the specific role. The best thing is to get started and remember, the learning never stops.
If down the line Salesforce experience becomes critical, no worries. With enough experience and exposure to different CRMs, it’ll be a breeze for you to pick it up and own the CRM implementation in no time. There are a million opportunities to get started with or without Salesforce experience. Grab one and just get started!
