RevOps Blog Turning the Customer Journey into your Competitive Advantage with Catherine Mandungu, Founder of Think RevOps

Companies are constantly looking for that edge to give them a leg up on their competition. Catherine Mandungu, Founder of Think RevOps, believes that competitive advantage can be found by optimizing the customer journey. In this latest installment of the Revenue Leader Interview Series, Catherine breaks down how the role of RevOps can help facilitate alignment and create the competitive advantage that companies need to stay ahead. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. RevOps: Hi Catherine, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's start with a bit about your background. Could you tell us about your journey to the world of RevOps? Catherine Mandungu Thanks so much for having me! As a kid, you don't really ever dream of becoming a RevOps person, right? I actually wanted to go into fashion. I had the intention of learning about fashion in business school in London. However, London is a costly town, and I didn't have the resources to move there. I moved to a town called Northampton, which had a great business school that I enrolled into. While I was there, I became fascinated with the tech world; I could see myself working in a tech company. In our second year of business school, students had to find an internship, so I decided to apply to Microsoft in the Finance department. The assessment went quite well, at least that's what I thought. But, unfortunately, I got rejected for that role. However, they called me back and let me know that another role may suit me better. I returned to interview for an Education Licensing Specialist position, which worked with governmental and educational bodies in the UK. This role would sit between the Sales team and Operations organizations; it was my first experience working with commercial operations. It was an exciting role because I was doing a little bit of sales work and account management, renewing non-evergreen to become evergreen. I also supported sales and resellers, worked on partner programs, training distributors, and working closely with the Operations teams. Once I got to do that, I thought this was for me because I really loved working with numbers, working through process improvements, enabling, and working with so many different stakeholders within the company. It gave me a broader perspective of what a business looks like, looking at both the holistic and tiny details. That was my first taste of Operations; though I was called an Educational Licensing Specialist, it could really have been called a Sales Ops role. After the internship was over, I went back to complete my final year of business school. When I graduated, Microsoft invited me back to work on the "Excellence" team, which was, in effect, the Operations team. That's how my journey started in Ops, and I've never left. RevOps: That's a fascinating journey. Fast forward, what are you doing today? CM: Over a decade later, I now have my own consulting company that I started just over a year and a half ago - right before the pandemic. I work mainly with B2B tech companies doing Revenue Operations. We started with startups and have now begun working with mid-sized companies as well. I love what I do. I started my own company because I love working on projects; I come in to fix a problem, create that transformation, and then move on. I don't want to go into the day-to-day. It's been exciting working with different companies because you get an even broader perspective with multiple clients simultaneously. Sometimes, you can bring best practices from one client project to another. Other times, you get shocked; you think you've seen it all, but there's always something to learn because everyone has a unique way of setting up their operations and business model. It's for me to come in and understand that, unpack it, and create or redesign something more efficient but unique to them; you can't always take what you built for one client and move it to another. I do try to automate because I think it can make my life easier. But, sometimes, it can actually be best to keep things unique to a particular client. RevOps: Your company, Think RevOps, talks about making the customer journey a competitive advantage. How can a company do that? CM: Let's first look at the definition of Revenue Operations. The way I see it, there are a few layers to it. Firstly, RevOps is a mindset. It needs to be a culture because it's about creating alignment and focus. Alignment doesn't just refer to the Go-to-Market teams but the entire organization. Any other department within the organization should add value to selling your product or service. The next part of RevOps is that it's a business function that aims to maximize revenue or potential revenue. That is often the given definition of RevOps, but it's only one part of it in my opinion. Going another layer down, though, you need to think about how you are actually doing that. It's done by managing the revenue engine's ability to scale efficiently so that we can maximize that revenue. I believe, to do that, you have to look at the customer journey end-to-end. You begin to understand the levers that you can pull to create incremental efficiencies when you do that. Some people like to talk about the customer journey as a funnel, but we've now begun looking at it as a bowtie. It's a funnel going into the acquisition, but we have to consider the expansion opportunities once you've acquired that customer. So that's what we mean by creating a competitive advantage with your customer journey. Let's say you aren't going to put any more resources into your sales team, but you still want to generate more growth. To do that, you have to identify the levers that you can pull in the customer journey to figure out how to create efficiencies; how much more productive your team can be with the same resources they currently have. We look to decrease the cost to help us gain that growth. One of the most important things to look at is CAC and LTV, which sit across the entire customer journey. So before you put more resources into your sales team, you have to do a deep dive into your customer journey to find opportunities for growth that already exist. RevOps: Alignment is another term that is often synonymous with RevOps. How do you think a company can achieve true alignment? CM: Let's first understand why we need to achieve alignment. When GTM teams work within silos, they are not making decisions based on how it will impact the customer journey and the other teams involved. Alignment is a mindset. Teams and individuals need to base every decision they make on how it will affect the entire organization. Instead of thinking about their team's individual goals, everyone aligns to a revenue target and they all work together towards that goal. True alignment is reached when you get to the point when people start talking about how the whole organization can work towards a shared goal. With that, comes a certain rhythm and cadence in the organization where everyone is talking about the same thing and using the same definitions; they talk about the goals and strategies to put in place as a team rather than their department. RevOps: You mentioned that you started your business just before the pandemic hit. How do you think COVID-19 impacted RevOps and the way people in a RevOps role work? CM: It goes back to the idea we just spoke about with creating a competitive customer journey. The pandemic pushed companies to do more with less; they had to find opportunities for incremental growth. RevOps became the way they could examine their customer journey without requiring a significant investment of resources. That's why RevOps became such an essential role over the last 18 months. It gave companies that may have otherwise really struggle in this time the ability to survive and be agile. RevOps creates agility within your customer journey so that you can quickly make changes when you need to, such as a worldwide pandemic. RevOps: What do you think the future holds for Revenue Operations? What does the next five to ten years look like? CM: I think RevOps will evolve much more in the next five years than it has in the last five. It will become something that is so much more ingrained within the business in terms of decision-making. For the last ten years, we've been talking a lot about how organizations have to be data-driven and data-enabled. That has now become the forefront of most organizations to understand how to use data to drive growth or create more value with the products and services being sold. The reason I'm bringing this up is RevOps isn't out there selling; we're operational and trying to figure out how shifting things internally will impact the entire organization. What I see for the future is that data will become an even more important part of RevOps. How often do you hear organizations say, "The data should...." "We need to enrich the data." "We don't have the data." It's always about data. Tied into that is digital transformation. To become efficient, you need to automate. If you look at RevOps today, we have two forces at play: A movement towards making data-driven decisions. The need to transform to automation to move faster and more efficiently. I can see the future of RevOps as a merge between data and digital transformation.The post Turning the Customer Journey into your Competitive Advantage with Catherine Mandungu, Founder of Think RevOps appeared first on RevOps Revenue Operations Blog.