Creating a Winning Revenue Strategy | Mallory Lee, VP of Operations at Nylas

I began as a marketing analyst after graduating in 2009, when Indianapolis had few opportunities at growing companies. The role required Salesforce experience, so I used a free trial before my interview. At ExactTarget, I gained experience in Salesforce, reporting, marketing automation and the Pardot acquisition. I later joined the Pardot team in consulting and stayed through the Salesforce acquisition.

My later roles remained rooted in B2B demand generation, automation and marketing operations. At Terminus, I joined a unified revenue operations model, supporting forecasting, pipeline and CRM analysis. My remit grew to include sales compensation, territory planning and customer success operations. That work showed me the value of following the entire customer journey across marketing, sales and customer success.

Software companies helped establish revenue operations by building products for its practitioners. More significantly, businesses recognised that siloed go-to-market strategies create blockers, confusion and broken processes. Revenue operations offers a way to align departments. However, this organisational challenge requires people who work well across several functions.

The title alone does not guarantee a broad remit. Someone can adopt a popular revenue operations title while continuing to support sales alone. Genuine RevOps considers the full revenue cycle and serves multiple teams or departments. Debate around unified models and relabelled sales operations has increased scrutiny of how companies structure and practise revenue operations.

B2C email offered a direct connection between an action and purchase, making returns easier to calculate. B2B journeys are less linear because buying committees encounter several messages before speaking with sales. Marketing technology has sought greater relevance and clearer links among activity, customer value and revenue. When growth outweighed acquisition efficiency, companies tolerated weak qualification, but unsuitable customers often created retention problems.

Account-based marketing supports efficiency by focusing spending on accounts that match the ideal customer profile. Revenue operations connects retention patterns, ICP insights, lead conversion, sources and investment decisions. Without linked marketing, sales and customer success data, companies struggle to build an efficient demand engine or make sound targeting decisions.

Different organisational models can work when stakeholders share the right mindset and communicate, but unified operations eases alignment. Marketing can create account scores and tiers while sales keeps separate named accounts in a spreadsheet. Without shared ICP, scoring or tiering, teams can pursue different priorities and use systems that prevent consistent tracking. Revenue operations can identify these conflicts before teams build competing infrastructure.

Similar problems affect handovers from sales to customer success. Buyers can spend months explaining use cases, then repeat them during onboarding because information was lost. Rapid growth can create disconnected teams, duplicated CRM fields and fragmented processes. RevOps should pause activity long enough to connect those steps and design a unified customer journey.

Early-stage companies often prioritise enough growth to reach their next funding phase, making senior RevOps leadership premature. Top performers can help find product-market fit and win foundational customers. However, their success can hide whether those customers suit the business long term. When retention and efficiency matter more, companies can find that high-output acquisition practices attracted customers unlikely to stay.

Abrupt controls can prompt resistance from established performers accustomed to securing signatures by any means. Yet the people, resources and operating style suited to one phase often do not fit the next. As growth slows, more process supports consistency and customer fit. Companies must match controls to their stage, avoiding premature formality without waiting for a retention crisis.

The answer depends on the business model. When product usage generates expansion, revenue operations can work with product operations to understand how adoption supports account growth. Without a product-led motion, priorities depend on product-market fit, platform development and whether new offerings create credible upsell opportunities. RevOps cannot use one expansion playbook without considering how customers buy and receive value.

Some companies use acquired products for cross-selling, asking existing customers to buy an integrated offering. This approach can become the main route to improved net revenue retention, but it does not always work as intended. Retention offers a stronger foundation than compensating for losses through expansion alone. The essentials remain customer value, suitable acquisition and effective post-sale support.

Product operations, as I use the term, differs from DevOps or technical platform maintenance. It covers roadmaps, customer feedback, release communications and preparations by product marketing and marketing. Without coordination, sellers can hear about a promising feature and sell it before teams settle its scope, availability or launch date. This creates confusion and customer friction.

Revenue operations and sales enablement help translate innovation into a coordinated commercial plan. Teams need guidance on launch timing, sales availability, pricing changes, package inclusion and target customers for an upsell. Product operations brings roadmap discipline, while revenue operations connects the plan to systems, teams and the customer journey. Together, they align expectations and organise go-to-market execution.

Before hiring a senior revenue operations leader, I would prefer one or two strong operators, a capable analyst and an enablement specialist. They should report centrally where appropriate. Enablement should arrive early because teams need a shared working method. Customer success operations can become necessary sooner than expected.

A consistent approach helps teams assess whether sales changes improve results. When everyone sells differently, teams cannot identify who adopted a change or whether it affected revenue. Establish a common process, make sequential changes and measure their impact. An exceptional seller offers limited organisational value when nobody can replicate the successful behaviour. Predictability requires enough standardisation to learn from shared methods.