That kitschy, overused and overworked headline about healthcare and tigers is actually from the Wizard of Oz. Most days, Olga Traskova, the Vice President of RevOps with TigerConnect, a healthcare communications platform, can feel a little bit like Dorothy swept up in a tornado with the multiple time zones she’s serving and connecting. Based in Los Angeles, with offices in Santa Monica, TigerConnect also has marketing teams all across the US and into Mexico.
Anyone who isn’t living in a magical fantasy land knows all about the hybrid working model Olga has been working within the last couple of years. A couple of days in the TigerConnect office, the rest of the time at her home office. It’s the new normal in a crazy kind of way, but she’s adapted well.
“What I learned in the past two years is that I’m a huge proponent of remote work,” she says. “Most of my jobs have been remote. I felt like I was more productive working remotely.”
Olga has two kids and neither the tin man nor the scarecrow is lining up to serve as a nanny or get them ready for school. So, she’s up at around six a.m. every week day to make breakfast and will often have her first meeting as early as seven a.m. (aka nine a.m. central, or ten a.m. eastern)
“I’m in my earbuds running around making lunch, making breakfast, doing their hair and listening to a call or participating in a call,” Olga says. “TIgerConnect is US-based, so usually, we start at eight. That’s when I send my kids off to school and land at my desk with a cup of water and a cup of coffee.”
She remembers and misses the days when her morning would start with reading emails, but due to the high pace of growth at TigerConnect, she spends the first half of her day in meetings and usually gets to emails afterwards. Because RevOps is a cross-functional role, she’s talking to a varied audience every day. When setting new goals and KPIs, as has been the case the last couple of months in preparation for 2022, the meetings are even more frequent.
“So, it’s a lot of meetings, the first half of the day. Maybe then I will get some breathing room to read through emails, to catch up and catch up with my team,” she says. “And then it’s meetings again.”
A lot of those meetings could be replaced by quick interactions along the yellow brick road if everyone were in the office together.
“That face-to-face time when you are in the office accounts for maybe 30% of the calls that you have on your calendar,” she says. “Just by stopping by someone’s desk, you know you don’t need that call, you don’t need to schedule that zoom.”
She describes being in the office as feeling like going back in time.
Or maybe it’s like going back to Oz. Either way, despite loving remote work, she misses it. I think we all do, to some extent.
“We can get coffee together and we can go for lunch together. We can actually chat or we can brainstorm. We can go from one subject to another,” she says. “A lot of things are actually being solved on-the-fly when you have a face-to-face. It’s way more dynamic. You get to have those real quick wins throughout the day.”
Because of the structure RevOps stands behind, Olga often says, the team has to “drink our own champagne.”
Hey, wait a minute… you all drink champagne on the job??
No, although I’m sure that would be fun for everyone – at least once – what she means is that because RevOps lives by performance factors, she needs to check those factors regularly. She calls it ‘watching the fun’. There are a couple of dashboards she looks at to follow KPIs and funnel activity.
“I’m really about looking at those dashboards on a daily basis,” she says. “This is what I’m trying to encourage. Marketing, sales, sales operations and finance now work on the same set of data, which is in Salesforce, on a couple of dashboards where we’re watching our performance.”
It’s all about the numbers. Kudos to Olga for centralizing that data and making it visible for all relevant stakeholders. That’s an important reason to invest in RevOps.
“If we don’t actually watch it, we can’t track it. If we can’t track it, we can’t manage it,” she says.
Weekly calls have Olga chatting with the CMO and other marketing leaders to look at performance, goals and the funnel. Bi-weekly calls bring that data together for a larger group to look at and consider the rhythm of the business, and how it should evolve given what the data is telling them.
“What I realize is that you have to be really prescriptive to sales people and marketing people. ‘This is the data that we look at and this is when we’ll look at it’,” she says. “And when we look at it, this is what we do.”
Now, in 2022 this approach is allowing Olga and her colleagues to implement a tight cadence for salespeople to submit, review and update their data; for their managers to submit their forecasting based on that data; and for how the leadership team gets involved. Beyond this, she says the organization as a whole has to be on top of what’s working and what isn’t in the various channels in order to determine next steps.
This isn’t just a one-time thing either. It’s a daily habit that needs to be built and managed over time.
“You actually have to be on top of this to see what’s converting,” she says. “Everyone says actionable data. It has to be clean, clear, trustworthy and then actionable.”
For Olga, there are no silver (or ruby, depending upon which version of The Wizard of Oz you prefer) slippers to send her back home at the end of the day. She’s already there most days and that means it can be hard to put a stop to the work day.
“You know, when you work from home, it really is never over. You sort of take a break,” she says. “I’m trying to set a rule that after 7:00pm, 7:30pm, I’m closing my laptop if the world is not falling apart, it’s going to wait until 7:00am, 8:00am in the morning.”
She’s dedicating more time to exercise, her family and personal things that she enjoys.
She also does her best to prepare for meetings two or three days in advance so that she has the information she needs. However, she admits there are often last-minute meetings that require brainstorming on-the-fly.
“What we’re learning during this pandemic is that it’s all about being productive,” she says. “So, define the focus, understanding where you need to be, why you need to be there and what you can bring to the table. If you can’t really bring anything, maybe you shouldn’t be there.”
Be sure to stay tuned as we continue our Day-in-the-Life series with other pros from Revenue.io’s Top 25 RevOps Leaders of 2022 list.
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