What Does It Take to Become a Kicksaw RevOps Strategist?

If you’re a Salesforce revenue operations professional who has drawn a blank trying to explain just what exactly it is you do to a friend or family member, you’re not alone! There’s always more to any given job than the job title, but this is especially true for RevOps folks out there. Just how do you sum up the complexities of your role in a few pithy sentences that Grandpa can wrap his mind around? 

Well, you probably don’t — the role is simply too nuanced for it. And that complexity is why we at Kicksaw started our series of blog posts highlighting what it’s like to work in the various roles we hire for. Today, we’re looking at the RevOps Strategist role!

Working at Kicksaw is not your average Salesforce gig, and to better understand the role, it might be helpful to better understand how we partner with our clients. We offer richer, more fulfilling experiences thanks to the simple but powerful fact that we do business differently. Our mission is to transform consulting by putting our customers and employees first, and it’s a promise we don’t take lightly. 

We’ve woven this attitude into our very DNA by creating a business model that offers flexibility in ways that you likely haven't seen before. Where most consulting firms focus on rigid SOWs that lock clients into contracts, we offer adaptable options that are tailored to fit a wide spectrum of client needs — everything from enterprise-level digital transformation to small-scale team augmentation. This business model serves our customers incredibly well, and as a massive added bonus, we’ve found that it creates an engaging workplace for our team members that encourages innovation and loyalty. Win-win!

To break it down as simply as possible, there are two different ways a client can engage with Kicksaw: Fractional Operations or On-Demand services. If the client's goals address strategic-level business problems that require adaptive flexibility to meet dynamic business needs, then Fractional Operations is likely the way to go. On the other hand, if the client needs routine maintenance, ongoing support, and tactical project help, they’re a good fit for On-Demand services (that’s where our RevOps Strategists come in!).

So far in our blog post series highlighting the different positions we hire for, we have focused on the three roles that comprise the Fractional Operations Pod trifecta, AKA the Pod: Salesforce Consultants, Solution Architects, and Salesforce Admins. Check those out if you want to learn more about Fractional Operations and Pods. 

In contrast to Fractional Operations team members, the RevOps Strategist is a bit of a solo artist, best suited to those clients who don’t necessarily need major implementation work or a complete systems overhaul but instead some reliable, expert help with their Salesforce operations. In many ways, the RevOps Strategist is a Consultant, Architect, and Admin rolled into one versatile, adaptable jack-of-all Salesforce trades superhero. Instead of working as part of a Pod to handle client requests, a RevOps Strategist handles all aspects of a client’s consulting engagement. That’s not to say they are total loners, though — the well of knowledge runs very deep at Kicksaw, and all of our Delivery team members rely on one another to help solve problems, trouble-shoot buggy flows, or just lend a listening ear as we work together to figure out the best solution for your client.

Once a RevOps Strategist is assigned to a client, they are trusted to run the engagement independently and structure their own time accordingly. Our RevOps Strategists typically work with ten or more organizations every week, which of course translates to a lot of different types of work and clients, and also a lot of different deadlines to manage. If you are a natural organizer who craves variety in your workday and wants to learn all you can about Salesforce while tackling a steady drip of deliciously complex business process tasks, RevOps Strategist could be the perfect role for you!

My favorite part of being a RevOps Strategist at Kicksaw is seeing how different companies do business, as well as leveraging Salesforce best practices to deliver awesome solutions tailored to each one. It’s a thrill to help their teams be more efficient while delivering actionable data. I love being part of the process from start to finish, starting with initial customer journey mapping and process diagrams, all the way through to building the end product, including flows that cut down on manual entry and UI updates to keep things simple for end users. There's never a dull moment!
— Brandi O’Brien, Kicksaw RevOps Strategist

What sets the Kicksaw RevOps Strategist role apart? 

Thanks to our unique business models, incentivization is off the table, and burnout isn’t really a thing here. Yes, you’ll track your hours (clients pre-pay for a certain number of AOD hours per month), and you’ll have a busy day with plenty of client calls to juggle. But you aren’t a number in our system — you aren’t 40 hours of work per week. You’re part of our team, and we value that. It’s about more than the numbers — it’s about excellent work. We just don’t do utilization around here. It doesn’t fit our culture.

So, what should you expect from a typical day? Other than those blocks of time set aside for client and internal meetings (and you should expect around six to ten hours of meetings per week), you are in charge of your schedule — it’s up to you to figure out the best use of your time in order to complete the work you’ve been handed. And while there’s really no such thing as a “typical” work day for a RevOps Strategist, thanks to the wide variety of clients, the breakdown for a typical-ish work day might look like this: 

Your Morning:

• Your first task of the day is creating custom objects and fields for an upcoming implementation, then taking the time to carefully document your work for the client. 
• One of your clients is ready to go live with new functionality, which means it’s time for you to migrate the work over from Sandbox into Production!
• Next, you build a flow you designed last week for another client, and spend some time testing it, fixing a few issues that pop up, and preparing documentation.
• A client sent you an email asking why one of their flows wasn’t working. You look into the issue, discover the problem, and quickly fix it.
• A separate client emailed you asking how to accomplish something within Salesforce maps. You answer their questions, providing links to helpful documentation, as well as a screencast of you demonstrating the process. 

Lunch

Today you’ve arranged to do a virtual lunch with one of your favorite Kicksaw coworkers, but for her it’s virtual breakfast because you live in different time zones (yay remote teams!).

12:30 - 1:00 PM

Take a break from your heads-down work to attend a solutioning meeting with the rest of the AOD team. This non-mandatory meeting is your team’s opportunity to discuss client work, problem-solve, and connect on issues that are important to AOD, the clients, and Kicksaw.

After that meeting, you settle in for another couple of hours of client work:

• You email a client to prepare them for their User Acceptance Testing the following week. They should already be aware that this is on the horizon, but in the interest of helping your client feel totally prepared, you explain the process thoroughly, succinctly, and with their particular business needs in mind. You do your best to anticipate their questions, based on your relationship with them, and clearly communicate next steps. 
• After hitting send on that email, you join a call to train one of your clients on a new Sales Quota process you recently built for them.
• One of your clients wants you to connect an app to their Salesforce org so that data can be communicated from the app to Salesforce. You research requirements for this connection, do some testing, and determine next best steps. Once you’re satisfied that you have a plan of action, you send an update to the client letting them know how you will proceed.
• For your last task of the day, you send one more email — this one is going out to a client who wants an update on how many hours they have remaining. AOD clients purchase “buckets” of hours, and if they need more work done than can be accomplished within the remaining hours, they can easily purchase additional hours.

3:00 - 4:00 PM

Today is Wednesday, which means it’s time for the bimonthly Kicksaw all-hands meeting. To prepare, you freshen up your beverage of choice and whip up a little snack. Time to settle in and receive updates from a selection of Kicksaw departments, celebrate team member birthdays and work anniversaries, hear from management on their plans and ambitions, and then spend a little quality time bonding with a few randomly selected Kicksaw team members, with a conversation prompt to help get the ball rolling. 

4:00 - 5:00 PM

You split the last working hour of the day into two very important chunks: ongoing education and paid volunteer time off. You spend a half hour studying up for your next Salesforce Certification, and when that’s done, it’s off to the local food bank to pack some sack lunches for local school children in need. All Kicksaw employees can take 24 hours of paid volunteer time off per year, and you are heavily encouraged to use that time to contribute to a cause you care about. 

As we’ve mentioned several times already, a RevOps Strategist’s life is filled with variety. Every day is different, as is every client — a knack for creative problem solving and strong personal time management skills are indispensable for this role. But if all of that sounds an awful lot like your favorite cup of tea, we could be the perfect match! 

Collaboration and knowledge-sharing is a big part of our success. The AOD team has a weekly call where we discuss the work we're doing and collaborate on how to handle clients. We work together to determine how to get them to commit to a parallel initiative that will really help improve their processes, know what questions to ask during discovery on a potential new tool, and provide each other with recommendations on how to push back against an idea they're eager to implement but won't serve them well or shouldn't be a priority right now.
— Ben Johnson, Kicksaw RevOps Strategist

What does career growth look like for a RevOps Strategist?

There are four tiers for SCs at Kicksaw, and we prefer the knot metaphor for explaining them: 

• Tier 1: Associate — Can tie a knot, and participates when others tie complex knots.
• Tier 2: Mid/Developing — Ties complex knots, calculates rope strength, and knows a lot about knots of all sorts
• Tier 3: Senior — Creates their own knots, teaches others how to tie these new knots, and uses these new knots strategically
• Tier 4: Principal — Uses their extensive knowledge of knots to solve complicated problems that affect their Pod/department and result in positive change for Kicksaw

Managers and employees maintain communication through a user-friendly performance-management platform, and performance reviews happen on a biannual basis. Transparency is important here — any employee who wants to know where they stand at Kicksaw can access that information without reaching out to HR or scheduling any meetings. Every role has an internal rubric for measuring tiers within each role, and salary ranges for the various roles and tiers are also available to any current employee. 

Additionally, every role at Kicksaw has a documented career progression track. And you don’t have to go the management route to experience career success at Kicksaw — we call the non-management track the “individual contributor track,” and it is weighted equally against the management track. 

No one is ever done learning, especially when it comes to Salesforce, which is why Kicksaw provides support for employees who want to take classes to improve their skill sets, attend conferences (such as Dreamforce or other Salesforce events), or pursue other avenues that will enhance their business process acumen. Support includes reimbursement (there is a cap), access to internal resources to help you find classes and other resources, an annual tech stipend, and more. 

In summary, you can go as far as you see fit as a RevOps Strategist at Kicksaw! 

What I love about being a RevOps Strategist is that it’s a blend of personal and technical — it’s just as important to connect with clients and understand their problems as it is to be able to build cool solutions for them. It can be difficult to prioritize and manage deliverables across many different clients, but being in control of my schedule allows me to focus on the most important projects and highest priorities.
— Anonymous Kicksaw RevOps Strategist

How should I prepare for an interview for the RevOps Strategist role?

Our People Operations team considers a variety of factors when looking at your resumé, but a long list of certs isn’t necessarily one of them. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t have any certs…just that experience is more important. If you’ve never worked in a live Salesforce org before, we probably aren’t a great fit for you right now. 

Once you’ve gone through an initial screening, if we want to proceed with you as a candidate, you will be given a technical assessment to give us a sense of your aptitude for the RevOps Strategist role. Without giving too much away, topics you’ll probably want to be pretty familiar with include: 

1. App Building
2. Data Migration
3. Data Quality
4. Flows

Once you pass the technical screening, you will meet with one of our Delivery Managers, and likely also a peer panel as well. These meetings give us the opportunity to get to know you and understand your approach to solving our customers’ business problems using Salesforce and complementary solutions. You will also meet with our Director of Delivery, as well as select leadership figures, over the course of your interviews with us. If this sounds like an intimidating list of interviews designed to make you sweat, don’t fret! It’s more like a long list of refreshingly relaxing conversations with folks who want to see you succeed.

Preparing for an interview for the RevOps Strategist role at Kicksaw really boils down to this: just be you. Trust us, we mean it. Just be you. We know that we’re hiring people, not resources. And people, unlike resources, have personalities that influence their work behavior and the impact they have on their teammates and workplace. Our core values are integral to our identity and community as a company, and it’s important that you embody all four of our core values: Work Together, Be You, Own It, and Keep It Simple. 

We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kicksaw owes its success to the people on our team. We’ve done our very best to create a culture that actually does put people first, and not just the people who are paying us — we put our people first as well. It’s why we started our profit-sharing program, and why we are constantly searching for the next opportunity to provide additional employee benefits and programs. In order to maintain our company culture and preserve the identity we’ve worked so hard to cultivate, we are very intentional about hiring folks who align with our core values. We’re serious about hiring team members who will contribute to our culture by bringing their own unique talents, energy, and passions to their roles. 

Still reading and intrigued? Send us your resumé! We know it can be nerve-wracking to apply for a new role, but we promise you — real people are going to read your application, and we take every submission under consideration. The RevOps Strategist role is an exciting opportunity for folks who do well as a one-man band, get really nerdy about flows, love to help a variety of clients with everything from mundane Salesforce operations to challenging business operations head-scratchers, and are hungry for an opportunity to grow their career at a truly unique consulting firm. 

We look forward to hearing from you!