Brett Kelly is Chief Revenue Officer at Inovonics, a ~40-year-old Roper Technologies commercial-security company reinventing itself from hardware widget sales into full-solution selling. His path breaks every traditional rule: a degree in classical guitar performance, a pivot through finance during the Great Recession, then sales analytics and RevOps at NCR — a 140-year-old, ~$6B, three-vertical company operating across 80-plus countries with roughly 1,500 sellers — where he rose from sales ops analyst to leading a conflicted inside-sales org (landing a $74M deal via a discrete-functions/swim-lane redesign) to an 'undefined chief of staff' for the global retail SVP. After a stint at AWS he took the CRO seat, making the rare jump from building the revenue machine to owning the number. He credits years of waiting tables for the service-industry humility he sees as the core of selling, and now runs an AI-native revenue org on Salesforce, MuleSoft, GCP, and Claude.
“Most folks that are in RevOps are these people that will find something, latch onto it for a little while, learn enough, and then some other squirrel will run by and they'll go, 'Oh, okay, I'm curious about that too.'”
“Service industry is humility in the best form, and it's just a way to practice. Still, sales is servitude more than anything.”
“If I ask you for a square, you better come back with a square. But if you know that a circle is really what I need, come back with that too.”
“We know you're not a race car driver, but you know how to build a really fast race car.”
“Any individual coach is never gonna be able to exceed the knowledge of the entire team. So as a leader, are you creating a platform by which everybody has a chance to say, 'I need help with this'?”
“We're a team, we're going to make decisions together. The ultimate decision still does reside with me, and I reserve the right to override respectfully.”
“The sense of ownership that I feel for our sellers who are 15, 20-plus year veterans of this company, who know this industry way more than I do — that weighs heavily on me.”
“He's using Claude Code to inject and extract data in VS Code. He's not even really interacting with Salesforce anymore as an admin in the UI — it is all Claude.”