---
title: "RevOps 2.0: Earning a Seat in Corporate Planning"
episode: 14
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Alex Brower"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, QFlow"
date_published: 2023-07-11
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:24:11
word_count: 3192
topics: ["revenue-operations", "forecasting", "gtm-strategy", "ai-in-gtm"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/alex-brower-revops-2-0-qflow/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# RevOps 2.0: Earning a Seat in Corporate Planning

_Alex Brower on graduating RevOps from a ticket-taking service center to the strategist in the planning room — and running planning as a real-time closed loop._

**Episode 14 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Alex Brower, Founder & CEO, QFlow · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published July 11, 2023 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:24:11  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/alex-brower-revops-2-0-qflow/

**Topics:** Revenue Operations · Forecasting · GTM Strategy · AI in GTM


## Executive summary

This early (2023) LeanScale Podcast episode is a tight, practitioner conversation between host Anthony Enrico and Alex Brower — founder and CEO of QFlow (qflow.ai) and a 15-year operator who used data to grow businesses across finance, an ed-tech startup in Chicago, and a dev-tech company selling VMware before building software for RevOps teams. The through-line is a maturity model: RevOps 1.0 versus RevOps 2.0. 1.0 is the tactical, reactive service center — implementing the tech stack, formatting sales calls, planning territories, comp plans, and CS playbooks, and taking tickets from whoever asks. 2.0 is an internal management consultant that sits shoulder-to-shoulder with finance on the plan the board measures the company against for the next nine to twelve months, and leads with insights rather than fielding requests.

The mechanism that moves a team from 1.0 to 2.0 is closed-loop planning. Most companies, Alex and Anthony agree, treat planning as an annual retreat: an off-site in September or October, a few years of data crunched by RevOps and finance, a top-down number backed into the board's target, launched in January, and revisited a year later. The analyses that drove each assumption get filed in a drawer — so when the number is missed (or beaten), nobody remembers why it was set. Closed-loop planning instead keeps the underlying analyses, the plan assumptions, and actual performance against those assumptions visible and updated in real time, surfacing early-warning signals like a stretching sales cycle before they become board-meeting surprises. The raw material is a well-built revenue waterfall — five or six drivers you always have a pulse on, sliced twenty to thirty ways across segment, region, product line, and service center.

Alex argues the barrier isn't skill but tooling: the traditional data stack (warehouse, ETL, a modeling layer like Looker) was never built for a two-person RevOps team, so real-time planning defaults to 'a couple times a year.' QFlow is his answer — a go-to-market analytics platform that builds a company's stats within thirty minutes of signup without that stack, and layers on generative AI to automate chart interpretation, weekly update emails, and plan-vs-actual Q&A. A Q1 customer survey showed 28% of analyst time freed on average, which Alex expects the AI to push toward 40–50%. Who should listen: RevOps leaders who want out of the ticket queue and into the planning room, founders and finance leaders designing a real planning process, and any operator tired of a plan that goes stale the day it launches.


## Key takeaways

1. **RevOps 2.0 is defined by a seat in corporate planning** — The line Alex draws between RevOps 1.0 and 2.0 isn't the volume of tactical work — it's whether the team contributes to corporate planning: the plan finance puts in front of the board and against which the whole organization is measured for the next 9–12 months. 1.0 supports that plan; 2.0 helps set it.
   _Why it matters:_ If your RevOps team never touches the board plan, you're running 1.0 no matter how good your Salesforce hygiene is. Getting into the planning room is the single clearest marker of graduating to 2.0.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives, Founders

2. **The jump to 2.0 is a mindset shift, not a finance degree** — You don't need a finance background to be RevOps 2.0 — you need to think like an internal management consultant, not a project manager. You still have to understand the tools tactically, but the job is to situate everything in a bigger picture and be 'biz-ops-like' about how the pieces fit together.
   _Why it matters:_ Invest RevOps talent in business judgment and strategic framing, not just tool administration. The ceiling is set by mindset and access, not by whether someone can model a P&L.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Founders

3. **Move from service center to a department leading with insights** — In 1.0, RevOps kicks a report over to finance during a planning session and manages requests for the CFO, CRO, or whoever is asking. In 2.0, RevOps is in the room sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with finance, leading with insights and recommendations rather than fielding tickets.
   _Why it matters:_ Reframe the team's charter away from 'request queue' toward 'recommendations engine.' The behavioral tell is whether you're handing off analysis or presenting a point of view.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives

4. **RevOps has the best business context to lead planning** — RevOps sits on the front line with marketing, sales, customer success, and service teams, constantly looking at what's working and what isn't in real time. Alex and Anthony agree that vantage point means RevOps is uniquely positioned to get the most business context of anyone in the org — so it should be part of, if not leading, the planning process.
   _Why it matters:_ Use the cross-functional data seat as the argument for a planning role. No other function sees the full go-to-market picture as continuously, which is exactly why RevOps shouldn't be relegated to number-crunching for someone else's plan.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives, Marketing Leaders

5. **Closed-loop planning means tracking assumptions and actuals in real time** — The goal is transparency and clarity for everyone, in real time, on three things: the analyses underlying each metric that drove a plan assumption, the assumptions themselves, and actual performance against those assumptions. 'Real time' means real time — a single place anyone can check without wondering if the data has synced.
   _Why it matters:_ Stand up a live plan-vs-actual view rather than a quarterly reconciliation. Real-time visibility is what turns planning from an event into a loop you can steer.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives, Founders

6. **The annual-retreat planning cycle is where the number quietly slides** — The traditional pattern — a September/October off-site, crunch a couple years of data, back into the board's revenue target, launch in January, revisit next Q3/Q4 — buries the analysis in a spreadsheet in a drawer. When you miss (or beat) the number, you can't reconstruct why it was set, and you've already missed the early-warning signals.
   _Why it matters:_ Don't set a plan and walk away for a year. Doing the work only a couple of times a year is how companies miss the leading indicators of a stretching sales cycle or a converting-slower funnel.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders

7. **The traditional data stack was never built for RevOps** — When planning measurements live outside Excel, they usually sit in a data stack built for a broader initiative — warehouse, ETL, visualization, a modeling layer like Looker — that requires interfacing with data engineers and analysts. That's outside the wheelhouse of most orgs running with a couple of RevOps folks, so the default is to plan infrequently.
   _Why it matters:_ The barrier to real-time planning is usually tooling and headcount, not talent. Purpose-built RevOps analytics, or a data partner, is what makes continuous, segmented planning feasible for a small team.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Founders

8. **Track the revenue waterfall live — and be able to slice it 20–30 ways** — A revenue waterfall done well contains five or six drivers you should always have a pulse on — normalized prospect volume, sales cycle, time-based conversion distributions from prospect to qualified opportunity, close-won production, SQLs and MQLs. You then need to segment those funnel metrics 20–30 ways because enterprise runs differently than SMB, EMEA differently than North America, and product lines and service centers all differ.
   _Why it matters:_ A single blended funnel hides the signal. Build the waterfall so it can be segmented across deal size, region, product, and service center in real time — near-impossible by hand without the right tooling.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives, Marketing Leaders

9. **Generative AI's first RevOps job is to give back analyst time** — QFlow's generative AI automates the time-consuming, low-judgment work — interpreting charts, writing the weekly update email that explains which deals pushed and which pulled in, and answering plan-vs-actual questions in plain text via chat. A Q1 customer survey found the platform freed 28% of RevOps analyst time on average, and Alex expects AI to push that toward 40–50%.
   _Why it matters:_ Point AI at the reporting drudgery that keeps RevOps reactive, freeing analysts for higher-order planning work. The productivity gain is the on-ramp from 1.0 busywork to 2.0 strategy.
   _For:_ RevOps Leaders, Founders, Revenue Executives


## Frameworks

### RevOps 1.0 vs. RevOps 2.0 (02:36)

**Definition:** A maturity model for the function. RevOps 1.0 is the tactical, reactive service center — implementing the tech stack, formatting sales calls, planning territories, comp plans, and CS playbooks, and managing requests. RevOps 2.0 is an internal management consultant that participates in corporate planning, sits shoulder-to-shoulder with finance on the board plan, and leads with insights and recommendations.

The distinguishing factor isn't the amount of tactical work but the role RevOps plays in the plan the org is measured against for the next 9–12 months. Getting there is a mindset shift — from project manager to biz-ops-minded strategist — more than a background requirement.

### Closed-Loop Planning (06:16)

**Definition:** A planning discipline in which the analyses behind each metric, the plan assumptions themselves, and actual performance against those assumptions are all kept visible and updated in real time — rather than being computed once for the annual plan and filed away until the next board meeting.

It closes the loop that a traditional annual cycle leaves open: you retain the documentation for why each assumption was set, you catch early-warning signals (like a stretching sales cycle) as they emerge, and you can review and adjust continuously instead of discovering surprises at quarter-end.

### The Revenue Waterfall as a Living Input (08:34)

**Definition:** The set of five or six drivers a well-built revenue waterfall contains — normalized prospect volume, sales cycle, time-based conversion distributions, close-won production, SQLs and MQLs — that you should have a pulse on at all times and be able to segment 20–30 ways (enterprise vs. SMB, region, product line, service center).

In RevOps 1.0 these metrics are analyzed only when building the plan and then abandoned; in 2.0 they are the continuously tracked raw material of closed-loop planning. Doing this segmentation in real time is what Alex calls nearly impossible without purpose-built tooling.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "What distinguishes what we call RevOps 2.0 from 1.0 is the role that RevOps can play in corporate planning — namely, the plan that finance puts together that gets put in front of the board and against which the organization is measured for the next 9 to 12 months."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (02:36)

> "If you're a RevOps 2.0, you are an internal management consultant, not just a project manager."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (04:23)

> "You're not just aligning operations to a strategy that's dictated to you. You're part of the strategy setting."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (05:01)

> "RevOps 1.0 might kick a report over to finance during a planning session, whereas RevOps 2.0 would be in the room with finance, sitting shoulder to shoulder."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (05:38)

> "You go from being a service center, managing requests for the CFO, the CRO, whoever is asking for it, and you become a department that is leading with insights, leading with recommendations, being part of the planning session."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (05:38)

> "RevOps is uniquely positioned in the organization to really get the most business context out of anyone, because you are on the front line with marketing, sales, customer success, and service teams."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (06:58)

> "Too often these things are analyzed in conjunction with putting together a plan, and then they sit in a spreadsheet somewhere, get filed away in a drawer until the next board meeting. And that's where the slow slide begins."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (09:07)

> "It's never great when you miss your number to have to go back and dig through assumptions to understand how the number was set in the first place. And it's not great when you overachieve your number and not really understand why."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (12:21)

> "When I say real time, I do mean real time. There should be a place where anyone can go and see how we're doing against plan, and not have to question, is this updated or has the data synced?"
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (14:06)

> "There were a bunch of tools that call themselves RevOps tools, but they're really sales tools. No one had built something that just worked out of the box for RevOps."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (17:50)

> "We were able to free up 28% on average of RevOps analyst time to work on higher order problems within the business."
>
> — Alex Brower, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (19:46)

> "Don't make it an annual retreat. Make it a true closed loop process that you're monitoring in real time, reviewing regularly, and then adjusting as needed — because the whole world can change in a couple of months."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 14 (22:38)


## Practical advice by role

### RevOps Leaders

- Get in the planning room. Stop kicking reports over to finance during planning season — sit shoulder-to-shoulder and help set the assumptions, leading with insights and recommendations instead of managing requests.
- Shift your self-image from project manager to internal management consultant. You still need to know the tools, but the value is situating everything into a bigger business picture.
- Stand up a live plan-vs-actual view: the analyses behind each metric, the assumptions, and performance against them, all visible in real time so anyone can check without wondering if the data synced.
- Build the revenue waterfall so it can be sliced 20–30 ways — enterprise vs. SMB, region, product line, service center — not as a single blended funnel.

### Founders

- Don't run planning as a once-a-year off-site that gets filed in a drawer. The annual-retreat cycle is where companies miss the early-warning signals and later can't reconstruct why a number was set.
- Recognize the barrier to real-time planning is usually tooling and headcount, not talent. A two-person RevOps team can't stand up a warehouse-ETL-Looker stack alone — buy purpose-built analytics or fund a data partner.
- Invest in your RevOps team's business judgment and access, not just tool administration — the mindset shift is what unlocks strategic contribution.

### Revenue Executives

- Treat closed-loop planning as your early-warning system: track the drivers behind each assumption (like sales-cycle length) so a stretching cycle surfaces before quarter-end, not after.
- Pull RevOps into corporate planning deliberately — no other function has as continuous a view across marketing, sales, and CS to inform the board plan.
- Point generative AI at reporting drudgery (chart interpretation, weekly update emails, plan-vs-actual Q&A) to free analyst time for higher-order work; expect meaningful, measurable gains.


## AI takeaways

**Thesis:** In 2023, Alex Brower's bet is that generative AI's first job in RevOps is to remove the reporting drudgery that traps teams in reactive '1.0' mode — automating chart interpretation, the weekly update email, and plan-vs-actual Q&A so analysts are freed for the strategic, planning-level work that defines RevOps 2.0.

- **AI removes the 1.0 tax** — Interpreting charts and writing the weekly 'which deals pushed, which pulled in' update are exactly the time sinks QFlow automates — the busywork that keeps RevOps reactive instead of strategic.
- **Chat as the interface to the plan** — The roadmap is conversational: log in, ask 'how is qualified pipeline looking compared to plan?', and get a plain-text answer — or forward the CFO's question straight to the tool.
- **Measured productivity, not hype** — A Q1 customer survey showed 28% of analyst time freed on average; Alex expects generative AI to push that toward 40–50%.
- **Real-time data is the prerequisite** — The value only shows up when the go-to-market stats and plan assumptions are already tracked in real time — AI on top of a stale, spreadsheet-bound plan doesn't close the loop.

**Agent & automation ideas**

- A weekly-update agent that drafts the plan-vs-actual narrative — which deals pushed, which pulled in, where the quarter stands — from live pipeline data.
- An 'ask-the-plan' chat agent that answers 'how is qualified pipeline pacing vs. plan?' in plain text and can be handed a CFO's question directly.
- An early-warning agent that watches the drivers behind each plan assumption (e.g., sales-cycle stretch) and flags deviations before the board meeting.


## Operations takeaways

### Revenue operations

- **Graduate to 2.0.** Move from a service center taking tickets to an internal management consultant in the room for corporate planning.
- **Get in the finance room.** Don't kick a report over to finance — sit shoulder-to-shoulder and co-set the plan assumptions.
- **Close the loop.** Keep the analyses, assumptions, and plan-vs-actuals visible in real time, not filed in a drawer until the next board meeting.
- **Own the business context.** RevOps sees marketing, sales, and CS data daily — that vantage point is why it should lead, not follow, planning.
- **Tooling is the barrier.** The traditional data stack wasn't built for RevOps; the right tool is what makes real-time, segmented planning feasible for a two-person team.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 28% (avg) | RevOps analyst time freed | QFlow's Q1 customer survey found the platform freed 28% of RevOps analyst time on average to work on higher-order problems. |
| 40–50% | Projected time savings with generative AI | Alex expects the generative-AI features to push the time freed closer to 40–50%. |
| ~30 minutes | Time to build GTM stats | QFlow builds a company's go-to-market stats within 30 minutes of signup, without relying on the traditional data stack. |
| 5–6 | Revenue waterfall drivers | A well-built revenue waterfall contains five or six drivers you should always have a pulse on. |
| 20–30 | Ways to segment the funnel | Funnel metrics need to be sliced 20–30 ways — enterprise vs. SMB, region (EMEA vs. North America), product line, and service center. |
| 9–12 months | Board plan horizon | The finance plan put in front of the board is what the organization is measured against for the next nine to twelve months. |
| 15+ years | Alex Brower's experience | Alex has spent 15+ years using data to grow businesses across finance, an ed-tech startup, and a dev-tech company. |


## Entities mentioned

- **QFlow** (company) — Alex Brower's company; a go-to-market analytics platform built for RevOps 2.0 that builds a company's GTM stats within 30 minutes of signup without the traditional data stack, with generative AI and a chat interface layered on. A Q1 customer survey showed it freed 28% of RevOps analyst time on average. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/qflow/
- **VMware** (company) — Referenced as the product Alex's dev-tech employer sold while he served as VP of Marketing — part of his 15-year data-and-growth background before founding QFlow. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/vmware/
- **LeanScale** (company) — Anthony's firm; cited as an example of the RevOps 2.0 category — Alex notes LeanScale's client work 'falls into that RevOps 2.0 category.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/leanscale/
- **Alex Brower** (person, guest) — Founder & CEO of QFlow, a go-to-market analytics platform for RevOps 2.0; 15+ years using data to grow businesses across finance, ed-tech, and dev-tech. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/alex-brower/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/
- **Microsoft Excel** (tool, Spreadsheet) — Named as where RevOps planning measurements live when they aren't buried in a data stack — the manual default that makes real-time, closed-loop planning hard.
- **Looker** (tool, BI / Data Modeling) — Cited as the modeling/visualization layer inside the traditional data stack RevOps must interface with via data engineers and analysts — a stack that wasn't built for RevOps.
- **LinkedIn** (tool, Social Platform) — Alex invites listeners to reach out to him on LinkedIn (alongside qflow.ai) for follow-up conversations.


## FAQ

**Q: What is the difference between RevOps 1.0 and RevOps 2.0?**

A: RevOps 1.0 is the tactical, reactive service center — implementing the tech stack, formatting sales calls, planning territories, comp plans, and CS playbooks, and managing requests from whoever asks. RevOps 2.0 is an internal management consultant that helps set corporate strategy: it sits in the room with finance on the board plan and leads with insights and recommendations. The distinguishing factor is whether the team contributes to the corporate plan the organization is measured against for the next 9–12 months, not the amount of tactical work it does.

**Q: What is closed-loop planning in RevOps?**

A: Closed-loop planning keeps three things visible and updated in real time: the analyses underlying each metric that drove a plan assumption, the assumptions themselves, and actual performance against those assumptions. It contrasts with the traditional cycle where the analysis is done once for the annual plan and then filed away until the next board meeting. Closing the loop preserves the documentation for why each number was set, surfaces early-warning signals like a stretching sales cycle, and lets teams review and adjust continuously rather than discover surprises at quarter-end.

**Q: Do you need a finance background to be a RevOps 2.0 leader?**

A: No. According to Alex Brower, the jump to RevOps 2.0 is a mindset shift, not a background requirement — you don't necessarily need finance experience, but you have to think like an internal management consultant rather than a project manager. You still need to understand the tools tactically, but the differentiator is being 'biz-ops-like' in your ability to situate everything into a bigger business picture and contribute to strategy rather than just executing it.

**Q: Why does the traditional annual planning cycle cause companies to miss their number?**

A: In the traditional cycle, teams hold a strategy off-site in September or October, crunch a couple years of data, back into the board's revenue target, launch the plan in January, and don't revisit it until late the following year. The analyses that drove each assumption get buried in a spreadsheet, so when the company misses (or beats) the number, no one can reconstruct why it was set — and the early-warning signals were missed months earlier. Planning only a couple of times a year means you're not watching the drivers of your plan against actuals as conditions change.

**Q: Why isn't the traditional data stack good enough for RevOps planning?**

A: When RevOps planning measurements live outside of Excel, they usually sit in a data stack — data warehouse, ETL layer, visualization layer, and a modeling layer like Looker — that was built for a broader organizational initiative, not for RevOps. Using it requires interfacing with data engineers and analysts and rewriting SQL queries, which is outside the wheelhouse of most companies running with only a couple of RevOps people. Because it's so much work, the default becomes planning just a couple of times a year, which is what breaks the real-time, closed-loop ideal.

**Q: What is a revenue waterfall and why should it be tracked in real time?**

A: A revenue waterfall done well contains five or six drivers you should always have a pulse on — such as normalized prospect volume, sales cycle length, time-based conversion distributions from prospect to qualified opportunity, close-won production, and SQL/MQL volumes. It should be trackable in real time and segmentable 20–30 ways, because enterprise runs differently than SMB, EMEA differently than North America, and product lines and service centers all behave differently. Tracking it live (rather than computing it once for the annual plan) is what feeds closed-loop planning — and Alex notes it's nearly impossible to do by hand without purpose-built tooling.

**Q: How can AI help RevOps teams, and what does QFlow do?**

A: QFlow is a go-to-market analytics platform built specifically for RevOps that assembles a company's GTM stats within 30 minutes of signup without relying on the traditional data stack, then layers on modeling and generative AI. The AI automates time-consuming, low-judgment work — interpreting charts, writing the weekly update email explaining which deals pushed or pulled in, and answering plan-vs-actual questions in plain text via chat. A Q1 customer survey found the platform freed 28% of RevOps analyst time on average, and Alex expects the generative-AI features to push that toward 40–50%, freeing analysts for higher-order strategic work.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Cold open: RevOps 2.0 vs. 1.0
- **00:26** — Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast
- **01:07** — Meet Alex Brower and QFlow
- **01:39** — How RevOps teams plan today (1.0)
- **03:16** — From siloed ops to the first RevOps team
- **04:23** — RevOps 2.0: the internal management consultant
- **06:16** — What closed-loop planning is
- **08:34** — The revenue waterfall as a living input
- **09:45** — Where the annual plan slides off track
- **10:30** — The September-to-January planning cycle
- **11:35** — Why the data stack isn't built for RevOps
- **13:13** — Real time means real time
- **14:54** — The metrics you must track and segment
- **16:12** — The origin story of QFlow
- **18:42** — Generative AI inside QFlow
- **19:46** — Freeing 28% of analyst time
- **22:06** — Wrap-up: don't make planning an annual retreat
- **23:18** — Where to find Alex and QFlow


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 6: Why Your Forecast Is Broken** (LeanScale) — The forecasting companion to closed-loop planning — why static, annual plans and forecasts drift off the rails. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/why-your-forecast-is-broken/
- **Ep. 15: Where Should RevOps Report?** (LeanScale) — Org-design counterpart to the RevOps 1.0-vs-2.0 question and RevOps earning a strategic seat. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/cameron-legge-where-revops-report/
- **Ep. 2: How to Measure New Business With Usage-Based Pricing** (LeanScale) — The measurement discipline underneath tracking a live revenue waterfall and plan-vs-actuals. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-usage-based-pricing/
- **Ep. 85: Why AI + GTM Engineers Can't Replace RevOps** (Tessa Whittaker) — A later take on the same strategic-vs-tactical RevOps divide and why judgment can't be automated away. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/tessa-whittaker-ai-gtm-engineers-revops/
- **Ep. 95: Why AI Means More RevOps Hires, Not Fewer** (Jimmy O'Halloran) — Extends the 'AI frees analyst time for higher-order work' thesis into a full argument about AI, productivity, and the RevOps operator. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jimmy-ohalloran-new-relic-revops-consumption-revenue/


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/alex-brower-revops-2-0-qflow/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Cold open: RevOps 2.0 vs. 1.0

**[0:00]** Where we see a real distinction in terms of contribution to the organization and what distinguishes what we call RevOps 2.0 from 1.0 is the role that RevOps can play in corporate planning.

### 00:26 — Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast

**[0:26]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening.

**[0:37]** Planning is one of the most important components of any revenue operations department, and I'll be honest, a lot of RevOps teams, ones that I've worked with, and maybe in my early times as a RevOps professional, have definitely fell short of what the overall organization needs. So today we're going to talk about planning and more specifically how you can close the loop on your planning process. I have a special guest here with me today who's going to help us walk through it.

### 01:07 — Meet Alex Brower and QFlow

**[1:07]** Alex has spent his last 15 years using data to grow businesses first in finance, which is obviously a good friend of revenue operations teams, for an ed tech startup in Chicago, and then at a dev tech company that sold VMware as a VP of marketing, and most importantly as the founder and CEO of Qflow. Alex, thanks so much for being here today. I'm really excited to go through it. Excited to be here as well. Thanks for having me.

### 01:39 — How RevOps teams plan today (1.0)

**[1:39]** So, absolutely. No, pleasure. So let's go ahead and jump into it. So all companies plan, revenue teams plan, ops teams plan, finance teams plan. I know you have a background in an eclectic group of roles, but how do you see the typical RevOps team planning today? So the typical RevOps team is involved with a number of tactical plans and tactical planning. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's required as part of what we call RevOps 1.0. That's planning out a tech stack so that reps can be productive, planning out a format for a sales call so that information can be rolled up in an efficient manner,

**[2:36]** planning out territories, comp plans, CS playbooks, etc. Where we see a real distinction in terms of contribution to the organization. And what distinguishes what we call RevOps 2.0 from 1.0 is the role that RevOps can play in corporate planning. Namely, the plan that finance puts together that gets put in front of the board and against which the organization is measured for the next 9 to 12 months.

### 03:16 — From siloed ops to the first RevOps team

**[3:16]** Yeah, and I think, you know, we've talked about this at LeanScale quite a few times, but there's different levels of your, I'll call it go-to-market operational departments, you know, sometimes the beginning you're running around with no ops, which is, if anybody's been in a company like that, and I'm sorry, I know how hard it is, then you tend to start to get siloed ops development, you'll get sales ops over here, marketing ops over here,

**[3:42]** and then you get that first version of RevOps. So the team that's dedicated to managing the full go-to-market customer life cycle, really thinking about end-to-end solutions, not thinking about things in silos. So I always think that's a really big moment for a company because they started to make the investment in that area, but how do you go from that version to RevOps 2.0? And what's the difference? What's the difference between that initial RevOps team and then the potential that a RevOps team like that could have?

### 04:23 — RevOps 2.0: the internal management consultant

**[4:23]** Sometimes it's in background, but not necessarily. We were just talking the other day about how you don't necessarily have to have a finance background to be that RevOps 2.0, but you need to change your mindset. If you're a RevOps 2.0, you are an internal management consultant, not just a project manager. You do need to understand the tools tactically, but you need to be more biz ops-like in your ability to situate everything together in a bigger picture.

**[5:01]** So you're not just aligning operations to a strategy that's dictated to you. You're part of the strategy setting. To give you some blunt comparisons, RevOps 1.0 would be focused on the effectiveness of a tool that they're responsible for implementing. Does it work? RevOps 1.0 is responsible for maybe not just that, but also the efficiency of the tool. How much does it cost? How much does it cost to deploy? How much does it cost to maintain? How does this fit into the broader landscape?

**[5:38]** A couple more examples. RevOps 1.0 might kick a report over to finance during a planning session, whereas RevOps 2.0 would be in the room with finance, sitting shoulder to shoulder. There are a few differences. You go from being a service center, managing requests for the CFO, the CRO, whoever is asking for it, and you become a department that is leading with insights, leading with recommendations, being part of the planning session.

### 06:16 — What closed-loop planning is

**[6:16]** Right. And we're talking about closed loop planning here, and so we can get into what that is. But for someone sitting there who doesn't have the BizOps background, isn't quite sure if they're contributing at quite the RevOps 2.0 level. Probably the easiest place to start, and one of the biggest places where you can help your finance team, is to implement some processes and potentially some tooling around closed loop planning.

**[6:58]** I've always been a big fan of being part of the planning process, and maybe it has to do with my background, maybe it has to do with how my mind works, but I always wanted to be in the room. I always wanted to be leading the discussion. You let me know how you feel about this, but I think RevOps is uniquely positioned in the organization to really get the most business context out of any individuals in the organization, because you are on the front line with marketing teams, sales teams, customer success and service teams.

**[7:36]** You're constantly looking at the data and constantly looking at what's working, what's not working in real time, and you're just in it all day. And to me, I feel like how does that department not become part of, if not even leading the planning process for the organization overall? I think there are a couple of reasons why that might not take place. One of the biggest reasons that we would see is the combination of a reactive mindset, to your point, tickets, requests, and not having the tools or the skills necessarily to efficiently measure everything that is needed to contribute to closed loop planning.

### 08:34 — The revenue waterfall as a living input

**[8:34]** So this shouldn't be something, these measurements that go into a closed loop plan. Should we take an example? Should we take an example of the revenue waterfall as part of the closed loop plan? So your traditional revenue waterfall done well will contain five or six different things, which you should have a pulse on at all points of time in your organization.

**[9:07]** Too often these things, like a normalized number of prospects that marketing and sales is engaging with, your sales cycle, time-based distributions to convert prospects into qualified ops, all those things too often are analyzed in conjunction with putting together a plan or a contribution model. And then they sit in a spreadsheet somewhere, get filed away in a drawer somewhere until the next board meeting, or if things are going well until the board meeting after that.

### 09:45 — Where the annual plan slides off track

**[9:45]** And that's where the slow slide begins. And we don't really remember what went into an analysis that drove an assumption in the plan. We don't have good documentation around how that assumption was modified based on something that's someone new operationally. And if we don't have those things measured in real time, then you can be sure that we're not looking at those inputs against the actuals as time goes on. And so that's where the closed loop, that's where what should be a closed loop ends up being something that's not closed loop at all.

### 10:30 — The September-to-January planning cycle

**[10:30]** I see most people approaching planning like this, and let me know if you see something different. September or October rolls around, they kick it off with maybe a strategy off-site, they go somewhere, you know, exotic, get away. And then they start, let's go gather the last couple years of data or whatever we have, and let's have the RevOps team number crunch, let's have the finance team number crunch, and then let's go, let's present a top-down plan.

**[10:57]** The CEO and the board have a revenue target they want to hit, so we'll just figure out how to back into that. Launch it in January, and then we'll come back to it next late Q3, early Q4. That's what I typically see. Two questions, is that what you see? And then two, is that the process you'd recommend following, or is there something more teams need to be doing? That is the traditional behavior that we would see at an organization.

### 11:35 — Why the data stack isn't built for RevOps

**[11:35]** And part of that, I mentioned earlier, was part of that are the tools, right? So for RevOps, what we typically see is that if these measurements that go into the plan exist outside of Excel, then they're usually in a data stack somewhere that was not built for RevOps. It was built as part of a broader initiative to create a data stack at the organization. So that includes your data warehouse, your ETL layer, the visualization layer, a modeling layer like Looker, so that these queries can be published.

**[12:21]** That is typically, and I shouldn't say typically, that's outside the wheelhouse of most organizations with a couple of RevOps folks. It includes, you know, you need to interface with a data engineer, data analyst, a data team. And so, yeah, the default behavior is, because it's a lot of work, is to only do it a couple times a year. Well, you're missing the early warning signals. And it's never great when you miss your number to have to go back and dig through assumptions to understand how the number was set in the first place. And by the way, it's not great when you overachieve your number to not really understand why.

### 13:13 — Real time means real time

**[13:13]** Absolutely, the way that we would want to see this is that there is transparency and clarity for everyone in real time about the analyses that are underlying each of the metrics that drove an assumption in the plan. We want clarity in real time for the assumptions themselves, and then we want to track actual performance against those plan assumptions in real time. And so that's what we want to see. And when you say real time, what does that look like? Is that quarterly? Is that monthly? Is it daily? How do you see teams, the ideal RevOps team, functionally, operationally, what would that look like?

**[14:06]** Well, you can group the data however you'd like, right? If you want to group by month or group by quarter, that's fine. But when I say real time, I do mean real time because there should be a place where anyone can go and see how we're doing against plan and how each of those assumptions in the plan are how we're performing against those and not have to question, is this updated or has the data synced? When I say real time, I mean real time. And you want those early warning signals about the drivers of the assumptions in the plan or of things like your sales cycle, right?

### 14:54 — The metrics you must track and segment

**[14:54]** You want the early warnings around the things that could be causing sales cycles to stretch out, for example. So it's all got to be in real time, and it's a challenge for sure. It's a huge challenge. I know it as an operator in RevOps before. It's very, very difficult to get the level of detail and the volume of data that's really required. And I can give some examples for people listening. If you're looking at the metrics you need to be looking at, you need to be looking at production of close ones, sales qualified leads, marketing qualified leads.

**[15:33]** You're going to want to look at the funnel metrics across the entire organization, conversion rate cycles, then you're going to want to segment that 20 to 30 different ways. Enterprise is going to run different than SMB. Your region in EMEA is going to run different than your region in North America. You have different product lines. You have different service centers. You need to be able to slice that data in all of the meaningful ways that are relevant to your business. And to do that in real time is, I mean, I'll just say it, it's nearly impossible if you don't have the right tooling.

### 16:12 — The origin story of QFlow

**[16:12]** I think it'd be really great if you could share, you know, this is why I was excited to talk to you about this topic because I'm sure this pain that you have felt that I have felt was a large inspiration for the development of QFlow. And I'd love to hear the origin story of QFlow and then also hear what you're working on today and what this could look like in the future for those RevOps 2.0 teams. Awesome. Yeah, we started QFlow. So both my co-founder and I have backgrounds in finance and BizOps. I did a stint in marketing, which I can tell you stories about later.

**[16:57]** But the bottom line is that we're spending a lot of time not getting what we needed out of our sales ops and then out of RevOps teams. Among other things, around planning it and just managing the business. And so we would end up doing a lot of this work ourselves, interfacing with the data engineers, with the analysts, rewriting SQL queries. Usually to an unsatisfactory outcome because of the toolset that that traditional data stack uses and that we live within with our CRMs, right? Which are really important repositories of information, but that don't facilitate the type of planning that we're talking about today.

**[17:50]** So we started QFlow. We looked around. We saw that there were a bunch of tools that call themselves RevOps tools, but they're really sales tools or sales management tools. And no one had built something that just worked out of the box for RevOps. And so we've built a go-to-market analytics platform for RevOps 2.0. It doesn't rely on the traditional data stack. It builds all of your go-to-market stats within 30 minutes of sign up. Gives you a rich view into the various performance drivers for those stats. And then, of course, there's a modeling component that allows you to understand where you could end up, two, three, four quarters from now.

### 18:42 — Generative AI inside QFlow

**[18:42]** What we're working on now, I mean, what everyone's working on now, we've built some generative AI in the product to automate some of the things that RevOps spends time on that is just time consuming, right? Interpreting charts, writing the weekly update email that goes out, explaining which deals pushed, which deals got pulled in, where we sit for the quarter. And we've got some good stuff in the pipeline that will allow people to use chat to interface with our product. So imagine just being able to log in, tap a button on your keyboard and ask Qflow how qualified pipeline is looking compared to plan and getting a plain text response back.

### 19:46 — Freeing 28% of analyst time

**[19:46]** So, yeah, I think that answers your question. Yeah, so when the CFO is asking you a question about what's going on, you can just forward it to Qflow and drum up the answer for you. That's right. I mean, yeah, I mean, seriously. That's the idea. You know, what we see is generally, we did a Q1 customer survey. And what we saw was that we were able to free up 28% on average of RevOps analyst time to work on higher order problems within the business. And so that's something we're pretty proud of. We think with the addition of the generative AI, that number can certainly be closer to 40 or 50%.

**[20:38]** And so what excites me is just imagining what kind of things are possible for companies out there when we can achieve those types of productivity gains and have these insights at our fingertips. Yeah, and I really like that you're developing technology for RevOps teams because there really isn't a lot out there. That's specifically for RevOps. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of tools that RevOps has to go implement on behalf of other departments to help them be more productive, but to get the things done that RevOps teams need to get done every day and just have the intelligence to lead the organization.

**[21:20]** There's not a lot of solutions for that. So I really, as a RevOps professional, I appreciate the work you're doing in the space and I'm really excited for how it's going to empower teams to just do so much more. Well, not to make it a complete love fest, Anthony, but we see some of the work that you guys do with your clients and you guys fall into that RevOps 2.0 category. So we appreciate you guys. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. A lot of time being a RevOps 1.0 person, so that's what you can eventually stack up to do it the right way.

### 22:06 — Wrap-up: don't make planning an annual retreat

**[22:06]** So just to wrap it up and conclude, RevOps 1.0, it's not a bad place to be and it's good that you're making the investment, making sure that you're putting together a team that looks at the organization holistically is important. But in order to really get the benefits and the power out of the function, one of the best ways to do that is to be part of the planning process if not leading the planning process and don't make it an annual retreat.

**[22:38]** Make it a true closed loop process that you're monitoring in real time, reviewing regularly and then adjusting as needed because I think as people can see this year, a couple months, the whole world can change. So if you're just going to stick to the plan that you set in September of last year, you're definitely not being agile enough. So, Alex, any closing thoughts for people listening? I know if people are interested in QFlow, I hope they can reach out to you directly and get some more information. I hope we get to do some more discussions together as well.

### 23:18 — Where to find Alex and QFlow

**[23:18]** No, I'd love to be back. Yeah, you can find us at qflow.ai, ping me on LinkedIn. Even if you just want to chat, I'm around. And yeah, I look forward, I can think of probably 13 different topics off the top of my head, Anthony, that we could riff on for a future podcast. I'm going to develop a few for us in the future. We'll just read them off. Okay. Thank you, Alex. Thanks, Anthony. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like the discussion, please like, share, and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.


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