SaaS Conversations Podcast: Maximizing GTM Success With RevOps in 2025
Although Revenue Operations (RevOps) is still an evolving function in SaaS, its role is critical to driving go-to-market efficiency. At its core, RevOps ensures that go-to-market teams like Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success function as a unified, efficient system to enable the ideal customer journey.
One of the biggest challenges for RevOps leaders is managing resource allocation – making high-stakes decisions about structure, strategy, and investment. How do you allocate resources for maximum impact? When is the right time to scale? Which strategic focus areas will drive long-term success?
In this episode of SaaS Conversations, Katherine Zhang, CEO and General Manager of OPEXEngine by Bain & Company, shares expert insights on building a high-impact RevOps function. We cover:
- The foundational role of RevOps in go-to-market success
- How to structure RevOps around key strategic focus areas
- Common challenges in resource allocation and best practices
- The role of benchmarks in guiding smarter investment decisions – and how to use benchmarks effectively
- Why strong partnerships with Finance are critical for RevOps success
- How RevOps strategies must evolve as companies scale
Listen in to gain actionable insights on optimizing RevOps, aligning go-to-market teams, and setting the right strategic priorities for sustainable growth.
Transcript
Introduction:
Welcome to SaaS Conversations, a podcast from OPEXEngine by Bain & Company.
In today’s conversation, we’re diving into revenue operations – RevOps – and how it shapes go-to-market success. RevOps is still an evolving function, with different definitions across the industry, but at its core, it’s about driving efficiency and alignment across go-to-market functions like sales, marketing, and customer success.
“ I think where the value of benchmarks really gets unlocked and it can really uplevel your planning is [when you] use it for growth and not just look at it and say, here's where I am now and here are the benchmarks for where I am now, but to look at it for where you wanna be.”
That’s Katherine Zhang, CEO and GM of OPEXEngine. In this episode, she shares her perspective on RevOps strategy, the scope of RevOps, the role of benchmarks in guiding key decisions, and best practices for aligning teams around resource allocation. We’ll also explore how companies refine their approach as they scale – because the right allocation today isn’t necessarily the right one for tomorrow. Let’s listen in.
Avery Ponce (Host): Thank you for being here today, Katherine. Let's start with a quick introduction. Can you share a bit about your background, your experience in RevOps, and your current role at OPEXEngine?
Katherine Zhang: Thanks, Avery. Great to be here today as well. I'm Katherine Zhang, the new CEO and General Manager of OPEXEngine. Some brief background on myself: I have spent the last decade plus leading Growth Strategy and Revenue Operations teams at tech companies of all sizes – from large ones like Dell Technologies to companies like Relativity, which is a legal SaaS company, and Project 44, which is a logistics SaaS company.
Being a leader in revenue operations, I have a lot of experience on the user-side of benchmarks, which is how I came to OPEXEngine. I know how critical those benchmarks are for resource allocation and long-term planning, and I am very excited to be at OPEXEngine and on the podcast today and share the experience of using benchmarks to really build your business.
Avery Ponce (Host): That's great, and we're very excited to have you on today. So Revenue Operations – or RevOps – is a relatively new function and term in SaaS, and there are a variety of definitions for the term out there. How do you define revenue operations?
Katherine Zhang: It's definitely – I would say – almost like a newer term and a newer role, especially within SaaS companies. And there are different definitions floating around out there. The [definition] that I find the most useful and that really encompasses the scope of [the function] is that Revenue Operations aligns and coordinates go-to-market functions to enable the ideal customer journey.
I say that sentence in those parts because I think the “align” and “coordinating” and really being [involved] across the whole customer journey – those are very important parts of Revenue Operations’ scope. So in terms of “aligning” – you've got your go-to-market strategy; you’ve got decision-making. The “coordination” is [involved] in different processes and structures and making sure that once you make the strategic decisions that those can actually be operational.
One thing that has been a part of all of my roles in Revenue Operations is resource allocation, which is a part of the “align” and the “coordinate” because you have to (1) figure out where you put your resources and then (2) you actually have to do the coordination to deploy them to make sure the customer journey happens.
Avery Ponce (Host): So it sounds like the scope of RevOps is pretty wide, but let's focus on that resource allocation aspect today. How do you go about figuring out your GTM resource allocation?
Katherine Zhang: It's a great question, and it's a big part of Revenue Operations’ scope. I'd say at the core, there are some fundamentals here. Go-to-market resource allocation – at the end of the day – is focused on two questions.
One: you want to figure out the quota coverage you need – meaning how many people do you need to sell to get to the revenue that you want?
And the second question is: how many people do you need supporting that? So how many people in Marketing (or dollars in marketing)? How many Customer Success people? Support, etc.? So at the end of the day, you are allocating resources and you're answering these two questions: how much quota coverage and then how much support for that quota coverage [do you need]?
But it's not that simple. I wish it were, but what makes it more complicated and what really is important for getting this right is to know your strategic focus areas first – you really can't answer these questions without knowing that. And when I say strategic focus areas, I mean you need to know your market and how you are going to win in that market.
So some examples here: you need to know how your customer buys. For example, if the customers buy through mostly the channel, that means you may not need as many salespeople. You also need to know how your customers will find out about your product. Is this a product that is relatively new and requires a ton of customer education and outreach? That means your Marketing budget might need to be higher. Is your product super complicated and needs very careful onboarding? Is that onboarding something that you have a channel partner doing? These are things that will – again – determine where you are on the resource allocation spectrum.
And the last question I'd look at here is: how likely are your customers to stay with your product? Is there something about your product that makes it especially sticky or – on the other side – makes it especially easy to switch? So you want to know: how are your customers buying? How are they finding out about your product? How are they going to get onboarded with your product and how are they going to stay with your product?
And if you can answer those questions, then you have a pretty good sense of your go-to-market strategic focus areas. And that's what you need as a foundation to really figure out how to allocate your resources.
This is actually where benchmarks come in and can be really helpful once you get down to modeling this out. There's two ways I think about being able to go about this.
One way is with your strategic focus areas [if] you know the answers to those questions about how you'll win. So you could sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, “Okay, based on what I know about the market and my customers, here's what I think a Sales team, CS team, Marketing team, and Support team would look like.”
Then you can take benchmarks and look at it and say, “Okay, this is what I came up with on a blank sheet of paper, but let me actually see what other people are doing so that I can figure out whether what I think works is actually what seems to be working out there in the rest of the technology market.”
The reason I put so much emphasis on the strategic focus areas is when you actually look at those benchmarks, it's very important for you to know how to look at those benchmarks and use them more deliberately with your strategic focus areas. So for example, if you know that you have a very channel-heavy sales process, the benchmarks might say that the top companies in your range have 100 salespeople, but you know you’re channel-heavy, so what you've planned is for 70 salespeople. And if you know that you're channel-heavy, that 70 is probably the right number because the average is going to be people who are a mix of channel and direct. And so knowing that you're channel heavy, you can say, “Okay, so I can tell that I'm going to be a little bit off benchmark here.”
If you're in a brand new market where this product doesn't exist, and you’re looking at the benchmarks for Marketing spending, you might need to be above those benchmarks because you know that you need some extra dollars there to do the marketing outreach.
So that's one way to do it: you come up with what you think it should be, take the benchmarks, think about what your strategic priorities are, and use those benchmarks to iterate on the model that you've designed.
The other way to do it is just to flip that because obviously starting from a blank sheet of paper can be intimidating sometimes. So start with the benchmarks, look at companies of your size with the EBITDA margin that you want and with the growth rates that you want, and look at what they are doing. And then again, put that lens on of what your strategic priorities are to more intelligently use those benchmarks and say, “Okay, so it says from the benchmarks that the top quartile of people have 30 CSMs at my size, but I know that my product's really easy to onboard and people are generally sticky, so I don't think I need 30. I think I can actually be near the bottom quartile and have 10 CSMs, for example.”
So that's another way to go about it is to use the benchmarks as your starting point and then tweak what your company needs to get to your strategic priorities based on what you know about your market.
Avery Ponce (Host): And how do your resource allocation processes evolve as your company scales?
Katherine Zhang: I just talked about how you go about starting a resource allocation and putting your first plan together or your first plan for that year together using benchmarks.
And that's a really great, impactful use of benchmarks, but I think where the value of benchmarks really gets unlocked, and it can really uplevel your planning is to use it for growth and is to not just look at it and say, “here's where I am now and here's the benchmarks for where I am now,” but to look at it for where you want to be.
So if you're a $100M company and you want to grow to $500M, benchmarks are incredibly helpful to show you what $500M looks like because you as a company have not been a $500M company so it's usually difficult to tell what that is. But you can look at benchmarks and say, “Okay, at a $500M size, I need to look like this in my operations. And so how do I get from where I am today to what the $500M should be? How should I think about adding people to my Sales team? How quickly or how slowly can I think about Marketing spend and things like that and ramping that up as you grow?”
Avery Ponce (Host): And so once you've determined your resource allocation strategy, generally what are the best practices for driving alignment and execution, and what are some common roadblocks you've encountered?
Katherine Zhang: This is definitely a good thing to think about because a plan is just numbers on a sheet of paper unless you can execute on it.
There's a couple of best practices, I would say, from my experience. The first is getting back to that definition of revenue operations being aligning and coordinating go-to-market functions. Make sure you do the “align” part, so make sure that you align on these strategic focus areas with the other go-to-market functions. You might need to bring in other functions here as well – like Product, for example, depending on what your focus areas are.
But you want to make sure that at the end of the day, all of the functions are aligned on how you will win in this market. That will help a lot because what that means is when you say, “Hey, I want 100 salespeople this year” you can actually explain, and they know why you might need those salespeople.
You can also explain in terms of the benchmarks, right? “We need 100 salespeople. I know the benchmark says 80, but we all know that we are a very direct, heavy team, and we want to grow higher than the benchmark. So we don't want 80, we want to do 100.” But if you are all aligned that that's what your market is like, and that's what your way of winning is, then that conversation becomes a lot easier.
So that's the first best practice – make sure you align everyone on your strategic focus areas.
The second one is very tactical, which is as a Revenue Operations leader, you have to work closely with Finance. You should really be two in a box with Finance the whole way through. What I found really useful in my experience with Finance is that Finance will often have a broader view of the company's performance and goals than any one function can. That's their job.
And in Revenue Operations, it covers a very broad scope and we like to think that we see everything to do with revenue – which is true to some extent – but, Finance also sees what's going on in the rest of the company. They see what the cost structure looks like. They're often looking at other financial objectives for the company as well that maybe are not directly revenue-related. So having that broader context from Finance is very helpful as you're building out a resource allocation plan.
And I would say on the flip side, if you are in Finance you want to also make sure you're building this relationship with your Revenue Operations team. What I've found is that the most effective relationships I've had with Finance teams are with teams that understand that when it comes to go-to-market resource allocation, it is somewhat ambiguous and it is iterative. It's not something where there is one number that's the right answer. And that number might change along the way as the market changes as well. So if you're a Finance person, having that understanding that when you're working with Revenue Operations, not every number has all these layers of backup data to it – sometimes it's just a little bit of an art. And also that things will change as the market conditions change.
The last best practice I'll say here is as you're going through resource allocation, don't be afraid to make changes. Getting to the point of it sometimes being a little bit of an art on the go-to-market side.
Obviously you want to have a plan and you want to have a north star that you're trying to get to, but resource allocation is not something that there is one there is a one size fits all answer to.
Avery Ponce (Host): That’s great. So as we start to wrap things up, do you have any final thoughts?
Katherine Zhang: Yes, if I think about everything that we've talked about, resource allocation is a very critical part of RevOps’ scope. If there's one thing I can leave you with here, it's that resource allocation is not simple and it's not supposed to be. We'd like to think that resource allocation in go-to-market is as simple as saying, “Hey, I want to make $100M and I'll give each AE a $1M goal, so I need to hire 100 AEs.”
It's never quite that simple, and it's not even that simple on the cost side. So if you have $1M to spend and AEs cost $200K each and you just say, “All right, then I'll hire 5 AEs.” It's not that simple either. It's literally the balance between those two. It's the balance between your ARR goals and your costs.
And knowing where you should be in that balance is where knowing your strategic focus areas and using benchmarks come into play. So it's very critical to know your strategy and then to use benchmarks to guide you along the way there.
Avery Ponce (Host): And that just about wraps it up. So thank you, Katherine, for joining us today, and for a great conversation about RevOps and specifically GTM resource allocation and best practices in terms of getting team alignment. These remain critical and top of mind topics in the space, and these are really great insights, so we appreciate your time and perspective.
Katherine Zhang: Thank you.
