GTM 147: RevOps Is a Hidden Growth Engine with Navin Persaud, VP of RevOps at 1Password

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Navin Persaud is the VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password, where he leads a 30+ person team supporting a GTM org of 450+. With over 20 years of experience across RevOps, SalesOps, and MarketingOps, including time at IBM and high-growth SaaS companies, Navin has built a reputation as one of the sharpest operators in the game. He’s known for building scalable systems, ruthless prioritization, and a clear-eyed view of how AI is reshaping operations.

Discussed in this Episode:

• Why RevOps is the most essential team for scalable growth

• The real signs that it’s time to hire your first RevOps leader

• What AI is disrupting first in RevOps forecasting, enrichment, orchestration, and reporting

• The rise of GTM Engineers and the shift toward intelligence-layer operations

• Tactical frameworks for combining AI insights with human judgment

• How RevOps should evolve from executor to strategic growth partner

• Hiring advice: what makes a great early-stage ops hire and how to test for curiosity

Highlights:

05:00 – The sports field analogy: building the GTM pitch, not just playing on it

07:00 – AI is both the scariest and most freeing technology in ops today

09:00 – GTM Engineers and the orchestration opportunity ahead

11:00 – Product-market fit is the right time to invest in RevOps

13:00 – Forecasting, enrichment, and demand routing—where AI adds leverage

17:30 – Why dashboards are dying and how ops will move to real-time insights

27:00 – How RevOps became a central GTM function

30:00 – Advice for founders on when (and how) to bring in ops leadership

33:00 – “Perfection is the enemy of pace”—a RevOps mantra

Guest Speaker Links (Navin Persaud):

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinpersaud/

• 1Password: https://1password.com/

• 1Password Careers: https://1password.com/careers

• Additional resource: Momentum.io—the AI Revenue Orchestration Platform that transforms GTM motion into a competitive edge through real-time insights and automated execution.

Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/

• Newsletter: https://substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

• Website: https://gtmnow.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/

• Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_

• YouTube: @gtm_now

• The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast

Sponsors

Sponsor: Trinet

Founding a company is hard enough. Navigating payroll, benefits, and compliance shouldn’t slow you down. That’s where TriNet comes in. They work with startups and scaling businesses to help take HR off your plate, so you can stay focused on building product, growing revenue, and hiring great people – the go-to-market engine. B2B companies like Hivebrite and Equilend trust TriNet to help handle the infrastructure of their workforce, so their teams can focus on execution.

The GTM Podcast
The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

GTM 147 Episode Transcript

Sophie Buonassisi: Hello and welcome back to the GTM Podcast. This is your host, Sophie Boni, EP marketing at VC Firm GTMfund, and our media brand here GTMnow I am joined today by a very special guest. Navin Persaud. He is the VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password. He’s one of the most experienced operations leaders with 20 plus years of experience building and scaling teams across RevOps, sales ops, and marketing ops. N Welcome to the podcast.

Navin Persaud: Thanks for having me, Sophie. Excited to be here.

Sophie Buonassisi: Likewise. Really excited for this conversation and love to jump in with an overall. Overall insight about operations. You know, a week ago you posted a role that you’re hiring for on your team, and you said, revenue operations is the engine behind our growth at 1Password. I had a conversation just the other week with the CEO of Yext and he said the same thing. Revenue Operations is the most fundamental role at the company. Love to hear. Why is that? is Revenue Operations, why has it become the most important role?

Navin Persaud: It’s funny, it’s kind of like water. You don’t know you need it until you need it. I find that a lot of companies, especially startups and then as they grow. It’s not the role they’re thinking of hiring, right? They’re trying to grow, they’re trying to support customers, trying to acquire new ones.

But at some point you reach that inflection point where, what’s happening in our business? Are we efficient? Is our forecast there? Do we have the right tools to continue that next phase of growth? Is everything that we’ve learned up to this point, helping us drive insight to fuel strategy for that next layer of growth.

And I think that’s the point where, oh my God, we don’t have a RevOps team. We don’t have someone at the controls or at the helm working behind the scenes to make sure those customers are being supported, to understand our business forecast, to make sure those sellers don’t have all the friction they have in doing what I believe is the hardest thing selling.

Sophie Buonassisi: I think it’s the most common regret. I hear, at least on the marketing side, but across all functions I wish we hired RevOps sooner and brought ops in sooner.

Navin Persaud: I love it though because I’ve made a career out of this. Like it’s that pain and that recognition that that pain exists is why I’ve been able to have a great career. Like I view my working careers in two phases. I was at IBM for a fair bit of time, and in the last 10 years I’ve been in SaaS.

And every role was one of, there’s pain, you need help. And for me that’s, oh, I’m attracted to pain because pain means I get to go build, I get to go build a team, I get to go learn about another business. And like, it’s a great marriage, but it always starts with pain.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a great point and it means you’re solving a need to have, not a nice to have too.

I’ve heard you actually use a great analogy for ops, more of a playing field analogy.

The sports field analogy: building the GTM pitch, not just playing on it

Navin Persaud: I am a huge sports fan and I think people in go-to-market just eventually learn to speak analogy, speak, uh, or at least that’s what I’m told. But I view RevOps as sort of the, the folks who basically are, if you’re, if you’re a big soccer football fan, you’re building the pitch, right? The RevOps team builds the landscape.

The go-to-market tech that drives that engine. So we’re there making sure all the lines are where they need to be, making sure the playing field is in the right order. We’re then setting up the rules like, this is how you do this thing, this is how you progress an opportunity. This is how you forecast. So we’ve, we’re, we’re doing a bit of the rules there, and we’re also making sure that everyone understands their role in that field.

They’re part of that process. So whether we’re the referee, whether we’re the builders, or whether we’re just the Sherpa on your way to that growth. You know, the RevOps team has an important part, and if you don’t have someone managing that landscape, that’s when as you scale, chaos begins to take over.

Sophie Buonassisi: Gotta love a sports analogy. What is your sport of choice?

Navin Persaud: Oh, I’m a Canadian, so I’m a huge hockey fan. I think that’s just, it just comes, it’s part of your DNA when you’re born, right? I’m a huge New Jersey Devils fan. It’s, uh. It’s an ironic thing because I live in Toronto and like we’re a hockey state here in Toronto. but I cheer for them just like I cheer for RevOps ‘ cause they were the underdog when I started cheering for them.

And there’s a big attraction to the underdog. The underdog is the one that’s not valued, not seen. Um, but if you put enough time into it, like I did with my devils, they’ll, they’ll turn around and they’ll, they’ll show you some of the promised land.

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. Cheering for the underdogs in every aspect of life Ops New Jersey team. Well, we are in full swing playoff season on hockey, so no shortage of sports, but Navin really wants to dig into AI specifically as this has been a super interesting intersection ops. What are you seeing right now with that intersection?

AI is both the scariest and most freeing technology in ops today

Navin Persaud: It’s a unique time in, in our lives and that. There is technology that has come about that is both the scariest thing and the most amazing thing at the same time in the same package. Scary in that, you know, people are wondering, Hey, I’m just getting settled in the workforce. What is this going to mean for my career or the way in which we work in the future as businesses look to adapt?

The most amazing thing when. My son, my son who’s a software engineer, shows me examples of, Hey, this is how AI can simplify some of the really mundane things that really drown you and RevOps people in their day to day and free you from those shackles to do the more important things. And I think there’s a great opportunity to embrace it and leverage it in ways that not because you, you, you must, but, but because you have to.

The world is changing, and I think you need to adopt a way to roll with those punches rather than trying to fight it.

Sophie Buonassisi: Well said. And sounds like, I mean, across every function it’s AI at the intersection is really elevating each function, allowing people to get outta the weeds, which is fantastic. What are you seeing from a team composition? There’s been a lot of specialization in ops roles. What are you seeing from a transition standpoint now?

Navin Persaud: Blowing up on my LinkedIn feed is the concept of a GTM engineer. Um, I feel like I gotta have one. I gotta get one soon, but it is effective. Here’s another analogy. It’s the conductor, right? It’s someone who’s orchestrating things like, here’s how your sales engagement tech will run, and here’s how your enrichment will run, and here’s how your ICP will get fueled, and here’s how your accounts get scored.

Like today, we deal with that very much, not ad hoc, but very, like, we’ve got a person who’s managing this and someone who’s doing this, and then we hope they’re talking to each other to create that synergy of efficiency. With ai, there’s an opportunity to automate a lot of that and then use your brain power to then focus on where we should apply this?

What, where should we learn from this? And then where can we get better from this?

Sophie Buonassisi: Now you said, and it felt kind of jokingly, gotta get one. And we’re seeing that world pop up everywhere. It’s really that blend of systems, strategy, scale. Tactically, what does that look like? Are you scaling the team across other functions? I mean. I mentioned that you are hiring so that you posted a role. How are you thinking about that potential GTM engineer or your existing structure and how you are potentially shifting that?

GTM Engineers and the orchestration opportunity ahead

Navin Persaud: Yeah, there’s two parts of my brain at conflict here. There is one in that I buy tools, not because I need tools, but because I have to solve business problems, and the tools are the means to those ends. Whereas the other side of means, like you’ve gotta dive in with AI and figure out what those tools are.

Because AI and what it can bring for a go-to-market business in SaaS is really the means to that end. So they’re in conflict in my mind. I know we’ve got a few hires out there but I mean, I’m at a point where, you know, I use a little bit of AI tech today, but there are some others that I’ve caught my eyes on to understand, hey, there’s an opportunity for scale here and the best.

The best operational leaders are executors. They’re operators of a business. They have the ability, and I learned this very early on, as a RevOps leader, you need to be in the business, but as a transformational leader, you need to be on the business. And if you’re only doing one or the other, you either lack context or you lack strategy.

So you need to figure out a way to do both. So for anyone who’s listening to this call and you want to be a leader of RevOps in one day, those are my words of wisdom for you.

Sophie Buonassisi: Those are fantastic words of wisdom. And you mentioned RevOps should be introduced earlier. I said the same thing. What stage does it make sense? companies to bring on RevOps, when and why? What are the triggers?

Product-market fit is the right time to invest in RevOps

Navin Persaud: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a really tough one. Um, I think I’ll, I’ll put it this way from what I’ve seen, and then we can decide when it kind of makes sense. But all, all signs to me point to product market fit. I believe when you have that, that’s when you believe you’re at that next horizon of growth.

That’s when you need to make sure, okay, it’s buckle up time, and in order to buckle up, we need to make sure, at least at a core level. We have someone’s eyes and ears on our systems, the way in which we report our results, how we communicate a narrative to our board, where our next layers of growth are going to come from, and what’s gonna fuel that strategy.

Is it gonna be in hiring? Is it going to be in diversification of products? Is it going to be in new channels in which we sell, or new regions in which we operate? All those things are gonna come from data. And data is useless unless you put it in the right hands. AI and humans then inform that strategy.

Sophie Buonassisi: So product market fit is really that trigger for companies listening, thinking about hiring and bringing on ops.

Navin Persaud: I’d say so. I say that, and I also say that company’s always way too late and it’s why I’ve made a career, but the reality is, and someone needs to put this study out there, like companies that waited too long to start with their first RevOps hire, which means they had to spend X more in time, lost, uh, growth potential, and an overall like system maintenance and cleanup just to like, to get past it because you, you create this technical debt, you create this way of doing business that will require you to change how your teams operate.

It becomes a refocusing effort, which we all know. Time is our biggest enemy in any, in any sales year for growth. And you don’t have opportunities to waste time, especially if you are that growing company and you, you’ve got, you know, you, you’ve taken money on the, on the, on the private market, and you actually need to return and show that growth and give that confidence.

Time is not working for you. It’s working against you.

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it really is prioritizing the long term by investing in ops. So really you see the long term return. You avoid the technical debt. You know, everyone talks about using AI to forecast better, but what else should RevOps be using AI for right now?

Forecasting, enrichment, and demand routing—where AI adds leverage

Navin Persaud: Enrichment’s a big one. Um, I think there are a lot of enrichment players out in the marketplace that I think a few of them are gonna get disrupted. I think there’s just a great opportunity where a lot of the data necessary, at least at a, at a minimum, especially for high growth companies, are out there.

They’re just not curated and collected in a way that makes them scalable to be used. But now AI is making that available and creating data sets by which. The majority, at least of what you need is accessible. And it just in the past didn’t live in a container and companies made a business out of putting them in a container, creating integrations, and allowing you to pull them down.

Now, with the right level of prompts and your own integrations, you could probably move away  from some of those legacy players. So enrichment’s a big one. Enrichment gives you an opportunity to understand not only your customer base, but to create and fuel that product market fit. ’cause then you’ll know well.

All of my customers are in this industry at this segmentation, probably in this region. That’s where I’m gonna go higher. That’s where I’m gonna make sure my product works and is translated. That’s where, and then I’m going to plan on how I’m going to sell and grow in the future. Richmond’s a big one, uh, orchestration, right?

So if Richmond’s just one spoke in that wheel, orchestration is the entire hubcap. Whether that be with how we route demand, that comes from inbound, how we score accounts so that reps spend less time trying to figure out where they need to start their day. And it’s a little bit more prescriptive on, okay, these are where the signals are telling me from my intent, from my a BM, from my firmographics, from my inbound, all, all of that, just making it a lot easier so the humans can spend time on selling and less time on where should I start my day.

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely and. that more time that humans can spend. Thinking about that, what does it look like then to RevOps combine AI insights with human judgment to drive better results?

Navin Persaud: If I go back to forecasting, my answer is like, the question I get all the time is, how can we be better at forecasting? Obviously the data has a part in it. You need your sellers and your leaders to be enabled, and you need to have like a north star to say like, this is how we want to operate our business.

But there’s always a little bit of art in that and there’s a lot of science in that. And the magic is when you’re able to blend those two things together to be able to triangulate, to, you know, your, your projection from an AI standpoint, you know, that helps me today in my role, in the platform that we use.

It helps me, gives me great confidence and context. What’s happening at deals at scale, there’s no way given the size of our sales team that I could, or my team could for that matter go through everyone’s pipeline and understand, Hey, where are these deals? Are they situated correctly? Both in stage forecast category time.

But I can quickly read a summary. I can quickly understand, oh, here’s where all the med pick fields were filled out based on. We enable the reps to ask the right questions, and the AI then helps us plot those questions into answers and help us give us an understanding of where that deal sits. These are things that if you’re able to do them at scale, you can not only learn more about your business and you know your forecasts, you can also learn very quickly about how well your sales teams are performing and the way in which you wanna sell, and the what you want them to sell and the how they’re actually doing it.

Sophie Buonassisi: Interesting. Then what about the reporting side? Are team still relying on dashboards, weekly reports? Is there a smarter way of moving forward?

Why dashboards are dying and how ops will move to real-time insights

Navin Persaud:Yeah, that’s the area I think of the biggest disruption. So, um, I was, I was, my son was just messing around and just showing me, Hey, here are some possible things. Like he was showing me, you can basically set up an AI interface, query a database. All of those things, you’re like, someone asks you ad hoc like, Hey, how many customers do we have in this industry, in this segment, in this region?

Well, that’s a prompt and that’s a quick response. All the building of the dashboard and the legwork all goes away, but that takes time. That takes both good data, good process to collect and keep that data clean, and then the necessary integrations. And obviously you wanna make sure your data is being used for good and your own good and not everyone else’s, but.

There are great opportunities there that I see, you know, in the next few years, reporting will be a lot more self-serve. I think there’s an opportunity to remove the knowledge and bottleneck that sometimes lives in ops because, oh yeah, I know exactly how that report needs to work because you gotta exclude this, add this, filter this.

There’s like some ninja magic that every RevOps person has in their CRM. Which makes them sort of the gatekeeper and judge and jury on whether things are accurate. I love to tear down those walls. We don’t need to be that person or those people. What we need to do is democratize our company data to leverage it for all so that the company can move more quickly.

I think as companies look to grow, you only move as fast as the slowest people, whether that be in your product org, your engineering, your sales teams, et cetera. And if we can move everyone faster, we’ll all be moving faster.

Sophie Buonassisi: Well said. Can you give us a, maybe if you have like a tangible example of a problem AI helped you solve that maybe would’ve taken the full team scope before or taken way longer beforehand.

Navin Persaud: Yeah, so as an employee of 1Password, we sell multiple products now. Um, in the past we were a single product company and we’ve grown to sell three now, and I. Each time we launched a new product, we really wanted to understand how it’s being received, what are the conversations like? What are the questions that customers have?

Why are we winning? Why are we losing? and gaining that tactical and incredibly valuable feedback is really hard if the reps aren’t asking the right questions. But more importantly, if it’s buried in your CRM somewhere. Being able to pull that out and provide like, executive level summary or even just like, you know, here’s your hot takes for the week based on we had a, you know, 150 calls and here’s what we heard.

That’s really powerful because then you can take that insight and then understand, okay, we have an enablement problem here. We have a use case issue here. Ooh, we’re winning here. We need to do more of this. We’re losing here, but we’re really only losing if we don’t learn from this osing. So let’s take this as learning and get better.

Sophie Buonassisi: I love that. Only losing if you’re not learning. Everything is a data point at the end of the day,

Navin Persaud: It is. It is.

Sophie Buonassisi: And you are. So how big is the team at 1Password now that you’re leading on Ops

Navin Persaud: While we’re hiring, uh, I would say we’re in the mid to high thirties in terms of, uh, people within the RevOps org supporting a go-to market team of over 450 people.

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Now. come across a lot of AI tools, and I’m curious to get your thoughts on what you’re seeing in the space, maybe what you’re using, what you’ve kind of seen best in breed, uh, for yourselves and also maybe from a, a startup maybe a couple stages behind 1Password, what you’d advise.

Navin Persaud: So let’s start with what I’m seeing. I am seeing a lot of the established players trying to bolt on AI into their platforms. Um, it’s a little unnatural. I’ll unpack that by saying like, they do a thing well, but not from the ground up. In other words, like once you add ai it sort of changes your entire product.

It’s not like, oh, we do these five things and then we’ll just stitch AI on at the end, not great. whereas, you know, I, I use a company today, um. I’m a reference on their website, so I won’t be bashful about that because I love what they do. Uh, it’s momentum.io and momentum’s a, a great partner because they had a product built on their ai, and they’re growing from that.

Their use case is pretty wild in that their use case is so far wide that it’s like you’ve gotta take a hot minute and be like, okay, I just need to solve these problems for now, and I’ll come back to the rest later. Because their aperture is so wide, they’re not constrained and confined by, oh, we built this product years ago and now we’re adding something to it.

The world is your oyster in terms of how you wanna solve your pain. They can then leverage that from, you know, their understanding of conversations, capturing of data, and allowing you to like time machines back to things to then understand, hey, what happened in Q1? Why were we losing for this product, for this segment?

And really get that real time data to understand. Okay. Here’s exactly the actions that we need to take to be better. Um, companies have all this data, right? There are tons of companies that, you know, create notes, have call transcriptions, et cetera, but it’s like a gold mine that has been gone on, on untapped for so long, and the greatest opportunity to make that structured data and really understand, okay, it’s not just a report anymore, it’s literally what’s happening and how we can leverage it to be better.

Sophie Buonassisi: And it sounds like there’s more of that. The first challenge is structuring the data, and you touched on other problems beforehand, like disseminating that data throughout the organization, it’s almost a stage approach where it sounds like that is the first step. How do you actually structure that data so that you can ingest it before you actually circulate it?

Navin Persaud: That’s key, right? No, AI’s not a magic wand. You can’t just go buy a platform or use it from another solution, plug it in and expect Nirvana. That is just not gonna happen. You still need RevOps people to make sure you have a good process, you have good integration with your systems, and you’re collecting and protecting data in the right way.

Then you layer on AI to then make that magic happen. But magic doesn’t happen without the foundation.

Sophie Buonassisi: That pro. Product market fit as a potential trigger

Navin Persaud: Yes.

Sophie Buonassisi: Foundation. Excellent advice. Now, Navin, you’re hitting your 10th year in SaaS and you’ve built incredible companies. You spent a good chunk of your career at IBM also working on some really interesting things. Earlier you mentioned pains that led you to every company.

I’m curious more about that journey. What was it like to transition? What scale did you experience throughout kind of entering SaaS and what learnings did you take from IBM and kind of bring with you along for that journey?

Navin Persaud: I like IBM or my time at IBM is like, you know, prolonged university or college. Uh, in that, um, I wanted to be a lawyer right outta high, right outta university and landed at IBM. Then life took hold and I had a career there and it gave me an opportunity to understand. You know, how to work in a corporate world, how to conduct yourselves, how to show up, how to be present, how to just be like a good human in that environment.

then near the end, you know, it was, it was a little scary, right? IBM is obviously a big company, worlds are changing. There was an opportunity where, no, it was time to move, and I decided, okay, I’m gonna take the leap into the great beyond and jump into SaaS. I never had a SaaS role in my time at IBM. We were hardware driven, contracts driven, but I knew I loved to build and the opportunity that I first jumped in was, wow, what is this thing called Salesforce?

I need to learn about it. I need to understand it, master it. And then while doing that, I got the opportunity to sit in the sales pit. So the sales pit at my first place was. Where all the BDRs and sellers would be, and they would be blitzing the phone and calling, and that’s where I got firsthand experience to understand, woo, your workflow looks really hard and manual.

Maybe I can help you there. Maybe I can make your life easier so that you can spend more time on the phone and less time after the call trying to figure out how to update your Salesforce. Those two things really then brought me on, like, now I can build a team, now I can deliver more insight to the business.

And each time I did those things, it’s like, how can you do more of this? What do you need? What can we unlock? And then teams started to get bigger. I was then given more scope and then an opportunity arose where I got to move. And I, I moved a couple times and I was just talking to someone this morning.

The longest I’ve been anywhere is here. My time at 1Password gave me the opportunity to build. The opportunity to grow, the opportunity to be more exposed in the larger landscape of what happens in a private company and the future is bright. So, um, I’m, I’m here for a while and I think it’s just an opportunity for people to understand that your career is not a straight line.

It is an opportunity where you need to continually challenge yourself. I think if you are happy and comfortable someplace. You really should think about whether that really means complacent. ’cause if you’re not challenging yourself, if you’re not learning, and if you don’t have this natural need to be curious, you know, you could end up in a position where maybe one day you’re optional and you, you don’t wanna be that optional person.

You wanna be that required person that’s driving business forward.

Sophie Buonassisi: Powerful, powerful world words. Thank you, Navin, and. you made that jump and shift over to SaaS, you know, you joined Lenovo and then you went on to join Vision Critical for over three years and you advanced quite rapidly in that organization. I’m curious now in the SaaS world for 10 years, obviously we’ve spent the bulk of this conversation on ai.

What have you really seen from a development standpoint on the operations side? What kind of major shifts perhaps other than AI have you seen, if any?

How RevOps became a central GTM function

Navin Persaud: I will start with the easiest one, and it is the entire concept of revenue operations. When I joined 1Password, I remember looking at the JD and its sales operations leader. It’s like, no, we’re doing RevOps and it’s a huge trend. Like, um, my son asked me again like, what’s all this fus with RevOps, why are all these companies prioritizing RevOps in use cases and what they do and why is it like they’re buying persona?

And it’s a great question and I love being in the center of it, but to me, RevOps, it is. Much closer to those little pockets of the business that drive the business forward and drive growth. Sales ops is like the nineties, two thousands terms when yeah, we’re doing forecasting and planning and not much else.

RevOps end to end, whether it’s your go-to-market tech stack, some companies include marketing ops, whether it’s your data, whether it’s your forecasting, whether it’s your territory planning, your sales incentive plans, your partner op, your sales, your CS ops. All of those things mesh together, we’re like a one stop shop.

And so to me, the growth of RevOps, not only in the scale and the scope, but the ways in which companies have decided, alright, our best, can our best way of getting into product market fit at a company and what we sell. Probably targeting RevOps because we can find their pain and we can show them our solutions for it.

Sophie Buonassisi: It almost sounds like breaking down the silos. I even found, I mean, four years ago when we started GTM, now and GTM Fund, it was pretty rare that people were actually using the term go-to-market. It was still sales, marketing and all of the silos. So it was kind of taking that bet on, hey, what we’re seeing is silos are breaking down.

It is a consolidated effort. Sounds like the mirror effect across revenue operations, where it’s no longer that siloed sales, marketing ops, revenue operations overall across the go-to-market org.

Navin Persaud: It is an important nuance. I mean, like, you know, we have a marketing function, we have a go-to-market function, but we’re, we’re both in it to win it. Right? We’re not one side that can’t do well without the other. And I, I, I know early in my career I. , I’d always see a little bit of that natural friction, right?

There’s always a few points of natural friction in a SaaS business. There’s the BDRs and the AEs, there’s the AEs and CSMs, and then there’s marketing, and then there’s go-to-market. And I think by, by marketing and sales and by calling go-to-market, you, you’re including marketing in that, right? They’re the, they’re the front and center of building your brand awareness, uh, driving traffic to your website.

I really like putting out your use cases and your customer stories. They’re the tip of that spear that we then have to pick that baton up and run within go-to-market. So this concept of bringing it all together helps tear down not only the silos that you mentioned, but also this perceived inner, oh, it’s us against them.

No, it’s us against the world.

Sophie Buonassisi: Us against the world. I love it. And what are, you’d say the main kind of questions or areas that you’d recommend to, I’d say startup founders, maybe they’re not quite at that product market fit inflection, but. I think it, it almost feels like a little bit of a black box. Everybody knows the importance, everybody recognizes that.

But what does that actually look like for somebody, maybe even to bring on a fractional RevOps leader first before their first hire? What are the typical kind of focal areas that you think are most important for that person?

Advice for founders on when (and how) to bring in ops leadership

Navin Persaud: What doesn’t get measured doesn’t matter. So really I would start with that. Like what are the important KPIs in your business? Right? What are. What is the money behind your business looking to ensure that they’ll give you more money so that you can continue to grow and make sure you’re ruthless in prioritizing how you get those results and you’re clear.

I love the idea of fractional, right? If you don’t have the, it’s not if you’re too early to invest in like the internal head count. Go grab a fractional leader, help them advise you, help them at least lay the, the foundation of like, when you get here, here’s what you need to be. Because you don’t wanna turn that corner and be like, surprise, you need RevOps.

And then start thinking about it. Then even thinking about it, it’s too late. But do you wanna understand like, okay, here’s kind of where I need to go and what’s important now so that as I, as we do grow as a company, here are the things that need to be in place so that when those milestones do come about, I.

You were making sure that, okay, I need to get my first hire here. Maybe not a leader, but I need a doer because then eventually I’ll have at least some foundational layer with maybe some external support until I can build that team and bring a true partner in the business to sit alongside sales and my marketing and my product teams to help me like steer the ship a bit.

Sophie Buonassisi: And you mentioned doer. Talk to me about what those characteristics someone should be looking for are at that early stage hire, and then maybe how they evolve as they grow or the additional characteristics as they hire.

Navin Persaud: There were two interviews this morning and I got the same question, and my easiest answer is you have to be curious if you are anything else. I need you to be curious. I value that heavily. I am curious, like when I got here, I was asking questions more than I was answering them. And you just have to, because what’s super important are people in RevOps need business context so that they can marry it with like, how the system should behave and how the reporting should look when you’re absent from like business context.

You’re not adding that layer of like translation to the business. So what I mean by that is, in my early days and what the thing I learned that I needed as a master was, here’s what sales is telling me. Here’s what finance is telling me, and here’s what the data’s telling me. I. I need to speak their lingo in any one of those conversations in a way that they understand it.

And I think this is where all the analogies have come from, but the reality is like I needed to translate what I was seeing into the right language so that it could drive the right behavior, the right aha moments, and then the right moving forward partnership.

Sophie Buonassisi: That makes sense. That makes sense. curiosity I think lends itself well to many different functions overall, just company growth, especially at that startup stage. But can definitely see that on the operations side and certainly lends itself to marketing too. Now, Navin, last two questions for you here.

Always the same. What is one tactic or strategy that’s working for you? Or 1Password.

“Perfection is the enemy of pace”—a RevOps mantra

Navin Persaud: I think I’ve used the word ruthless prioritization a number of times, but for me it is like gospel, right? There are gonna be things that land in RevOps left, right, and center. It’s the reason I love RevOps in that we’re not a dumping ground, but we’re like, I. We’re the internal chat GPT, right? I have a Slack channel here where there’s hundreds of questions from our go-to-market team on the daily.

Some of those things are pretty clear, like we have a process. They just go here and search, but they come to us and I get it. I know why. Shortest path to the actual end result. That’s how a lot of folks operate. For me, it’s really around ensuring that I have things that are important. And things that are urgent, and I know the difference between the two.

For those that are important, they’re on the list, but those are urgent there at the top, and I have to protect what’s at the top because I understand that I’m not here to build perfect systems, not to have a hundred percent quality data. I’m here to facilitate the growth of the business moving forward.

The go-to-market team that I’m a part of, they’re effectively the RevOps customers. It’s my job to serve those customers so that we can grow, and me building great systems helps me. Building perfect systems doesn’t. I think our, I learned pretty early in my life that perfection is the enemy of pace and in a SaaS business, and especially in a high growth one, you want pace.

Sophie Buonassisi: That is fantastic advice. And what’s one widely held belief that revenue leaders have that you think is bullshit or no longer serving us?

Navin Persaud: It’s all good. The forecast is all good. Like there’s never been a company that I’ve been to where below the revenue leaders there’s been chaos. funny story, when I interviewed here, I had an opportunity to meet the revenue leaders and then after I got the job and I, we got to know each other, they’re like.

I honestly thought, this is what they told me. You were interviewing me because of the questions I was asking and where I was probing. And then once I eventually got a hold of all the systems to actually see the pain that brought me there. But I think as a sales leader, you live off of emotion. It is the absolute reason why I could never be in sales.

I’m very black and white. I’m very unvarnished. I’m very much, this is how it is. But as a seller, what makes you an amazing seller is your opportunity to have those highs and lows. It is your emotion that comes across that provides belief that you can solve customer’s problems, and it’s that emotion that bleeds through you that is then absorbed by those people who are looking to buy.

But it’s that same emotion that also hides things. Good RevOps people can find. So when I hear, eh, it’s all good. It’s all good. You know, curiosity kicks in.

Sophie Buonassisi: How do you test for curiosity in your interviews?

Navin Persaud: That’s a tough one. I, I really wanna understand, uh, with people like we we’re very project driven, we’re very task driven on things we have to deliver in RevOps. Um, I think the easiest question would be like, Hey, you have this very urgent project that you’re working on, and you realize that during the initial discovery of the thing you need to build, there’s some holes.

What do you do? Do you do option one, which is put that off to the side and go work on the next thing, where it’s very clear what you need to get done? Do you two ask one person who you might know on the team like, Hey, can you help? Three. You’re like, red alert, there’s a problem here. Here’s exactly what I need to know.

Here’s why it’s blocking us and here’s who I need to help. People who don’t pick option three aren’t curious enough. Um, you really need to be able to think, uh, independently, but act in a way. and I’ve told this to my teams, like, be 80% right and move forward. If you were wrong on the other 20%, I got you.

But that 80% allows you to move with pace. A hundred percent allows you to not move with pace and seek perfection, so move with pace, ask the right questions, be clear on your priorities, and continue to drive the things that the businesses deem urgent.

Sophie Buonassisi: That is an excellent, excellent way of testing. I think we might have to swipe that over here if you don’t mind, and no doubt many will. So excellent advice, Navin, this has been wonderful. Where can people find you if they wanna get in touch?

Navin Persaud: I am a hawk on LinkedIn. Uh, believe it or not, for all of those cold outbounds that I get, I read ’em all. I don’t maybe respond to them all, but I see them all, um, follow a lot of LinkedIn content. There are a lot of other RevOps peers out in the place in the space that I keep an eye on. LinkedIn is the best for me.

I’m not big on those social channels. LinkedIn is really the only one.

Sophie Buonassisi: And what have you found is breaking through the noise when people are job searching and, and reaching out.

Navin Persaud: So you mentioned off the top, I have a few hires open. Uh, I think on average since I posted that. I’ve had five InMails a day on why someone is the best fit or the best candidate. I’m honestly asking everyone to please apply ‘ cause the volume means I cannot spend 20 minutes with each one of you to do a pre-interview.

So I do really need you to go through the process, but the breakthrough, the noise is to, to demonstrate or at least show or summarize it. Here’s what I’ve done, right? I don’t wanna know, like, here are my responsibilities and I built a wonderful dashboard. Here are business pains that I’ve solved. Here’s how I built and managed teams.

Here’s how I’ve driven outcomes for my other, other peers in the business. This is how I elevated revenue operations within my function. That’s more impactful than telling me yeah, I spent two years here and I used to have Salesforce. Kind of not great. That’s kind of like what I would expect any RevOps leader to come in and do.

I had to do it here. I had to stand up a new CRM. Great. It’s part of why I joined. It’s not why I was hired.

Sophie Buonassisi: Less activity, more outcome oriented.

Navin Persaud: Yes.

Sophie Buonassisi: Are those roles that you’re hiring for? If you wanna give ’em a quick shout out.

Navin Persaud: I am hiring for a director of revenue operations. This person, uh, if not filled by the time this post podcast goes up, we’ll lead my systems team. So managing sort of the entire go-to-market tech stack, including any AI tools that we buy. That person will hire a manager for that team as well. And then we have an individual contributor that we’re hiring to work on that team.

And then lastly, my partner in crime, Catherine Watkins, for her team. She manages forecasts and our insights team, she’s hiring a senior operations manager to sort of like, program manage all of these things that we’re trying to do at scale. So the RevOps team here at 1Password is growing, 1Password is growing.

We’re a great story. We’re a great Canadian success story. If you don’t know, you will, you should know. Check us out.

Sophie Buonassisi: That is a fantastic pitch and I feel like generally from our conversation here and I do past conversation, anyone that is fortunate enough to get to. Work with you. Naven is very, very lucky. So some really exciting roles that are open. And I’m gonna sneak a last question in here ’cause piqued my curiosity.

You mentioned you, absorbed from other leaders in RevOps. Like where do you find that you source your greatest education right now, especially around AI.

Navin Persaud: I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but I think my son, my, my son has the opportunity to work for an AI company as an intern, as a software engineer. And every day he’s showing me something different and I’m like, he doesn’t see it, but I see like, oh my God, that’s gonna change the game. Holy crap.

That’s going to create business change at scale. I wish I could do that. So that’s area one. Area two. Days are short, so it’s really hard. So if something does catch my eye, you know, if it floats into my LinkedIn feed, and some vendors are really smart, I don’t know how they do it in targeting, but their stuff is just pinned at the top of my feed, so I can’t not see it.

Um, shout out to clay.io for just being that vendor for doing that. Um, but yeah, it is just, there’s a lot of content and I just follow, I see some of the things other RevOps leaders are doing. It’s these vendors who are aggressively targeting RevOps leaders like myself. They’re doing a really good job of putting it out there.

The one coaching moment I could probably say is like, just make sure you tie it back to RevOps. RevOps pain. It’s the pain. That’s why I’m here. It’s the pain that I need to solve. But you can’t just say you have a shiny tool that just does one thing. You gotta help me understand that. If I don’t do that thing, what does that mean for the business moving forward?

How does that impact the company’s growth? Because that’s why I’m here. I’m not here for the tools. I’m not here for the great process. I’m here for growth, and if you can work it back from growth, then maybe we have some time to spend.

Sophie Buonassisi: He might get some excellent outreach after this conversation

Navin Persaud: Oh yeah. I’m probably hating myself right now for doing that.

Sophie Buonassisi: Well, ideally some great candidates in the mix too, so we will drop in the job board. Requisitions into the show notes. Navin, thank you for the time. This has been a wonderful conversation, super insightful To all the listeners, thank you for hanging with us and we will see you next week.