Akira Mamizuka

Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS, LinkedIn

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LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS, Akira Mamizuka on Revenue Ops Interviews

September 10 @ 10:00AM PST

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Setting KPIs can often feel arbitrary, especially when entering new markets. How do you get past this uncertainty to set realistic goals?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • March 31

First of all, let's not convolute KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) with targets. KPI definition should happen independent of our knowledge of the market or the availability of historical performance data. It simply means defining the metrics that matter for your business. After your KPIs a......Read More

1774 Views

Marketing and sales don’t understand the reasons that drive lost renewals and they just seem to blame CS. How can revops help align with all departments so that we can all work together to understand the challenges facing renewals?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • January 11

Correlation between Go-to-Market actions and renewal success is one of the most studied areas in SaaS firms. Although the answer will vary for each firm, having a data driven point of view on actions and indicators that lead to positive renewal outcomes is imperative. Examples of actions and indi......Read More

1752 Views

How do you break down responsibilities and KPIs between revenue operations and demand generation?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • March 31

If we think about the revenue flow in terms of a funnel, demand generation would be at the top and revenue or bookings at the bottom. KPI definition should follow roles & responsibilities. Along each step of the funnel, it is critical to first define: - Which function owns that step? - Wha......Read More

1404 Views

What's your process for figuring out what metrics to hold revenue operations accountable for?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • March 31

This is a non-trivial topic since Revenue Operations is often a "recommender" in many decisions, as opposed to a "decider". The "dual mandate" of the Revenue Operations function is: 1. Grow revenue faster 2. Make the go-to-market resources more productive I believe best-in-class Revenue Op......Read More

1382 Views

My org has a completely separate ticketing system for CS issues that is siloed to only CS reps. What’s the best way for revops to help with this situation? Why is it important to remove a silo like this?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • January 11

Although I am not a Systems expert, I have experienced this challenge as part of my RevOps career. From my standpoint, the root cause maps to the fact that most CRM Systems are built with the "Sales" use case at its core, and often the workflows and capabilities for Customer Success and Support c......Read More

1380 Views

Why should customer success and revops be aligned or work together? What’s the tangible benefit?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • January 11

At LinkedIn, we believe that customer value is a "true north" objective. In fact, we know that successful customers tend to expand their relationships with LinkedIn over time, leading to revenue and profit growth. On the B2B Tech space, multiple functions interact with customers and users alon......Read More

1233 Views

Consistent revenue growth and renewals are both touted as super important in my org, but net new sales seems to be more important to leadership than retention. How can a revops role help with that?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • January 11

At LinkedIn we use the TAM (Total Addressable Market) approach to tackle this problem. First, we separate the "New Business TAM" from the "Existing Business TAM", in order to understand penetration and "headroom" in each category. Startups, early stage companies (and even mature companies pote......Read More

1112 Views

What steps do you take to continuously improve the relevance and usefulness of your dashboards and reporting?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • March 27

Dashboard proliferation and staleness is an issue companies often deal with, including LinkedIn. Bias to action leads to multiple different dashboards being built over time, leading to: * Inconsistent metrics, since not always the builders align with metric owners on the same source of truth......Read More

1068 Views

Do you have any advice for a junior who is a first revenue operations hire?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • July 28

A junior hire who is the first Rev Ops hire is an exciting role to be. They will lay the foundations for the company to grow and scale. However, this is also a chaotic role. At such an early stage, the company likely has gaps in processes, systems, tools, training and reporting, just to name a......Read More

998 Views

How do you recommend socializing KPIs (before the work starts and when it's done)?

Akira Mamizuka

LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS • March 31

I see 4 key steps as part of an effective KPI-setting process: 1. Align on the right KPIs. Employees need to understand why certain metric matters. Connecting any KPI to key business outcomes is crucial. 2. Socialize the method and numbers. Some KPIs are complex to be calculated and ca......Read More