Mike Sitter: What Boards Want From RevOps That Most Teams Never Deliver

[Music] Welcome to Go To Market, a podcast for RevUp, sales and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go To Market is sponsored by Full Cast and Silicon Slopes. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce Mike Citter, who is the Vice President of Revenue Operations at Asset Watch. Mike, how are you today? I'm doing great, and he thinks we're having the on. Yeah, thank you so much for joining. I have been so excited about this ever since he said you do it a couple of months ago. So I've been really looking forward to it and I appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. Let's get started. Tell us a little bit. My first question is, just give me a little bit about your background. You have a 20-year illustrious career in RevUp. How did it start? Yeah, it started kind of interestingly. So I think an interesting aspect of that 20-plus years that I've been in RevUp's is that about seven of those, only the last seven have really been in the SaaS industry. I grew up, so to speak, in Telecom, working for a very large public teleco company, doing sales operations and sales process. Along the way, I picked up some really interesting disciplines and knowledge around how sales enablement weaves into the whole revenue process and RevUp's. Really cut my teeth, so to speak, in that business and learning how large companies that are more mature and established function. While it was great, I was really looking for an opportunity to be associated with something a little bit more exciting, a little bit more higher growth. I've worked my way out of Telecom through the co-location and data center business, and then finally landing it in the SaaS business. Most of the SaaS companies that I've been associated with, were mid-delay stage, and where you're working with some established processes, some more mature operations, and you've got the ability to tweak and refine and accelerate things. Also gave me some really good learning experiences around how late-stage companies look at potential events and diligence, and that gave me an appreciation for the connection between the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, and how all of that stuff translates into enterprise value, and how outsiders look at companies, and the importance of really strong RevUp's function there. Most recently, I decided that at this stage, I really wanted to use all those learnings and apply them to maybe an early stage company. So, I joined Asset Watch about two months ago to lead RevUp's there, and that's been a great experience so far, because they've got a lot of really good building blocks in place, and a great potential to grow in the market. But there are definitely things that we need to address from a building perspective, and creating some of those scalable processes that help grow repeatable revenue, but without slowing things down, and the company is growing at a really good clip, and you don't want to mess with that, but you want to set the company up for sustained growth over time. Yeah, I totally agree. And as a startup myself, I've always been in startups, whether it's, I started in healthcare marketing, I guess some of the healthcare companies I worked with were not startups, but I have been in either health tech or just high tech for a long time. And that startup motion, where you have to get this 100% plus organic growth, build your scalable processes and not slow down, like what you're talking about is so hard to do. So I think it's amazing that you have found that engine and how it works. So based on what you're doing now at Asset Watch, what are a few of the learnings that we can get from you in terms of, how do you build this revenue engine today in 2026? Yeah, I think there are a few considerations. One is it really helps to start from a first principle standpoint, and why does REBOPs exist? REBOPs really exists to make the revenue engine run efficiently to drive that predictable, repeatable revenue. What it's not here to do is to introduce process for processes sake. And so I think there are a few things that I've learned that are really important. One is you've got to get an outside in perspective on the business as early as possible. So I was very intentional as I was onboarding with Asset Watch, to kind of start with the investors and start with the board, really understand what's important to them and what they see from a company. And then something else that I think was really helpful, that I think a lot of folks in my position don't give enough attention to is, I spent a lot of time out in the field. And one of the things that we do is we work with manufacturing plants and our solution helps them with predictive maintenance. And so there's a hardware aspect to what we do. We spend a lot of time with plant managers and reliability engineers. And so within a couple of weeks, I started going on field service calls with our installation technicians and got to talk to folks at the customer level. But what I really wanted to understand was like, how does the process work today? How do we get from a sign statement of work to an installation order that's scheduled to complete it installs? And how does that all kind of connect together? Because I wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing from a RevOps perspective, and preserved all the things that were good about that and looked for opportunities to streamline things even more. And so I bring all that up to basically say that the purpose of RevOps, like I said, is not to introduce process to put controls over everything. I like to say like the best work product that RevOps has are the things that people don't even notice. And that's working. I totally agree. And if it's working well and people don't think about it and things just happen, then you know that RevOps has done a really good job. The more invisible you can be, the more effective you are. That's right. Right? That's right. One thing that you said that was, I found fascinating just now, is that you said, understanding what the board wants and the goals of the company have been instrumental to your success. Can you tell me a little bit more about how are you placing yourself strategically in that role? That's one of the areas that I think RevOps teams in order to be able to really grow their career, and need to learn how to do. Yeah, I think that for me, it really comes down to, you've got to drive a relationship and alignment really early on, not just with the CRO, but the CFO and the CEO. If the company is at a place where you've got someone at that level as well. And I think that you really have to understand how the company values itself versus, well, in terms of is growth the primary driver is profitability the primary driver? Are they looking to achieve some balance of the two? And I think you really have to have that context in the RevOps role because that helps inform where you decide to make investments in the case of a company like asset watch, where at a stage where we've got the opportunity to capture a lot of market. And so the primary driver is growth. So that kind of directs our attention to not just how we generate pipeline and how the marketing machine works with the different channels, but also like how do we get as efficient as possible at converting that pipeline into into sales. And so it's less about making sure that we're being ultra disciplined with our expense and and cutting where we need to to achieve profitability. It's more about making smart decisions there. So unless you really understand what the board expects of the company and what the company values the most over the next 12 to 18 months, it's really hard to know that you're focused on the right things and prioritizing the right the right projects and the right initiatives. I love that. And something even as simple as are we going for top-lying growth or are we going for bottom line profitability or are we somewhere in the middle? Like just having that conversation with the board and with your CEO, I think is it probably has like 20 different action items that might be different and kind of branches often in a tree I would imagine from a football person, right? Exactly, exactly. Just to maybe put a little bit of a finer point on it. So right now in addition to growth. what we're trying to accomplish is we want to be able to have fully auditable, readily accessible ARR and sales reporting so that because a lot of this for us is around making sure that the board and the investors have confidence that we are managing and measuring the business correctly. So short term a lot of the priorities are around financial reporting and things like deal desk, you know, standing up a deal desk function so that we can get better, better controls over how we book, book deals over how those that translates into revenue, how we accelerate those processes. So it's just, you know, just understanding that from our CEO's point of view because he's the one that has to get in front of the board every quarter. You know, I'm definitely interested in making sure that he has what he needs to stand up, you know, comfortably in front of the board. That's awesome. From your perspective, where is a revenue operations person best suited? Is it, is the peer to the CFO and the CRO? Is it to report to the CRO? Is it to report to the C- how do you think the optimal structure is? Yeah, it's, boy, I've lived that so many different businesses, right? It's, it's definitely different, but I can tell you like a couple of anecdotes from, you know, coming to asset watch and the onboarding. So I report to the CRO today. Now the CRO and asset watch doesn't have responsibility for the complete revenue cycle. A lot of that sits with the chief customer officer. It has appeared to the CRO and so I, I'd like to say in a lot of cases, it doesn't really matter the reporting structure. I mean, especially for a company R size, it's really about, you know, how you build those informal relationships and so I remember conversation with the chief customer officer during the interview process and he asked me a question, how do, how can I be sure that even though you're reporting over here to the CRO that you're going to be able to give my organization enough attention and make sure you're not over prioritizing the sales side of things. And the way, and the way I thought about it was, you know, as, as RevOps leaders, we're really accountable to the revenue process itself and to the company and not to any one individual. So that's why like really tried intentionally to have a strong relationship with even the CFO. And I have very open and transparent conversations with, with my boss about the things that I'm doing that may not apply directly to his team and his priorities. But as long as I'm able to explain how, like this all stitches together and how, you know, in the long term, this is something that he should care about, then it works. So I've reported in the CFOs before CLOs. I would say the CFO reporting relationship is really important for RevOps if the company is planning in the near term for some kind of an event, right? Because RevOps plays a huge role in the diligence process and being really closely connected to the CFO and the finance organization, whether that's a potential acquisition or IPO, I think it really gives RevOps that level of appreciation and context for how all these things matter. Yeah. I think you're, the main point I think you're making is, regardless of what your exact reporting structure is, your accountability is to the overall revenue process and serving all of the team. That's right. Right. And the company is a whole and the shareholders and the board and everyone else. So it's to me, you know, elevating the role of RevOps in the industry is one of the primary drivers and reasons that I want to do this podcast. Because I think, you know, quite often, the RevOps people are the smartest guys in the room. And they're the ones that are able to see across the entire spectrum, not just like in marketing, for example, like I see things from a marketing perspective. That's my job. But being able to have a revenue operations person be very like, okay, well, this is your perspective. I acknowledge and respect it. This is the sales. This is the finance. And here's what we can all do together. I think it's a really, really excellent vantage point and very strategic and necessary for any business. So it's awesome. I'm sure that I'm sure that you are highly, highly valuable at asset watch for doing that exact thing and they're lucky to have you. So two months in, but we'll see. Things are looking good so far. That's wonderful. Well, clearly you're at the top of your game. So my last question for you today is how do you stay there? What do you do to keep yourself in strategic RevOps shape? Wow. So I think one of the, one of the hidden superpowers of RevOps is the ability to balance the tactical day to day execution with the ability to look longer term. And so one of the things I've always tried not always successfully, but always tried to do is at this point in the year. So we're right in the middle of our, of our second fiscal quarter of the year is really thinking about next year and how are the things that, whether it's hiring for different positions on the team or things like capacity planning, pipeline targets, like how do we set ourselves up so that we're not caught flatfooted at the end of this year when, when, when next year starts. And that really I think is where the alignment comes into play even more with some of those senior executives. And you know, as an example, unfortunately, been in the case where we look at say our sales hiring and how many AEs that we need to make our, our number. And we haven't really been very intentional about what are our targets look like for next year. And how do we work with FPNA on the long term plan because most people in RevOps know that a sales rep that you hire today is probably not going to be productive until six to nine months from now. And so all that has to be built into the budget and, and the plan. And I really, as part of that, I really try and get into the brain of like our senior sales leader in terms of how's he, how's he looking at the market and what's he worried about in terms of, you know, is, is the TAM going to run out in six to nine months and what signals are we looking for there. And so the more I can be a thought partner and an advisor to those folks and, and really keep my eye on what's happening in, in nine months versus just what's happening this week or, or next month, I think that's where that's kind of separates really effective revops professionals from people who are really just focused on execution and, and responding to requests. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Mike, for being willing to come on this podcast today and, and helping us understand what a, a very like strategic revops person thinks like and some of the things that are the most important and I wish you all the best like an asset watch and again, they're lucky to have you. Yeah, now it's been fun. Thanks, Amy.