Creating a Winning Revenue Strategy with the VP of Operations at Nylas, Mallory Lee

The RevOps & ABM Alignment

In this episode Romeo is joined by Mallory Lee, VP of Operations at Nylas. Their platform gives developers universal access to email, calendar, and contacts providers through a single integration.

Mallory graduated in 2009, when the economy was in a dreadful shape. She was determined to stay in Indianapolis, and during that time one of the only growing companies in her region was ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce in 2020), where she began her career as a Marketing Business Analyst and stayed for 4 years, climbing up to the title of Marketing Budget & Operations Manager.

During her time in ExactTarget she learned Salesforce and had the chance to work on marketing automation projects right at the time when marketing automation started to gain ground.

After ExactTarget, Mallory held a variety of roles at Salesforce, Formstack, Bluebridge and Cheetah Digital until she found Terminus where she stayed for 3 years, climbed the ranks, and ultimately found her true calling in the customers journey specialty.

Mallory attributes the recent popularity of RevOps to the major advancements that we’ve seen in RevOps tech and the defining of the category. Her passion in RevOps is all about connecting the dots end to end, driving efficient growth, creating enterprise value and approaching growth in the right way.

When it comes to building a working GTM motion, Mallory mentions that the key need for any strategy is the need for clear and aligned communication between stakeholders. If your operations team is not on the same page, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. One of the caveats that Mallory has noticed is that in some environments the ones who hold the Salesforce key are the ones who dictate the rules, which is not a healthy environment.

Both Romeo and Mallory agree that early stage startups often try to implement a functional RevOps motion and fail due to rushing the process, often influenced by factors such as impatient investors, pressure from the market and incompetent leadership. This seems sustainable while investor money is coming in, but once that well dries up - the true damage of a misaligned GTM team shows.

Tune into the full episode to learn how to create a winning revenue strategy!

HIGHLIGHTS:
01:05 Mallory’s Career Beginnings
05:42 Finding Her Calling in Improving The Customer’s Journey
07:00 Why RevOps Became Popular
10:52 Quick History Lesson in RevOps
13:05 B2C vs B2B Revenue Strategies
17:45 Seeing The Big Picture in Revenue
19:17 Why RevOps & ABM Work Well Together

23:32 Early Stage Startups and Bad RevOps Models
27:52 Forrester and RevOps in 2023
33:10 How To Become a Winning RevOps Specialist
37:32 Shiny Object Syndrome

Connect with Mallory:
LinkedIn | Webpage

Connect with Romeo:

LinkedIn | Webpage