Revenue Operations & Growth Topics
Revenue operations, sales pipeline management, and acquisition-focused growth. Includes sales analytics, pipeline management, revenue forecasting, and customer acquisition strategies. For post-sale customer success and retention, see Customer Success & Experience.
Sales Metrics and Key Performance Indicators
Covers the selection, design, interpretation, and operationalization of sales metrics and key performance indicators to measure and improve revenue generation, pipeline health, sales productivity, and customer retention. Candidates should be able to define leading versus lagging indicators and activity metrics versus outcome metrics, and construct a balanced metrics framework that aligns measurement to strategic objectives while avoiding perverse incentives. Core metrics include pipeline value and pipeline velocity, pipeline coverage, win rate, average deal size, average contract value, sales cycle length, conversion rates by stage, lead to opportunity conversion, quota attainment, forecast accuracy and bias, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, churn and retention rates, and representative productivity measures. Discussion should include how metrics vary by business model such as subscription software as a service, enterprise sales, direct to consumer, and channel models, and how to segment metrics by representative, territory, product, or customer cohort to surface meaningful insights. Practical implementation topics include clear metric definitions and ownership, data quality and governance, reporting cadence, target setting and thresholds, dashboard design and automated reporting, cadence reviews and root cause analysis, and how metric design influences coaching, compensation and incentive design, forecasting, resource allocation, and cross functional decision making. At senior levels expect to explain how to implement dashboards and data pipelines, establish metric driven routines, and redesign metrics to drive desired behaviors and strategic outcomes.
Customer Relationship Management and Sales Tools
Covers practical competence with customer relationship management systems and complementary sales tools used for account management and revenue operations. Candidates should be able to demonstrate hands on experience using platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot to log customer interactions, maintain accurate contact and account records, create and track opportunities, manage opportunity stages and pipeline health, and support forecasting. Expect questions about building and running reports and dashboards, using automation and workflows to reduce manual work, maintaining data quality and hygiene, importing and exporting data, and connecting customer relationship management data into account planning and sales strategies. Also include familiarity with user navigation and shortcuts, permission and role management, customizing fields and layouts, basic system administration tasks, common integrations with other business systems and business intelligence platforms, and how these tools drive customer insights and measurable outcomes such as retention, upsell, and pipeline velocity. Interviewers will assess both functional usage and strategic thinking about how to leverage tools to improve sales effectiveness, adoption, and account outcomes.
Account Expansion and Growth
Strategies, processes, and execution for growing revenue and customer value within existing accounts through upselling, cross selling, seat expansion, broader adoption, new use cases, and expansion into additional teams, departments, or regions. Covers how to identify signals of expansion readiness such as high product usage, new user personas, team growth, unmet needs, and workflow changes; analyze usage, customer health, and account data to surface qualified opportunities; quantify incremental value and return on investment for the customer; and build consultative, value based proposals, pilots, and packaging. Includes methods for sequencing and prioritizing opportunities using criteria such as revenue potential, implementation complexity, strategic importance, customer readiness and timing, implementation cost, and risk. Emphasizes cross functional coordination and handoffs between customer success, sales, product, finance, and channel partners, designing repeatable expansion playbooks, account mapping and stakeholder plans, objection handling and ethical selling that preserves trust, and training and enablement for scaling. Defines success metrics and measurement approaches including net revenue retention, expansion rate, churn rate, customer health indicators, attach rate, average expansion revenue per account, deal size, and expansion velocity. At senior levels, candidates are expected to design phased growth plans, bundle complementary offers to increase efficiency, account for company resource constraints, and document scalable processes that deliver measurable outcomes.
Revenue and Business Impact
This topic covers the candidate ability to connect revenue outcomes to broader business strategy and objectives, and to demonstrate concrete business results they influenced. Interviewers assess understanding of how Revenue Operations and go to market choices enable or constrain strategic goals, the financial and operational implications of different approaches, and how operational practices should evolve as strategy changes. Candidates should also be able to translate marketing and sales metrics into business impact by explaining attribution, return on investment, and key performance indicators such as revenue growth, retention, upsell and cross sell performance, customer lifetime value, and profitability. Finally, candidates are often asked to provide two to three specific examples of revenue outcomes they drove or influenced, with concrete numbers or percentages, the actions taken, the measurement methods used, and the causal link between activities and business results.
Sales Forecasting and Pipeline Management
Covers end to end management of the sales pipeline and the methodologies used to produce reliable revenue forecasts. Topics include pipeline stage definitions and opportunity progression, opportunity tracking and deal management, sales velocity and conversion metrics, and best practices for optimizing pipeline flow and coverage ratios. Requires knowledge of forecasting approaches such as pipeline based forecasting, historical trend analysis, rolling forecasts, rep driven and consensus forecasting, and bottom up revenue forecasting. Candidates should be able to discuss forecast accuracy metrics, root cause analysis for forecast misses, ways to improve forecast reliability, and common governance and reporting cadences. Also includes territory and quota planning, capacity and headcount forecasting, coordination with sales teams on expansion and cross sell opportunities, and handling pipeline complexity across products, geographies, and channels. Familiarity with customer relationship management systems, sales analytics and reporting tools, and examples of processes built to improve forecast accuracy and communication of pipeline risk are in scope.
Quantifiable Impact and Metrics Driven Achievements
Prepare to discuss your key performance indicators and business outcomes. At Staff level, focus on portfolio-level metrics: total revenue managed, year-over-year account growth rates, net revenue retention (NRR), upsell/cross-sell revenue contribution, customer churn rates, and NPS or customer satisfaction scores you've influenced. Highlight specific wins: accounts you've turned around, revenue expansion deals, or accounts you've scaled from startup to enterprise-level spending.
Account and Customer Segmentation and Prioritization
Covers strategies and frameworks for segmenting customers and accounts, tiering them for differential engagement, and prioritizing where to invest time and resources. Topics include segmentation criteria such as revenue, growth potential, strategic importance, industry, use case, maturity, geographic region, and behavior; designing tiered engagement models such as high touch, medium touch, and low touch; evaluating segments by size, growth, margin potential, competitive intensity, and strategic fit; allocating coverage and resources across segments; and defining trade off decisions to avoid under serving strategic accounts. Also includes approaches to make portfolio level choices about which account groups to pursue or deprioritize, how to scale engagement across many accounts, and examples of segmentation frameworks and the measurable business impact of portfolio segmentation.