Steve Dinner is VP of Revenue Operations at Owner.com, the all-in-one growth platform for independent restaurants. A self-described 'accidental' RevOps leader, he came up through sales development — running multiple BDR teams as a second-line leader and inheriting the RevOps function while still running the BDR org — and used Salesforce and operating cadence to make himself a better BDR director. Over roughly a year he rebuilt his team around agile and structure rather than headcount: he runs a high-output RevOps function with zero in-house admin or developer FTEs, sourcing specialist Salesforce talent and agencies on demand and onboarding them through a documented course so they're productive on day one. He organizes his team as product owners over segments of the customer journey and is an early, aggressive adopter of LLMs for Salesforce development, QA, and quota-setting.
Steve Dinner on why the two-week sprint is finished, the three tracks and two gates replacing it, the 29:1 RevOps ratio he had to right-size, and why an LLM should manage your CRM like a code base
Steve Dinner on running a high-output RevOps team with zero in-house admins or devs — agile, structure, specialist contractors, and AI
“Okay, we need to be anti-dogmatic here about what we're going to hold on to and what we're going to throw away.”
“So I'm really at the point where I'm looking at it and I'm saying the build is super cheap now.”
“But in general, I think the value of your planning system and the value of your testing system just went up and you have to now invest a lot more heavily in your effort there.”
“What is the likelihood that this can hurt anything or cause any permanent damage?”
“I'll look over and I'll see a BDR director who's got a Claude artifact that looks just like something that I deployed that's custom for a different use case.”
“And we've just spent years telling them that if they didn't adapt and learn to use this technology, they were going to end up jobless.”
“The concept should be that you want to be really rigid about your business logic and any of the plumbing, and you want to be really experimenting with ways to democratize your experience layer.”
“There was no real AI jobs apocalypse. Everybody just works longer, harder, saw that they could capture more territory.”