Thurman Sneed is Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, where he leads global sales, customer success, revenue operations and marketing. He began his career as an auditor and CPA at Arthur Andersen and moved into FP&A before a CIO asked him to lead a CRM implementation out of the finance organization — his entry into go-to-market operations. He went on to build and run GTM operations at Novell, NetIQ, Intralinks and Micro Focus, and served as SVP of GTM Operations at Sierra Wireless. At Marigold he led revenue operations, then global enterprise professional services, production services and customer support as COO of the services business, before stepping into the CRO seat following Marigold's sale of its enterprise software business to Zeta Global. He holds a Master of Professional Accounting and a BBA from The University of Texas at Austin and completed Harvard Business School's Program for Leadership Development. His view that RevOps should pay for itself every year, and that the RevOps career now leads to the CRO seat rather than COO, anchors his conversation on the LeanScale Podcast.
“Numbers connect everything for me. And if you were an accountant, you'd understand what I'm talking about. You want things to balance. You also want a true return.”
“If we have a finite amount of money to spend, let's not necessarily peanut butter spray that money, but let's aim it at something very specific.”
“As opposed to saying I need a team of 10 or I need a team of five, I first start with I need a skill set that can help us do A, B, C, and D. And then I build a team from that perspective.”
“It's not just a RevOps line item in the P&L anymore, which is exciting, actually.”
“If you haven't invested in RevOps, RevOps should be able to pay for themselves annually.”
“It was kind of scary to be honest with you. I had to call some people. It's like this guy's asking me to effectively change my career. All I know is finance.”
“It was more fun helping people hit a quota than being on the dark side, so to speak.”
“When a door opens, five more open for you typically.”