RevRev Ep. 14 – Helen Calvin

January 27, 2021 | Written by Dave Duke

With a thirst for helping companies discover opportunities for improvement, Helen Calvin has been on a mission to help organizations thrive throughout her career. As the CRO at Jellyvision, her love for interviewing and hiring has shaped her employee development strategies and influenced the way she empowers the Jellyvision customer and revenue teams to pursue greatness. Tune in to the latest episode of Revenue Revolutionaries to learn more about Helen and the insights she’s gained throughout her career.

Episode Key Takeaways

1. Being insatiably curious is the best way to understand and serve customers – Helen shares her perspective on the importance of using curiosity to understand and serve customers. She stresses this by giving a couple of examples of questions you can ask to understand the customer’s mindset while keeping a pulse on the problems that are impacting the customer the most.

2. Think about the needs of your employees in order to effectively serve and retain customers – Helen believes the best path to retaining and growing customers is to think about customers through the lens of employees. The starting point for delivering value to customers and partners is through protecting employees. If employees are in go standing with the company organization they will serve customers well.

3. There is both safety and risk in the CRO role – The CRO role is pretty black and white for Helen as she clearly knows if she’s doing her job or not through the revenue metrics (the safety) that are used to run the business. She also knows that there is nowhere to hide (the risk) as the numbers speak for themselves. She predicts that CROs will start to take on more responsibility within organizations in the coming years. Aligning teams across the organization relative to revenue will become more important to ensure the functional areas and leaders are in lockstep and understand their role in the revenue equation.

4. If you’re not voting for yourself, the vote is unanimous – As Helen reflects on her relationship with her mom she encourages us to place bets on ourselves. “You’re in control of your future” she explains. It’s important that we all have faith that there will be brighter days in 2021 and to make that happen we need to take care of ourselves and each other to ensure that happens.

5. ‘Great’ likes to work with ‘great’ – Helen has made a point to focus on people development throughout her career to get the most out of her teams. This has been a key strategy for her to ensure that she builds the strongest team and culture. She believes in setting high expectations while creating an environment for autonomy to allow for people’s talents to shine through. Leaders must provide their teams with the right tools alongside high expectations to give them a chance to be great and work with others who have similar ambitions. 

MetaCX MetaBoom

Contact

MetaCX
830 Massachusetts Ave. Ste 1500
Indianapolis, IN 46204