Turning customer insights into revenue

Christine Maxey was the Director of Revenue Operations at LeanData when she gave this talk at our Revenue Operations Summit, Austin, 2025. She's now the Director of Revenue Operations at NVIDIA.

About a year ago, I found myself at a crossroads. Pipeline was drying up, deals were taking longer to close, and the market felt... different.

Sound familiar?

Instead of panicking, we made a strategic pivot that would fundamentally change how we approached revenue. We shifted from pure revenue generation to revenue protection.

But here's where it gets interesting. This year, we took that protection playbook and transformed it into something even more powerful: a systematic approach to expansion.

Today, I want to share exactly how we did it, and more importantly, how you can implement these strategies in your own organization.

The evolution from protection to expansion

Let me start with something that might surprise you. When I talk about customers, I'm not just referring to the companies that buy our products.

I'm talking about everyone my team serves daily: sales, product, marketing, you name it. This broader perspective on who our customers are has been crucial to our success.

As ops professionals, we share this common thread: we're driven by making other people successful. It's what gets us out of bed in the morning, what keeps us troubleshooting at night, and what makes us constantly search for better ways to serve our internal and external customers.

When we initially developed our revenue protection strategy, we identified four key areas that would help us retain and grow our customer base.

I called them the four Ps: people movement, people intent, partnerships, and product. Yes, it's a bit random, but it stuck, and sometimes that's all that matters in ops, right?

These four pillars helped us weather the storm when times were tough. But as the market began to recover and customers started buying again, we realized something crucial.

The same framework that helped us protect revenue could be supercharged to drive expansion. We kept the foundation but expanded our thinking, our processes, and our results.

People movement: Your hidden goldmine

Here's a statistic that should make you sit up straight: if you have a good product with strong market fit, your past champions are three times more likely to convert. Three times. Yet most organizations are terrible at tracking where their champions go.

We look for several key signals when it comes to people movement. First, there are promotions, both lateral moves and upward mobility. Then there's the broader category of people changing companies entirely. Each of these movements represents either a risk to manage or an opportunity to capture.

Internal promotions: The double-edged sword

When someone gets promoted internally, it creates interesting dynamics. If they move up the ladder, congratulations: you potentially have a champion with more budget authority.

We've automated our response to these situations. The account manager gets an alert, we trigger an automatic gifting sequence (because who doesn't appreciate recognition?), and we flag it as a potential upsell opportunity.

Lateral moves require different handling. Your champion might be moving to a different department, which could mean two things. Either you're losing your primary advocate in their current role, or you're gaining an opportunity to expand into a new part of the organization.

We alert our CSMs immediately to understand both angles: who's replacing them and whether there's potential for expansion into their new area.

External moves: Risk meets opportunity

This is where things get really interesting. When champions leave for new companies, you're facing one of the biggest churn risks in the book. We've found that loss of champion is one of our primary reasons for customer churn. But here's the flip side: when that champion lands at a target company or prospect, it's pure gold.

We use tools like UserGems and Bluebirds to track these movements, combined with Sendoso for those thoughtful touches that keep relationships warm. But let me be clear: not every job change matters. Not every person who moves is worth tracking. The key is being selective and focusing on the people who truly championed your product.