After nearly 10 years in various RevOps leadership roles at LinkedIn, Rachel Krall recently transitioned into Strategic Finance—just as AI and digital transformation are redefining how business teams operate.
In this exclusive conversation with Go To Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Rachel shares what she’s learned, where she sees the future of RevOps heading, and why being technically curious is now just as important as being process-savvy.
Whether you’re in ops, finance, product, or leadership, this is a can’t-miss conversation about the future of work, the evolving role of AI agents, and the people and processes behind successful transformation.
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy Cook: You’ve been at LinkedIn for a decade now. Tell me how your career has evolved over the years.
Rachel Krall: I started my career at LinkedIn in go-to-market operations—what we now call sales ops or RevOps. Over the years, I moved across multiple areas within RevOps and just recently transitioned into Strategic Finance about four months ago. So, while I’m new to finance, I spent nearly ten years in RevOps at LinkedIn in various capacities.
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Amy: How has your perspective on RevOps changed now that you’re looking at it through a financial lens?
Rachel: One of the biggest differences is how much the aperture widens in finance. In RevOps, I thought I had a solid grasp on the business. But stepping into finance made me realize how many other factors are at play, like the cost of our data centers or broader operational efficiencies I never had to think about before. That said, many of the core skills, like problem-solving and stakeholder management are incredibly transferable.
What stands out about RevOps is how customer-obsessed the function is. You’re always solving for the go-to-market teams. I’ve even started hiring folks from RevOps into Strategic Finance because they bring that problem-solving, customer-centric mindset that isn’t as common in traditional finance teams.
Amy: It really feels like RevOps is having a moment. Now that companies understand how critical it is, there’s some tension around where it should report—CFO? CTO? CRO? What’s your take?
Rachel: It depends on the company’s stage and goals. I spoke with one early-stage company that placed RevOps under the CTO because they were focused on scaling efficiently through technology rather than headcount. That made a lot of sense for them. At LinkedIn, one of my closest partners has been our internal productivity engineering team. That alignment between RevOps and the technologists building internal tools is becoming more and more essential—especially with the rise of AI.
Amy: So should RevOps teams become more like developers?
Rachel: I think so, yes. There are two themes I’m seeing. One is becoming more product-minded, not just managing processes but owning the product strategy for internal tools. I’ve built teams with business product owners, and I’m now hiring one for our financial tech roadmap.
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The second trend is citizen development with business teams building low-code or no-code tools themselves. We used Microsoft Fabric and PowerApps to build tools like forecasting dashboards that sync with OpenAI to analyze rep notes for sentiment. It’s early, but it’s powerful and very agile.
Amy: That reminds me of how reps forecast differently. Some inflate, others wait until the last minute. The idea of using AI to understand that and normalize it is brilliant.
Rachel: Exactly! Forecasting has always involved a lot of human-level adjustments based on gut feel. Now we’re starting to use sentiment analysis to flag patterns, like which reps are overly optimistic or pessimistic. At LinkedIn, we run both top-down and bottoms-up forecasts, and historically, the bottoms-up has been more “art than science.” AI is helping us bridge that gap.
Amy: Where do you see AI going in RevOps? Is it a job eliminator or a force multiplier?
Rachel: It’s evolving so fast, it’s hard to make hard predictions. I’m really excited about agentic technology—AI agents that perform specific tasks. . .
Click here for the full interview.
