Revenue Operations can touch everything from sales and marketing to customer success and sales engineering. So how do you actually know if a candidate has the skills to own it?

Dan breaks down the skills interview he uses for RevOps leads and leaders, including the four areas he evaluates, how to use the STAR method to separate individual ability from team experience, and the questions that help you figure out whether someone can actually do the job.

If you’re hiring someone to own RevOps, this is the interview we recommend.

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How to determine whether a sales leader can reliably forecast revenue—or is simply hoping a few big deals save the quarter.

Dan explains why forecasting is the most important skill to test when hiring a VP of Sales or sales leader. If they can’t predict a miss months in advance, they won’t have enough time to correct it. They’re not managing toward quota. They’re getting lucky.

You’ll learn how to:

• Ask candidates about their forecasting methodology
• Recognize why MEDDIC and deal reviews aren’t complete forecasting strategies
• Test whether they can forecast using CRM data at scale
• Evaluate their standards for sales stages, close dates, deal values, and next steps
• Look for both bottom-up and top-down forecasting
• Uncover the sales techniques they’ve successfully implemented before

A sales leader who only knows the five biggest deals isn’t forecasting. Before you put them in charge of the number, make them prove they can see a miss coming—and know what to do about it.

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How to identify leaders who can build strong teams, confront low performance, and run the business through metrics—not gut instinct.

Dan breaks down the three leadership skills every interview should test: recruiting high performers without relying entirely on an internal recruiting team, thoughtfully managing underperformers out of the business, and using metrics to spot problems before they become layoffs.

You’ll learn how to:

• Determine whether a leader can personally recruit top performers
• Separate structured hiring processes from dangerous “gut instinct”
• Test whether they confront or tolerate low performance
• Evaluate how thoughtfully they manage performance and terminations
• Find out whether they understand their metrics—and act when results fall behind

A leadership candidate can give you all the right answers. The real question is whether they’ve actually done the hard parts of leading.

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How to stop hiring Customer Success candidates based on polished answers and start testing whether they can actually grow and protect an account.Dan breaks down how to design a practical Customer Success skills interview around three capabilities that matter most: building expansion pipeline, developing relationships across every level of an account, and working effectively across sales, support, and implementation.

You’ll learn how to:

• Test pipeline-generation skills through role-play
• Use Dan’s “five deep” framework to assess customer relationships
• Identify candidates who only operate at the user level
• Evaluate cross-functional collaboration using real examples
• Score each skill objectively and determine who clears the hiring bar

Hiring for Customer Success? Stop asking candidates what they would do. Make them show you.

We turned this approach into a practical Skills Interview Workbook you can use for your next hire.

Subscribe to the Walk & Talk newsletter using the link below, and we’ll send it your way.

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PART 1 | Dan's starting a new series on how to design your interview process by role — and it starts with the resume review, the step most leaders do on gut feel instead of a system. The title sounds harsh, but Dan walks through exactly why the rule exists: his method for weighing adjacent experience, his hard line on job hopping, and the five things he screens for before anyone gets a real interview. First installment of a series worth following closely.

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Job offer acceptance rates are falling—but it isn't just because the market changed.

Dan breaks down why candidates have become far more cautious, what they're really evaluating during your interview process, and how small mistakes like showing up late, changing the role, or poor communication create red flags that cost you great hires.

He also shares three practical ways to dramatically improve offer acceptance rates: humanize the interview process, use structured interviews instead of gut feel, and move fast once you've made a decision. If you're hiring sales, marketing, customer success, or executive talent, these principles can make the difference between landing your top candidate and losing them to another company.

Need help recruiting? Book a meeting with Dan

Most founders have a headcount problem. In this episode, Dan explains the hiring ratios he uses to evaluate startups from 2 people to 300+.

He breaks down when to hire go-to-market versus engineering, why finance should stay lean, and why administrative roles should rarely exceed 10% of your company. He also shares one of the biggest mistakes CEOs make during layoffs: cutting revenue-generating teams while keeping too much overhead.

If you're planning your next hires, scaling after a strong first half, or trying to build a more efficient organization, this episode gives you a practical framework for aligning headcount with growth.

Need help recruiting? Book a meeting with Dan.

If nobody on your team is hitting quota, should President’s Club disappear or is the real problem how you designed it?

Dan breaks down how he would build an H2 President’s Club that actually changes behavior. He explains how to set qualification thresholds when quotas are unrealistic, reward the biggest deal and strongest pipeline creators, give new hires a fair path to qualify, and include product, engineering, and customer success—not just revenue teams.

The goal is not to hand out a trip for doing what was already expected. It is to create an incentive people will rally around and reward the work that genuinely moves the company forward.

⁠Book a call with Dan⁠ to talk through your revenue or hiring situation.

Ending H1 behind plan triggers a lot of same-day, gut-reaction decisions about H2 — and Dan says that's the first mistake. Before anything changes, he walks through how to actually diagnose the miss: whether the quota was ever realistic, whether reps were properly supported, and whether the org generated enough of its own pipeline. Sometimes the H2 fix isn't hiring more reps. Sometimes it's admitting the spend is wrong somewhere else entirely.

Trying to figure out what H2 should actually look like? Book a call with Dan to talk through your revenue or hiring situation.

Had a strong H1? Before you decide where to invest for H2, find out where that growth actually came from. Dan walks through the five sources of pipeline every leader should be tracking, the ideal mix across them, and the one that gets skipped almost everywhere — executive-sourced pipeline. Getting this right now is how you plan H2 investment instead of guessing at it.

Want a second opinion on where to invest for H2? Book a call with Dan to talk through your revenue or hiring situation.