Juhi Palat, Director of Sales Operations at Velo 3D, on falling into Salesforce by accident, why she thinks early-career remote work is a trap, and what most people get wrong about the CRM everyone loves to hate.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Chapters
- 00:00 — Meet Juhi Palat
- 01:41 — The barista job that taught efficiency
- 06:45 — A hospital asset system full of misspelled records
- 09:57 — Teaching herself Salesforce at a Massachusetts startup
- 11:52 — Three people, New York, and the RevOps fundamentals
- 15:51 — Why forecasting accuracy became the specialty
- 20:50 — The case for moving to a tech hub
- 23:14 — In defense of Salesforce
- 27:07 — Headless CRM and what comes next
- 29:16 — Last call: Big Sur, without the camping
Meet Juhi Palat
Juhi Palat is Director of Sales Operations at Velo 3D, a metal additive manufacturing company. She lives in Los Angeles, works with a lot of engineers, and arrived in revenue operations by a route almost nobody plans.
She majored in biomedical engineering. She has never held a formal Salesforce certification. Her first real exposure to the discipline she now leads came from being irritated by a badly maintained asset database in a hospital.
Asked the question every Tiki Bar guest gets first, what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer was honest:
Honestly, I had no idea. I majored in engineering, so clearly something to do with math and science. And now I'm at a 3D printing additive manufacturing company. So I guess things come full circle. I work with a lot of engineers. But yeah, I had no idea. Just kind of fell into it. And I ask a lot of RevOps people and they kind of say the same thing.
That last observation is worth sitting with. The path into revenue operations is rarely deliberate, and the people who end up running it tend to arrive from adjacent technical work rather than from sales.
The barista job that taught efficiency
Her first job was as a barista in high school. She describes it as an unusually good first job, and the reasons she gives are more specific than nostalgia.
What's really interesting about working in a coffee shop that people don't understand is you have to memorize all these combinations of drinks. So there's a lot of memory involved in that. And there is a matter of speed and efficiency also, right? You need to get through all these orders in a timely fashion.
Memory and throughput under time pressure. She draws the line to her current work directly: RevOps is fundamentally about making sure things run efficiently, and the habit of holding a lot of detail while moving fast transferred.
She also mentions being the barista who experimented with combinations nobody had asked for, making banana lattes before banana lattes were a thing. The instinct to modify a system rather than simply operate it shows up again later.
A hospital asset system full of misspelled records
After George Washington University, where she chose biomedical engineering partly because a friend was in the program and the classes looked interesting, she went to work in a hospital's biomedical engineering department.
The hospital ran an asset management system for tracking medical devices. The software was not good.
It's crazy because things would be misspelled, things would be all wrong. And I was just like, how would you find anything in here? How would you make reports, how can you do future planning? How can you assess anything with this software when all the data's wrong?
This is where the career actually starts. She was hired to work on medical devices and found herself more interested in the database that tracked them than in the devices themselves.
I was so much more interested in that than what was actually going on in the hospital. So I knew that I kind of needed to make a pivot.
Anyone who has spent time in revenue operations will recognize the reflex. The problem that grabs you is not the work the org thinks it hired you for. It is the state of the system underneath it.
Teaching herself Salesforce at a Massachusetts startup
The pivot was a small startup in Massachusetts that had just started using Salesforce. Nobody trained her. She learned it because the team kept running into limits.
It was all really organic. We would be like, wouldn't it be nice if we could do this without clicking these buttons? Right. And then I would be like, I think that's possible in Salesforce. Then I went and researched it and then built it.
Within a short time she was effectively administering the instance for the whole company, with no formal training and no certification. That gap mattered later. When she started applying for roles in New York, the missing admin license meant she was not getting callbacks.
These companies were like, okay, that's great. You love Salesforce and you've used it at one job, but this is your first job.
She notes that the Salesforce interest arrived before the RevOps interest, which she describes as slightly backwards from how most people tell the story.
Three people, New York, and the RevOps fundamentals
Eventually one company called back. Her first New York boss, someone she is still close friends with, made a straightforward offer: this will be a lot of work, but if you work hard it will be worth it. She took it and moved.
The team was three people. All three knew Salesforce. The other two also knew RevOps properly, which produced a fast and useful humbling.
I honestly thought I was really great at Salesforce. And then I got to this job and I was like, wait, I don't know anything.
What followed is the kind of career step that is hard to engineer deliberately: a small team, a manager willing to teach, and exposure to every function rather than one narrow lane.
He taught me the fundamentals of RevOps, all of the different functions, all of the different hats that you wear. And he got me experience in every single thing.
She also names what surprised her most, which is how much of revenue operations sits outside the CRM entirely. Other tools, other parts of the stack, a whole surrounding ecosystem she had not known existed.
Why forecasting accuracy became the specialty
Asked which part of operations felt like the most natural fit once she was past the pure Salesforce work, her answer was immediate: forecasting, and specifically forecasting accuracy.
I was really interested in how people knew that a deal was gonna come through and how to accurately predict what you're gonna close at the end of the quarter. That was really fascinating to me.
On the relationship between operations and the sales team, she is direct about what separates good operators from the rest:
The best RevOps people are the ones who can work really well with people in sales and listen to them and listen to their feedback and kind of be able to toe that line between taking in the feedback that's valuable, but also saying, okay, this is not something that's gonna happen.
She cannot imagine a version of the job where you are not talking to salespeople constantly. The listening is not a soft skill bolted onto the analytical work. It is how the analytical work becomes useful.
The case for moving to a tech hub
Asked what advice she would give someone starting out, she flagged in advance that it might be unpopular. It is the strongest opinion in the episode.
There's a lot of remote roles out there. And I think it's easy when you're out of college now to just get sucked into one of these remote roles, be in your, live in the state that you're used to. Live in your little bubble. And that's great, but I think if you want to make big moves, you have to take big risks.
Her argument is not about productivity or collaboration. It is about proximity to people.
When you're young and you're in these hubs where there's a lot of people who are in tech, you meet a lot of other people and you go to networking events and you get connected to people who are doing really cool things. And you just never know what's gonna fall on your lap through that way.
She names San Francisco and New York as the two biggest hubs, with Austin quickly catching up to third. Her own career is the evidence. She built it in New York tech, then moved to Los Angeles to sit closer to a San Francisco-headquartered company after two years of working remote from the East Coast.
It was a really crazy decision, but I think it was worth it.
In defense of Salesforce
The second contrarian position, and the one Kevin remembered from a dinner conversation, is that Juhi defends Salesforce in a market where criticizing it is the default.
People love to kind of hate on Salesforce because they are just the big dog in the space. Like they've owned the space for a really long time. I think salespeople always look to quickly bash Salesforce because they just don't want to do data entry and things like that.
Her counterargument comes from breadth of exposure rather than loyalty.
The truth is, when you work with tons of different software, Salesforce is probably one of the best. You can customize it to anything that you need. And it's always adapting.
She does not claim it is beyond criticism. Asked whether there is room for better tools, she says of course. Asked whether she has seen anything better, she says probably not, and immediately labels that as opinion rather than verdict.
The observation she closes on is the interesting one for anyone working in this market:
A lot of RevOps people would never defend anything except Salesforce. But here and there you get different opinions on that.
Headless CRM and what comes next
On where revenue operations is heading, she raised headless CRM without prompting, and her reaction to it is mixed in a way that reads as honest rather than diplomatic.
It kind of scares me to be honest, but I do think that's where things are slightly going.
She is genuinely optimistic about AI changing the discipline, particularly for work that used to require data scrapers and manual assembly. She is equally clear that a great deal of manual work will remain, and treats that as part of the job rather than a failure of tooling.
One smaller point about her own development is worth pulling out, because it is unusually practical. She has shifted to asking for feedback in advance rather than waiting for it.
When you proactively ask for feedback, you're not waiting until something happens where you have to course correct. I think you have to be in a mature state of mind to proactively ask for feedback, but I think it's really good.
Last call: Big Sur, without the camping
Every Tiki Bar conversation closes with the same question: one thing you find yourself recommending to everyone.
Juhi is currently working her way through California, and her answer was Big Sur, with a specific hack attached for anyone who wants the experience without either camping or paying resort rates.
Alila Ventana, which is like a super exclusive resort, they have a glamping option, which is not very expensive at all. It's just the price of a normal hotel. You're in the woods and you're in nature, but you have these nice bathrooms and all this stuff, and you're still in this resort.
Mentioned in this episode
- Velo 3D — metal additive manufacturing company where Juhi is Director of Sales Operations
- George Washington University — where she studied biomedical engineering
- Salesforce — the platform she taught herself, and defends
- Big Sur, California
- Alila Ventana Big Sur — the glamping option she recommends
About the guest
Juhi Palat is Director of Sales Operations at Velo 3D, based in Los Angeles. She came to revenue operations from biomedical engineering, taught herself Salesforce at an early-stage startup, and built her career in New York tech before moving to the West Coast. Her focus areas include forecasting accuracy, CRM architecture, and the working relationship between operations and frontline sales.