Amara Johnson

Amara Johnson, VP Revenue Operations at Helix Health, shares lessons from automating deal desk operations and why some work should never be automated.

**On automation at Helix:** "We automated 60% of our deal desk. The other 40% is where the real work happens. That's where the relationship is, where the nuance lives."

**What they automated successfully:** "Anything administrative. Contract generation, routing to legal, initial redline templates. Anything that doesn't require judgment or customer context."

**What they didn't automate:** "Pricing negotiations. Terms discussions. Anything that involves a tradeoff. Those conversations still require a human who understands our business and the customer's reality."

**The discipline of knowing what not to automate:** "The temptation is to automate everything. The wisdom is knowing that 40% that you leave alone is actually the lever that moves the business."

**On building RevOps maturity:** "RevOps isn't about having the best tools. It's about having a clear process, automating the right things, and having people focused on high-judgment activities."

**For revenue leaders:** "Invest in your deal desk operations. It's not exciting, but it's where deals are won or lost. And don't automate everything—automate the parts that are blocking your teams from focusing on judgment calls."

**What's changed:** "Two years ago, we had three people doing deal desk work and we were a bottleneck. Now we have three people doing deal desk work and we're enabling 4x the capacity. That's the power of smart automation."