Apoorva Verma
The newfound popularity of a Revenue Operations function seems, at face value, pretty obvious. The economy is exceedingly tough, which has prompted companies to hire experts in operational efficiency. The idea is to, as the saying goes, “Do more with less.”
Unfortunately, RevOps largely find themselves doing less than they’d hoped.
We recently surveyed 100 RevOps professionals, and overwhelmingly, they told us that instead of tackling strategic work, they’re bogged down in the muck of daily tasks. They’re falling into ticky-tacky time traps that can’t fix the origin of their team’s inefficiencies. Of these 100 respondents, 66% said they spend too much time on data hygiene and 73% said they spend too much time on process adherence.
It was — and still is — quite obvious that companies are hiring with an overly rosy outlook on what they want their new hires to achieve. But, thankfully, there are ways for RevOps to start digging their way out of this hole.
Let’s have a look on how to open up your schedule and get the time you need. RevOps leaders must get back enough time on their day to day first before they’re able to even think about approaching the larger, meatier projects.
To do this, we recommend:
1. Fight ad hoc requests with a ticketing system
Email, Slack, paper airplanes, shouts from across the office: For many RevOps, these inputs are an overwhelming, multichannel swarm of wishes, requests and outright demands.
For that, half the battle is in the tracking. Even if your team doesn’t use sophisticated software to manage tickets, you can start untangling this mess in three take-charge steps.
We suggest the following:
- Consolidate tracking of requests in one easy-to-access place.
- Track the order (date and time) and urgency of each request.
- Develop an SLA for yourself based on what is being asked and by whom (say, a week or more for a business development representative’s wish versus within a day for executive requests).
Your ticketing system can be as simple as a shareable Google Sheet with three columns: Who are you? What do you need? What date is it? Just set expectations that if rules are followed, everybody wins. (Bonus: Codification here will most definitely help leadership understand your burden and make resourcing decisions later.)
2. Automate, automate and automate
McKinsey says that 30% of sales activities can be automated. Be on the lookout for opportunities to streamline tasks to free up bandwidth. Some of the most impactful areas include:
- Contact creation: If you or your team is still creating contact or lead records by hand.
- Reporting: If you have recurring reports that are consistently delivered.
- SLA management: If you’re monitoring leads not followed up on or stale pipeline.
- Data capture: If you’re manually enriching prospect contact or account data.
3. Train sales reps at a live event
Show — actually show — stakeholders how to run through your process in a live, synchronous event. Not over email, not on Slack, not asynchronously at all. Do it live and make it dedicated to this one process (say, an enablement session, not at an all-hands, etc.) You’ll see better engagement and get a chance to clarify potential ambiguities/answer any questions.
Be sure to show your team where they can access your documentation. Also, work with enablement on creating a knowledge base so that your team forms a habit to come back to the same place.
Remember that even after your live training, it’s important to train in one-on-one sessions (and to follow up to make sure the training you’re providing is actually landing). If there is a champion (whether organic or appointed), extend your reach by doubling down on enabling this person as much, and as often, as you can.
Loom videos, for example, are a great resource in that you can eventually build an evergreen library of step-by-step walkthroughs, explainers and the like — as well as find out if anybody is actually watching them.
4. Codify everything you possibly can
Codify every single one of your business-critical processes in an easy-to-access document and include step-by-step instructions. Those who ask you questions can be pointed to the documents and eventually will stop asking. Just be sure to be super clear and detailed.
In these online, readily accessible documents, you’ll want to include:
- Where to go: Which system to log into, where to go post-login.
- What to do: What fields to fill in, e.g., lead qualification notes.
- When to do what: Not just the order in which things are done but the situations in which it’s appropriate to do them.
- Who does what: Particularly important because many times, without a clear understanding of this, colleagues will assume somebody else will do the thing — and then nobody will do it.
- Why this process even exists at all: The business impact that will result from adherence to this process.
- Why this matters to your team personally: The step that gets missed most often in codifying processes. Clarifying what’s in it for the team. Say Marketing is handing marketing-qualified leads to sales and reps have a set of fields within the CRM record they need to fill in (based on direct engagement with the prospect) before moving it to a sales-qualified lead. This may seem like busywork to the rep, who wants to speed through to the next part of their day. Explain the personal impact of filling in these fields. It’s as easy as saying if Marketing has reliable data and more context around why the lead was qualified or disqualified, they can better focus their efforts to get the rep higher quality leads — aka more money — the next time around.
But it’s still important to remember that RevOps as a function wasn’t created so somebody would be around to constantly patch-up gaps in the revenue team’s way of doing things.
Sure, RevOps was created to fix workflows, but then … to go bigger. To generate revenue not by constantly playing defense but to develop novel solutions to important revenue-team-specific challenges.
Ultimately, we say: RevOps was supposed to be a creative function all along — and, we think, with a little bit of guidance, and a little bit of dedication, it can be all RevOps (and businesses) hoped for and more.
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