Getting Started in RevOps Part 2: Internal Process Evaluation
By: Matt Solomon
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August 2, 2021
In part 1 of this series, we discussed beginning your strategic operations journey by building your customer journey map. For the second part of this series, we will discuss how prioritization and strategic planning around the customer journey are essential to executing on impactful projects for your customers and go-to-market team. RevOps is a relatively new role within SaaS businesses and even without a full-time revenue operations leader, you can begin to run these processes.
Internal Functions, the second in our series highlighting how to get started with Revenue Operations.
How RevOps translates into the customer journey
Once you’ve established your customer lifecycle within your go-to-market team, it’s time for your RevOps function to identify and prioritize internal projects to improve alignment between all departments. Understanding the gaps in your GTM is essential for RevOps, as they will need to work with the functional leaders to fill in those gaps with processes and/or technology.
In addition, centralizing the ownership of these gaps and connections with the RevOps function enables GTM leaders to focus on their specific functions while knowing that RevOps will act as an advocate for processes across the entire workflow.
Working cross-functionally with the go-to-market teams
Your RevOps team needs to be able to effectively interface with each function and “speak the language” of each department/team while simultaneously creating one unified workflow that everyone can understand. To achieve this, RevOps leaders need to know how to ask questions and communicate effectively with leaders so they can frame the answer to, “What’s in it for me?” for each team.
For example, the sales to customer success handoff is essential for creating a successful client relationship, but often the sales team’s incentives end at the close of a deal. Understanding each team’s incentives gives your RevOps team perspective on how they can more closely associate processes with success metrics.
When talking to functional leaders, be sure your RevOps team gains an understanding of the following:
- How is the process supposed to function currently?
- Are there situations in which the processes do not get followed? If so, why does that occur?
- What information do you need to be successful and are you currently getting that information?
- Which manual parts of the process are you not incentivized to complete? Which distract you from your goals?
Answering these questions for each team will help RevOps understand why gaps occur and how they can create alignment and build bridges for all functions while removing overhead that distracts teams from the agreed-upon processes.
Creating a transparent project plan and schedule
After consolidating business requirements, the RevOps team should look across all revenue-driving functions and determine which projects will have the biggest impact on the business. To help prioritize projects, create a prioritization matrix based on impact and effort and place each project in its respective quadrant, as in the below:
When defining “High Impact” projects, consider projects that fall within the following categories:
- Influences more than one department of the customer lifecycle
- Drives revenue growth for existing and new business
- Fixes critical process or issues that impact team productivity
- Creates transparency of KPIs for all stakeholders
Projects that fall outside of that range should be categorized into a lower-impact category.
The goal in making this matrix is not to devalue certain projects, but to ensure you are allocating your time wisely. Once you’ve categorized all projects you can start determining the scope of work for each, who needs to be involved, and if new resources/technology need to be sourced to accomplish them.
Align on priorities and get to work
Now that your RevOps team has evaluated and prioritized the internal processes, communicate these findings back to all key stakeholders to generate alignment on how the team will allocate its time.
Once consensus is reached, start executing! Use a collaboration tool like Monday.com or Wrike to give team members visibility into project progress. Send a monthly project update email to provide transparency on various deliverables.
With a solid understanding of both your customer journey and internal needs, you can now begin designing and evaluating the technology necessary to achieve your goals.
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