RevOps Shouldn't Be SalesOps in Disguise

Sean Lane 0:02 Today's episode is sponsored by the DevOps experts at full cast with me is their Head of Customer Success. Tyler Simon's Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does full castes go to market planning platform help Reb ops teams achieve these types of goals. Well, forecast lets Tyler Simons 0:20 you build better territory so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue. Sean Lane 0:32 That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today. And I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that? You Tyler Simons 0:41 must get rid of the spreadsheets. Because spreadsheets create lag and errors with forecasts planning and updating happen automatically, all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go to market plan changes, which you know what they happen all the time forecast has your back. Sean Lane 1:08 Alright, you got me convinced? Where do I learn more about forecast, our Tyler Simons 1:12 website forecast.io. Sean Lane 1:28 Hey, everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Shawn Lee. So there's something I've noticed, there are some teams called revenue operations. But when you pull back the curtain just a little bit, it's really just sales operations in disguise, maybe with some added responsibilities or additional internal stakeholders. Reb Ops is often viewed as the silver bullet to siloed decision making inconsistent data sources. But you can't expect a perfectly cohesive operation simply by naming an organizational structure. If sales is still the dominant voice in your go to market planning and execution, you're missing out on the potential benefits of a truly cross functional revenue Operations Group. teams often don't achieve this ambitious cross functional state because it's hard. When you have multiple internal stakeholders, it's harder to prioritize work across all of them. It's harder to move fast when you have to stop and consider what a decision in marketing might mean for sales or the ripple effects of a new sales process and customer success. Leader after leader on this show has told us that cross functional approaches are better. And that's what the best go to market teams need. We as operators are uniquely positioned in our organizations to build, strengthen and maintain these cross functional relationships. Were the central connectors of our companies. So how do you develop the right types of relationships beyond sales to pull this off? That's what we're going to explore in this episode. We're gonna go function by function with all of the key internal customers that aren't sales to find out. Ready? Let's go. First up marketing. There are so many unique opportunities, and Rob opts to partner with marketing and CMOS turned to operators more and more as that trusted advisor to help them run their teams. And not just a reactive resource, but a proactive partner. They want us to bring them data interpret what it means or at the very least provide a hypothesis. Marketing is also often the closest partner to sales when it comes to go to market execution. So Reb ops teams have to be trusted liaisons between those two groups. When sales comes to the table with one version of the truth and marketing with another Reb ops has to act as the unbiased objective party. It's also important to help marketing strengthen its relationship with groups outside of sales. It's not just about marketing and sales. You can't just be focused on acquiring new customers. functions like customer marketing, or digital customer experience require extensive cross functional support. And oftentimes Reb ops can demonstrate the art of the possible to these groups. Maybe you can point out ways that a marketer might be able to use a customer's action inside of your product to trigger a targeted campaign just for that role. Sometimes just showing people the options that are available to them can be the catalyst that they need. If you're looking for a list of potential ideas of how Reb ops might be able to work with marketing, here's a few more for you. You can work on determining your ideal customer profile. You can build firmographic scoring, you can build behavioral scoring, so Things like intent signals for what prospects are likely to buy your product. You can work on lead distribution speed to lead, you know, set an SLA for the marketing team on the reaction time to those leads. campaign planning, campaign forecasting campaign execution, marketing automation platform work, whether it's design or administration, marketing, spend and budgeting. Those are all a great list of ways you can get started to partner closely with your marketing customers in your organization. Okay, that's it for marketing. Let's move on to customer success. You could also think of this for any professional services team that you have as well. In CS NCS, a lot of times Reb ops, and its standard definition includes ces as an internal customer for robots to serve. But post sale teams frequently get the least attention compared to their sales and marketing counterparts. It's understandable, growing companies tend to focus on securing revenue first before spending time and resources on how to keep that revenue. If you want to go back check out episode 43. From this podcast with a manual scholar from toast, she saw this progression in her career when she went from a sales leader to being a CS leader. Leaders like Immanuel Kant make their visions or reality without a robotic partner at their side. Don't make the mistake of just prioritizing sales and marketing over all your post sales teams. Whether it's onboarding customer success, professional services, ops partners can drive enormous value for all of these teams. Okay, let's give you a few examples of ways that robots might work with yes groups. You can work on designing the customer journey, things like handoffs, roles and responsibilities, communication between teams, you can work on customer health scoring, you can work on renewal and retention analysis, help out with Voice of the Customer design and for further analysis. Work on things like capacity planning and book of business design. So what makes up an ideal book of business for a CSM? And how do you manage that across your entire business? Those are some ways that you can partner with those CES and post sale teams within your organization. All right. That's it for CES, we've got three more non sales partners to go in 30 seconds. This episode is sponsored by full cast a company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top forecast automates common go to market activities like territory, rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations was forecast say goodbye to go to market planning headaches, and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about forecast today by visiting forecast.io. Okay, welcome back. Let's get back to those internal partnerships. Before the break, I talked about marketing and customer success, two of the most common partners to a Reb ops group that aren't sales. Now I want to talk about three maybe slightly less common, but just as critical partners. Next up product. How many times have you been in an important meeting with strategic go to market partners and product isn't even in the room? You might not have even stopped to question it before. But looking back at one of those meetings now isn't it kind of absurd? Even if from a reporting standpoint, your team doesn't formally support the product organization at your company. It's critical that you as a DevOps group build strong relationships with the product team. First, there's so much that we as operators can learn from our colleagues in product and engineering. ops teams are the product managers of the company itself, so we can borrow from how they run their teams, and help our own teams improve. Also, this partnership is critical to maintain alignment between product and the rest of the go to market teams. They should be able to leverage the vast amount of data available in the product teams across all your different revenue teams. This is especially true if you have any sort of product lead growth environment. If your company leverages its product to drive initial adoption, for example, there is a treasure trove of data available to help your revenue team succeed. Your job as an ops person is to help make that data accessible, relevant and actionable. If you find yourself in a situation where interactions between Reb ops and product have not been the norm. Maybe you can also then just seek out creative ways to get in front of that product audience. One example a way I used to do this was every Friday at Drift we had a company Show and Tell meeting where every function presented something that they had recently shipped show Intel makes sense, right? We knew as an ops team that this was an opportunity to get in front of our product team. And we were always really thoughtful about the message that we presented when our team had a moment to present, you have to take advantage of anytime you get with those product stakeholders. And so we took advantage of that company wide forum as one of those opportunities. Lastly, if you work in a company where your customer yourself have your own product, you have a unique opportunity to shape the future product development itself. You are customer number one, provide feedback, offer suggestions, and then hold your product team accountable to making things better. If you're looking for ways that you might partner with your product team, here's a few ideas. Again, partner led growth motions, maybe you can work on surfacing product usage data to your customer facing teams, you can work on matching the role specific users within the product to specialized campaigns. And like I said, you can provide feedback on your company's own product. Okay, that's it for product up next, finance. Now, finance is undoubtedly one of the closest cross functional partners for Reb ops. For everything from annual planning to comp designed to budgeting, it's important that you go out of your way to form a trusted partnership with your finance counterparts. Someone organizations have Reb ops teams that report directly into the CFO or part of a G and a function. So the relationship might already be inherently built into the reporting structure of the company. When this isn't the case, that makes it all the more important to seek out opportunities for that collaborative relationship with finance, you can do this by including them in some of your routines that the operating team has run, you can allocate budget with them for things like investing in your tech stack, you can lean on them as a sounding board for business forecasting. And you have to be in lockstep with them for all things about designing your operating plan, and variable comp, you simply just can't run the business if finance and ops aren't on the same page. So if you're looking for more examples of ways that you can work with finance, here are a few builds your company's operating plan, capacity and hiring, planning, comp design techstack, budgeting, deal desk work, any sort of bookings, policies, rules of engagements that you might have, and everything that's involved in the order forms, billing and subscription management of your company and your customers. Okay, that's it for finance. Last but certainly not least, HR, HR, talent, people ops, whatever you call them. When you're looking around your organization for other teams that are faced with a broad charter of responsibilities, just like rub ops, look no further than your HR or talent partners now do the nature of their work. Both ops teams and HR teams are usually the first ones to know sensitive information, we're often working hand in hand with them behind the scenes to ensure a good experience for all of the other employees and accompany. They've got the same internal customers we do. So we should spend time with them. If a sales rep of your company is struggling, and it's about to go on a performance plan, you and the HR business partner need to be in lockstep on how that plan will be delivered and measured. Let's say you're making a big hiring push, being aligned with your recruiting team about every single hire and the funnel that you're building for those hires is critical. If you're looking for projects that might be relevant for your partnership with HR or talent, here's a few for you. As I mentioned, hiring, planning, performance management, new hire, onboarding, as well as onboarding, any sort of any sort of performance review frameworks and succession planning. Alright, that's it for HR. Now, as you look back at all the different partnerships that I've talked about, you could argue that some of the extra efforts that I've outlined in this episode might be viewed as being outside of the core job description of revenue operations roles, and you might be right. But that's only the case if you want to be an average operator. Everything in this episode is about setting your team apart, and setting your company up for the incremental successes that will come as a result. Now, I've said this before, I do worry sometimes that the charter of revenue operations might be getting too broad, and that we're setting operations folks up for an impossibly tall task. But instead of thinking about managing an overwhelmingly large laundry list of individual relationships, consider this alternate perspective. Reb ops teams aren't there to say Complete to seek out new efficiencies on the path to revenue. We exist as well to serve as a center of excellence, a role model for all varieties of operational efficiency. Think about that, a center of excellence. Each cross functional interaction you have is an opportunity to be an ambassador of that efficiency to the rest of the company. Every team in the company, not to mention your customers will get better as a result. All right, thanks so much for listening to this episode of operations. If you liked what you heard, make sure you're subscribe to our show, you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. If you learn something from today's show, or from any of our episodes, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts six star reviews only. Alright, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Today's episode is sponsored by fool cast your go to market planning platform. If you've ever spent hours or days building territory and quota plans only to have them be out of date. The second the reps hit the street, you need to check out forecast. With forecasts you set intelligent rule based policies that automate all of the time consuming manual tasks that hit Reb ops teams throughout the year. with virtually no effort operations will always seamlessly align with your plan. Learn more about forecast today by visiting forecast.io