What to do when the ops that got you here won’t get you there, with Jeff Ignacio

This podcast is brought to you by Cognizant. Cognizant helps businesses connect with their dream prospects by providing premium contact, company and event information, including firmographics, technographics, intent data, verified business emails, and verified mobile numbers. Hi everyone. I'm going to try something new this time around for this episode. I'm going to provide a solo episode. No guests. It's just going to be me and you hopefully listening. What I'd like to do today is go over a perspective or a couple of hypotheticals and scenarios where a revenue operations leader has to really think through very carefully around how to construct cadences, processes, basically the entire architecture of revenue operations in order to solve a business problem. And so I'm going to walk through just a couple of materials and a couple of examples today. And for those who are listening, you may not be able to exactly follow along, but let's just play out a scenario where you have a business and that business has been growing tremendously over the last couple of years. And one of the things you're noticing is that the growth of that business is starting to slow down. And the reason it's slowing down is because you have a couple of key issues that are coming up across the business that were once promising solutions for the business. So let's imagine that you had over the last couple of years, a rapid growth phase. You were growing because you had marketing teams, sales teams, CS teams building out, you know, their own strategies, their own tactics, and building the operations to stitch all that together between the operations, the tactics and the strategy. Sorry. And so, you know, what got you here is not necessarily what's going to get you there, where you want to go. So let's just think through, you know, if you're a marketing group, you brought in someone from, you know, marketing operations talent, if you're in sales, you brought in a sales operations talent, and they've built up a ton of processes, brought in a bunch of systems and help change, manage your organization to bring in these best practices, and so you were flying high for the last couple of years. And now you're getting to a place where you have decentralized technology, you have unclear decision-making frameworks across the groups, you might have teams building and not necessarily sharing the impact of what could happen upstream and downstream, so you have these ramifications that, you know, were once positive, but are now somewhat negative, right? Because now what you have is teams not working together, siloed decision-making, you have information that's sitting in pockets across the business, you have that siloed, fragmented data system set up, and ultimately you might have even systems that are redundant by nature. And so because of this redundant nature, you know, you're starting to create some ill feelings across finance and operations in the sense that, you know, we're spending way too much on technology. We have too many tools. We're, our teams are not working on a single pane. They're toggling between different applications all the time. And one of the things that I'd like to do is make sure that we, as a revenue operations and a business operations profession, are thinking with our North Stars and aligning organizations to the future state, and that future state is a world where, you know, you're continually breaking down silos, information's being shared across different groups. Your decisions are backed by data where possible. And hopefully the majority of your decisions are actually backed by data. And so as I move forward through my material today, I'm going to just share a couple of frameworks. One interesting thing that I think is useful is you want to have a root cause analysis framework. And that root cause analysis framework is essentially a way for you to think through, well, we have all this process, organizational and system debt that is bogging down our growth, and we've identified a couple of basically the usual suspects here, fragmented systems, data silos, integration gaps, decentralized governance, inconsistent processes, underutilized investments. And that is leading to a couple of organizational impacts. You have cross-functional misalignment, duplicative and manual workloads, idiosyncratic decision-making, and a lack of a shared model. And so, you know, when we think about the business a couple of years ago, it was a high performing vehicle, but just like an F1 car from five years ago, you know, you may not, you may, you might still be in the race, but you're not necessarily winning at the bleeding edge. And so you have to do a little bit of retooling to reduce the drag, to take off a little bit of weight and to make sure that you're, you know, increasing the traction, I'm not much of a car guy, but I can imagine some of these things would be great improvements year on year that could lead to that one degree edge to performing better in the new environment. And so as a RevOps group, we want to incorporate a couple of things. One is, you know, what is our strategic governance framework look like? How do we ensure that our roadmap is living and breathing and has the right items added onto it? And then that we have a framework and a process for submitting new ideas and vetting what should go on that roadmap. And I understand that trade-offs can happen all the time. Things go off the roadmap. Things can on the roadmap, maybe the project, it gets re-scoped downwards in nature. The second thing we want to do is bring in, you know, shared services or a center of excellence. Now, typically with a RevOps group in the early stages of a company, you have generalists. Those generalists are essentially Jack of all trades, Jill of all trades that can do a lot of different things. And as the group grows and expands, you start to bring in these specialists. Now the specialists, you know, you might bring in that skill set for different groups, but you don't necessarily need someone embedded in each specific group. So that's where a center of excellence or shared service can come in handy. And, you know, what I mean by these phrases, like a center of excellence is that you bring in the specialists who can somewhat act like an internal consultant to the business or to different functions, and they're bringing that capability and skill to these different groups. And that is what unleashes tremendous value because now you don't necessarily need to, you know, invest in one specialist in every single group. You just need one specialist across all these different groups. And that's, that's more scalable. And the next, you want to make sure that you're always evolving with the times. And I think for a lot of revenue operators, we're feeling a high level of anxiety with the fact that many of these tools are acquiring one another, becoming what I call these super apps. And then secondly, they're also baking in these new AI features. And you yourself might feel pressure because, you know, you're getting these top-down mandates. We have to have an AI strategy. So it's like many years ago, we had this, we have to have a mobile strategy or we have to have a cloud strategy. And now we're getting into this world where, you know, you have to have some sort of AI strategy. So these are some capabilities that I think as an ops org, we want to be able to unlock. And so having a framework in mind, it makes a lot of sense. And I've preached before the concept of the PEAS framework, P E A S. And that's where strategy and operations are like peas in a pod. And that stands for process, enablement, advisory and systems. But, you know, what does that really mean in nature? And so one way you can think about it is let's start with a governance structure. You want to make sure that you have the leadership and executive buy-in to, you know, what you're trying to accomplish as an org and so steering committee can be small or it could be cross-functional nature. You want to have a racy matrix attached to that steering committee. Who's responsible, who's accountable, who's a contributor and who's informed. And then you have a policy or process in place for, you know, what data you review and how decisions are made. You want the experts in the room. You don't want someone who's not an expert in particular initiative to make the call per se. And so you may want to even delegate that decision-making, but you want to make sure you write these rules out. Second is you want to make sure that you're project managing and not only project managing each initiative, you have a program in place for all these different initiatives. The larger your company, the more initiatives you're likely to have. The smaller your company, you might be only dealing with one or two projects at any one point in time. And, you know, I always coach that you need to think about rocks in a jar. You fill the jar with your big rocks first. Those are, you know, your big hefty migrations. Maybe you're implementing a new tool that you've never implemented before. You might have a vendor, a consultant or agency helping you with that. You don't want to have too many of those because you potentially set yourself up for failure. Then you fill it up with medium rocks and small rocks. But as a bigger company, you have, you have several initiatives. So now you're, now you're program managing. You're not project managing. You're program managing where you have a series of projects underneath, and you want to make sure that as an org, you're juggling all these balls in the air and you're doing it deftly. Then you want to have a decision framework. A decision framework, as I mentioned, you have an intake process for what projects go on your roadmap. You might do something as sophisticated as an effort impact matrix and that effort impact matrix could be weighted. You definitely want to have some sort of ROI attached to that decision framework. And, you know, when we think about as a revenue operations team, an ROI is essentially what is the net gain divided by the total cost and the total costs here, you know, on the denominator, you want to make sure that it's both direct costs and your indirect costs. You know, I'll get to that in a second. And then on the top of that, the numerator, that's going to be your net benefit, it's going to be your net gain minus your net cost, net gain could be something to the effect of labor savings. And that's probably the easiest one. And then when you think about an uplift, you know, are we uplifting revenue, are we increasing pipeline? You take those two estimates together and you should have a reasonable case for your return on investment. And then ultimately all your projects should be business led and outcome focused, not technology led. Right. You don't let the technology guide your strategy. It forms should follow function. And so when you think about, uh, every initiative that you have in place, that should be tied to a business goal, ideally you have some sort of OKR or a V2MOM framework where your goals are broken down and each initiative has to be tangential, if not directly applicable to any of those specific goals. Um, then you want to have, you know, three other pillars. Those three other pillars are going to be stakeholder alignment and risk mitigation. Second is going to be having a prioritization framework and resource orchestration. And then lastly is the KPIs and how do you measure success? So let's break one of those down in detail. So when we think about stakeholder alignment and risk mitigation, we want to make sure that we have the right operating cadences, the operating cadences can be somewhat tactical, but you also want to have your strategic operating cadences. And those are going to be with decision makers in the room that the decision makers in the room should be focused on what progress you're making per initiative, and that you want to make sure that you surface these risk areas. And lastly, you always, always want to make sure that you service these, um, you know, any requests. Um, and each initiative needs to have a single threaded owner. That means one person who's completely accountable to the success or failure of that project. That's what is going to drive results. Whenever you have a project that is cross-functional in nature, you introduce risk in that you might have dual owners, but you want to have one single threaded owner. And then you want to have an executive stakeholder could be your chief revenue officer, um, could be a VP of sales. Could be, you can even go to a level below and I think that's totally fine. And then in that second pillar, we're thinking about a prioritization framework. I mentioned earlier the effort impact matrix, but you want to make sure that the effort impact matrix sizes up the different initiatives that are basically being determined if they should go on the roadmap or not, once you determine which one should go on the roadmap, you need to attend, then take a look at the roadmap and do you have a room? If you don't have room, then you need to figure out how you're going to increase capacity, or you're going to have to make adjustments on any other items that are already on that roadmap. So for example, you might de-scope existing projects, you might push out certain projects. And when you're thinking about, um, the other coin, hopefully other side of the coin where you have some sort of, uh, investment, you can bring in a full-time headcount that'd be for a lot of revenue operators, ideal. Um, especially those who are operating with very lean teams, but if you don't have that, then, you know, agencies or contractors or vendors, probably the way to go, um, I don't think we're anywhere close to having, you know, an AI agent do the work of like an admin, um, at this time, but you know, who knows that could be wrong in a year or two. And maybe you have teams of agents working on a number of different things. The last pillar is making sure that you have the right KPIs when you're aligning your investment requests. So, you know, if you had a business thesis, um, sorry, business case template, what would that business case template look like? And I'll walk you through it. The one that I'm thinking through, you want to make sure that you're solving the right problem. So you could have a number of, number of problems. And one thing that I see what folks do is they list out 10 problems and now you're getting to a very convoluted business case, uh, because, you know, how do you solve for 10 problems with one solution? So try not to have compound problems when you're trying to solve a specific issue and tie it to some sort of metric that you're trying to improve. And the metric could be somewhere in your bow tie could be you're improving your lead to opportunity rate. You're improving your meeting held rate. You're improving your win rate. So you want to be a little bit myopic with which metric you're, you're solving for, uh, your baseline, then you want to have that metric baselined. So you have a, a before view of that metric, and then you have an outcome like after view. So it's kind of like a weight loss program. You're walking in at a certain weight. You need to, you know, put this initiative together, exercise, and you lose that weight and end up with your target, your target. So you want to have your baseline metric and your target outcomes. And then lastly, you want to make sure that you figure out, you know, what is a reasonable time to impact estimate? Does it take, you know, 90 days to get there? Will it take you a full year to be there? And I think, you know, that introspective honesty around, you know, the last time we launched a major initiative, it took three, six months to get off the ground. We didn't really see the data, uh, the improvement in our data for another 12 months. And I think it's okay to be very honest about that. You can try to accelerate it, of course, but you don't want to, you know, fool yourself into thinking that you're going to change things overnight. Um, so when you're thinking about these, you know, these problem sets you're solving for these initiatives. So for example, you might want to present a business case for bringing in a lead routing solution. You're bringing in a lead routing solution because maybe you have, uh, you have dropped the balls, right? You have like a hundred leads coming in for every hundred leads coming in. You have a two business day SLA and 30% of the leads don't get touched. Well, that's a big problem. So you want to start solving for your SLA. You want to start solving for high lead touch percentage versus leads coming in. You want to make sure that you are not dropping those balls. All right. So, so that's like an idea of like what kind of problems you could be solving for. And then, you know, that's really more about the governance framework about like what goes on your roadmap. And then late and then, and then after that, you're going to focus on how do you actually take the roadmap and then execute on it, this, this is where you're going to need an excellence, like an operational excellence framework. So you have your operating model, which is the operating model says something to the effect of, okay, it's on the roadmap, but now we need to fund these projects. We need to assign, you know, team members to them and we need to make sure that we set up status updates. You know, this is a six week engagement or an eight week engagement. We're going to get this off the ground. We want to make sure that we are very thoughtful around how often do we check in? Do we take the updates and apply them to the sprints? Or do we communicate in a separate message out to the executive team or to the go-to-market team? Um, next is you want to make sure that you're tracking your performance. So what's your Northstar metric for the project? And then what are the leading indicators that you're doing well? So when the project's ongoing, your leading indicator is going to be, you know, what's your work breakdown structure look like you're in phase one through phase five, you're in phase 1.1 versus 1.3, and you should have been at 1.5 by now, so now you're delayed, so, but you all, you want to be very, um, circumspective around, you know, where you are with your projects and you want to be able to show folks, you know, as a portfolio, you know, here's project one through five that we said we're committed to this quarter and here's how we're performing against each one of those different projects and it's going to at least convey to the org that, uh, you know, very honestly, uh, where you're, where you're behind and where you're ahead, uh, and then lastly, you know, you want to be able to change manage the org. So once you complete your projects, you are able to change behavior adoption with your sellers, your marketers are able to use those tools effectively. And that comes with having a change management process. Change management process is not just an office hours and a one hour training. It's around, okay, let's create reporting that shows how well we're adopting and how much, uh, and that adoption should then show, um, at least, Hey, look, we're, we're changing behavior because if you change behavior, that should technically drive results and that's, what's going to help you with your project unlock, you know, moving from that before metric, that baseline metric to that goal metric at the very end. Uh, so I know for those who are, you know, are, you know, listening today and thinking I have a lot of projects that I'm working on, I hope some of these lessons that I've conveyed today are actually super helpful to you. And if you've ever had any questions around, you know, how to manage complexity with a number of different initiatives at once, my door is always open. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn at any time, or if you're in any of the RevOps communities like RevOps Co-op, uh, you can ping me there separately as well. Thanks everyone.