Building good revenue operations is not easy. Neither is house hunting.
With my time currently spent house hunting or learning about RevOps it got me thinking about the parallels between trying(!) to find a house and building good revenue operations in an organisation.
I am on the hunt for a house with a rather long list of requirements…oh, and it needs to fit within my budget and be located within a three-mile radius of my ideal location. Not much to ask is it? Well…
Actually, it’s proving to be a challenge.
I thought I had started out with clear objectives and priorities. But, I am quickly realising my ‘must have’ list cannot all be a priority because I’m getting nowhere. I have put together my learnings so far below.
Follow my advice on building good revenue operations
- Start with the end in mind
Before embarking on this journey, it was essential to understand where you want to end up. And are you also future proofing your decision and investment?
Buying a house is a long-term investment. Just like implementing best-in-class RevOps practices is an investment. It’s an investment in long-term success and scalability of a business and both requires some long-term thinking. What are the most important outcomes you want to achieve from this decision to invest in infrastructure? (whether it’s a house or RevOps!).
- Prioritise
The initial must-have lists tend to be extensive – a natural reflection of our aspirations. However, as time unfolds, through deeper analysis, thorough questioning and numerous discussions (not to mention countless viewings!) we should gradually refine these objectives. Prioritisation emerges based on what truly matters to us. So, I have learnt it makes sense to start the planning phase by addressing the ‘hair on fire’ issues first. Now, I just need to figure out what my ‘hair on fire’ issues are with my house search.
In the realm of RevOps, the biggest pain points we come across tend to sit in one of four buckets:
- Data Quality
- Automation & Scalability
- Process Alignment
- Decision-making
A well-designed RevOps & RevTech framework will look at these four pillars and assess to what extent the inputs are providing the most optimised or effective outputs. These can then be prioritised in order of what will have the biggest impact on revenue generation.
- Make sure you use good data to make good strategic decisions
For me, house hunting and building a best practice RevOps framework requires an awful lot of good data to feel confident about making good decisions.
It requires research into budgets, market trends, property prices, property attributes, mortgage rates, transport costs & other information, energy & insurance costs, renovation / major building costs, taxes (!), schooling and more. The ‘gut feeling’ plays a role too, both in our private and business lives but listening to this feeling when making big decisions becomes much easier when armed with good data.
It is important to have clean and well-maintained data in your CRM (or in my case in my property excel file) to mitigate ‘bad data’ risks, misalignment and ill-informed decision making. The end goal should be to make your CRM the trusted source of truth.
- Be ready to collaborate
I have found house hunting involves extensive collaboration with many ‘stakeholders’; estate agents, mortgage providers, solicitors, survey inspectors, family, friends, neighbours, employers (for a company-related move) and more. It is quite exhausting.
Equally, building a RevOps framework means striving for effective integration across all the touchpoints of the organisation’s customer lifecycle. This means extensive collaboration between tools, data, people and processes for efficient operations and the most optimal environment for revenue generation.
This is not easy, if it was everybody would be doing it effectively already. It requires effort, dedication, a willingness to overcome obstacles and probably a little bit of pain.
So, what now?
We often hear about those CRM implementations, which failed to achieve the objectives the commercial leaders thought had been set. This then meant hiring a different partner at more cost to correct mistakes or worse still, finding out that the software chosen didn’t actually meet all the use cases they had. Having to live with those compromises can severely impact the future revenue generating potential of the company.
Inevitably, there will be compromises, but hopefully if you follow this advice those compromises are ones everyone can live with.
Why not embark on building your revenue operations framework with us?
RevQore provide RevOps/RevTech health assessments or ‘check ups’ and deliver a roadmap for process and system optimisation in as little as 3 weeks.
This offers our customers a cost-efficient and low obligation method to explore your options before making significant decisions and commitments to a specific pathway.
