Doyle Slayton, Senior Director, Sales & Revenue Operations at Jenzabar, gave this presentation at the Revenue Acceleration Festival in November 2021. Read the other part of his talk here 👈.
Most of you are probably working through a variety of ways to build your own revenue operations teams. So what I thought I’d do today is talk about the keys to winning and building a team that's going to be successful within organizations.
It's one of those roles where you can be in what I’d call an ‘order taker’ type role, where you receive all kinds of orders, and you're reacting to what sales, marketing, and customer success need.
If that's the structure of your organization, then that's obviously one way that you can operate. But the other is one where you get a seat at the table, and you're adding to the strategy and innovation in building a world-class organization. And that's really what we're going to focus on today.
What is revenue operations all about?
Revenue ops is about aligning the people, the process, and the tools so that you can standardize how your organization does business.
Build out standard operating procedures and playbooks and follow a methodology for marketing, sales, and customer success so that you can measure how it's working.
Are you getting what you want out of your results or your people? Or is it making their job more effective and efficient? And are you doing what you need to do to help grow your customer base and retain them?
After measuring, that gives us an opportunity to come back to the table and figure out where bottlenecks and gaps exist so that we can optimize and make improvements.
When you’ve got the insights, you can also decide where to spend additional funds and money from a marketing perspective to build out territories for sales, and provide additional services and solutions through the customer success team.
👉So it's really about this cyclical process that you follow as you look to create alignment with your team.
Oscar Armas-Luy
How to build a revenue operations team
So how do you build a revenue operations team? There are four key areas that play within your department.
Operations management
Operations management is where the strategy and alignment across the departments happen.
You help them with business processes and innovation, and there's a lot of cross-functional collaboration.
You have to find a way to provide training and change management so that everyone can come through and understand what the organization is looking to accomplish and how to get to that end result in a step-by-step format.
Insights and data team
The insights team is another area that’s a hot topic right now.
It’s the ability to manage the data infrastructure, data quality, being able to give people access in real-time with dashboards and reporting, and being able to get the insights that those teams need so that you can move faster and grow the organization.
Enablement/acceleration
Then there's the enablement and acceleration portion where you're really trying to set up a playbook for onboarding your team.
When new people come into the roles in either of those three departments, you've got a playbook so that they have a step-by-step process, and they feel like you've been expecting them from day one. They don't have downtime, but you've got a structured process to ramp them up in a quick and efficient manner.
Tools team
And then the last thing is the tools team, where you're working in alignment with the various departments that make up RevOps responsibilities, being sales, marketing, and customer success.
But you've got dotted lines to other departments like IT when it comes to the technology stack that you're working with.
You've also got dotted lines in some of the areas that I've already talked about when it comes to HR and the onboarding process, and finance and legal when it comes to working with sales to win, renew, and retain business.
🗣Revenue Operations Alliance is coming to a city near you - apply to speak & share your insights.
