The Revenue Operation Manual (Book Summary)

The Revenue Operations Manual: How to Build a High-Growth, Predictable and Scalable Business by Laura Adint and Sean Lane

Part One Build Your Knowledge

• There is no better substitute than to sit, literally or virtually, with your internal customers to see how they do their job and how you as an Operator can make their lives (and the experience of your external customers) better.

PART TWO Build Your Business

4 The Importance of Operating Rhythms: The Routines, Meetings, and Cadences to Help You Hit Your Numbers

• Disciplined operating rhythms start with “inspecting what you expect.”
• The Operations <> Internal Customer Alignment Routine
  • Purpose: Review goals, key projects, and priorities for the Operations team and their internal G.T.M. stakeholders.
  • Attendees: If your Operations team has multiple internal customers (like marketing, sales, and customer success), don’t try to serve all audiences in a single routine.
  • Sample Agenda
    • Review progress against key goals and projects.
    • Prioritize/re-prioritize upcoming work based on business needs.
    • Share work in progress for feedback and validation of direction.
    • Discuss key personnel items: Performance management, hiring, ramp, etc.
    • Offer business insights based on proactive analysis by Ops. team.
• The Pipeline Generation Routine: The pipeline generation routine (likely bi-weekly) is about accountability — specifically two-way accountability between marketing and sales.
  • Purpose: Review progress against pipeline creation targets and create mutual accountability between marketing and sales.
  • Sample Agenda:
    • Review meetings and pipeline creation performance vs. targets:
      • Marketing: Provide learnings/insights on recent and upcoming campaigns that will help achieve targets (what’s working, what’s not).
      • Sales: Provide learning/insights on recent opportunity creation and open pipeline advancement (what’s working, what’s not).
    • Review pipeline coverage for current period vs. targets:
      • Review of open sales pipeline progression and its current status.
      • Review performance by source vs each source’s expected contribution.
      • Discussion of strategies to move deals forward: Surface learnings on resources/tactics on specific opportunities that have been working well in advancing/closing pipeline.
• The Forecasting Routine
  • Purpose: Review and discuss the forecast vs goals for a particular time period.
  • Sample Agenda:
    • Update team forecast calls for the current period, and the review of the previous period’s forecast accuracy.
    • Discussion of any significant changes in the sales pipeline. Identification of risks, opportunities, and adjustments for the upcoming period.
    • Alignment on strategies and actions to meet sales targets.
    • Note: This is not story time, nor is this time to solve deal-specific issues. Teams can and should ask for help on specific deals and set up next steps or deal reviews to fulfill those requests outside of the forecast meeting.
• The Deal Review Routine
  • Not all deal reviews are the same.
  • A few different types to consider:
    • Pursuit (go/no go) deal review: Determine whether we should pursue a specific deal or not.
    • Solution deal review: Planning the right solution, value proposition, sales strategy, and tactics to win a deal.
    • Commercial deal review: Final pricing, negotiation, contract, and risk decisions in the closing stages of a deal.
  • Purpose: Spend dedicated time strategizing an individual deal.
  • Sample Agenda
    • Discuss client needs and current pain points that your product is uniquely positioned to solve.
    • Discuss and craft the best fit solution for that customer.
    • Review the customer’s decision-making process and criteria for success.
    • Review the buying committee, their roles, and the relationships the company currently has and doesn’t have with prospective buyers.
    • Review the timeline for a decision and the mutual success plan to advance from the current state of the deal to closing.
    • Review any unique legal, security, procurement, or risk factors that will impact the strategy to close the deal.
• The Quarterly Business Review Routine
  • When we have prepared for Q.B.R.s in the past, our Operations team compiled all of the data for every Q.B.R. to simplify the data compilation work for the presenters themselves.
  • It’s also important that Operations (or Enablement in some cases) has a clear plan for capturing, prioritizing, and reporting back on all of the feedback and requests that come up during Q.B.R.s.
  • Purpose: An opportunity for individuals to reflect on the previous quarter’s performance and learnings, and to look ahead to thoughtfully plan for the quarter to come.
  • Sample Agenda:
    • Reflect on the previous quarter’s performance: Quota attainment, funnel metrics, forecast accuracy, and lessons learned.
    • Look ahead to the upcoming quarter: Open pipeline, path to quota, current forecast, and most important opportunities/customers.
    • Asks for leadership or the organization: Product feedback, systems or tool improvements, training needed, and marketing collateral/support.
• The more you optimize your routines to run from your systems, the more prepared everyone can be without significant manual work prior to each routine, and consequently, the more aligned everyone will be on expectations for that routine as well.

5 Designing and Instrumenting the Customer Journey

• Every interaction, every conversion point, every hand-off, every lifecycle stage must be thoughtfully considered and purposefully crafted.
• As simple as it sounds, the most important first step is documentation.
• Some questions you and your team can ask yourselves:
  • Who are our target customers and who are not?
  • How do customers find out about us and what are the different entry points to our customer journey?
  • What are our different go-to-market motions (e.g. direct vs. channel)?
  • How do leads get captured? Which leads make it to our sales team and how are they distributed? By region? By product? By grade? What rules govern this process and who manages them?
  • What are the key ingredients to an effective evaluation and sale of our product?
  • If and when someone decides to buy, what type of implementation is required?
  • How do we ensure adoption and successful use of our product?
  • What happens when the customer has a problem?
  • What opportunities are there for renewal, cross-sell, and expansion after the initial purchase?
• What we should be asking is, “Do I have enough pipeline today in order to hit my number tomorrow?”
• Build basic reports in your C.R.M. for each milestone
• You might have level 1 metric reports for the number of:
  • Sales activities
  • Meetings booked
  • Meetings held
  • Qualified opportunities created (#/$)
  • Closed won deals (#/$).
• One prime example of the need for inspection pre-sale is “Speed to Lead.”
• Post-sale instrumentation is just as important.
• Revenue Operations must seek out ways to help their teammates capture this information uncovered during the sales process, synthesize it, and ensure it is accurately conveyed to any other colleagues who might be working with this customer.

6 The Building Blocks of the Modern Tech Stack In

• An S.D.R.’ s dashboard might focus on the highest intent leads that require action, sales activity inputs, and meeting and pipeline outputs.
• A C.S.M.’ s dashboard might focus on high-risk customers, upcoming renewal events, or open support tickets they need to be aware of.
• A D.I.T.L. [Day in the Life] dashboard should aim to facilitate the next best action by any team member in any role.
• We used an integration platform to create bot that would send a Slack message after a meeting was held to ask the sales rep the outcome of the meeting and whether an opportunity should be created. If yes, the rep could then click a couple of buttons and create an opportunity in the C.R.M. without ever having to leave Slack.
• If you spend a majority of your time performing tech stack maintenance and putting out integration fires, you’re never going to fulfill the aspirations of the Revenue Operations Mindset.

7 How to Make Internal Changes that Actually Stick

• The goal of any sales organization should be that reps are “engaging in the highest quantity of highest quality “activities. Our job as Operators is to eliminate the low-quality activities.
• There are four key steps you can use as a blueprint to launching a new tool or process that people will actually use.
  • Step 1: Focus on the “why “and keep reiterating it over and over again.
  • Step 2: Make sure you have buy-in from leadership.
    • Spend time with your leaders, taking them through the justification of the business case, validate your approach, and outline for them the exact project plan and timeline for the launch.
    • Also, don’t forget that post-launch, you’ll need them to be your best evangelists for reinforcement, adherence, and more reinforcement.
  • Step 3: Create a pilot group.
    • When their peers are skeptical, the pilot group of users should be the ones advocating for a new change’s value on your behalf.
  • Step 3.5: Train your Operations Team.
  • Step 4: Pick K.P.I.s to measure the success of your launch, and measure them!
• It’s easy in Operations to quickly move on from one project to the next thing on the “to-do” list, but having the discipline to revisit your original hypothesis and expected impact is critical.

8 The Art and Science of Forecasting

• Forecasting represents the entire operating rhythm of the whole company

• If your deal stages are there to guide you through the process of selling, forecast categories are your confidence intervals for how likely that deal is going to happen.
• EXAMPLE OF A 13-WEEK REVENUE CADENCE
  • Week 1: Deal inspection and clean up
  • Week 2: Q.B.R.s and slipped deal analysis
  • Week 3: Current quarter forecast
  • Week 4: Next quarter forecast ; sequence of events call for end of month push
  • Week 5: Current quarter forecast
  • Week 6: Next quarter forecast
  • Week 7: Current quarter forecast
  • Week 8: Next quarter forecast ; sequence of events call for end of month push
  • Week 9: Current quarter forecast
  • Week 10: Current and next quarter forecast
  • Week 11: Current and next quarter forecast
  • Week 12: Current and next quarter forecast
  • Week 13: Current and next quarter forecast ; sequence of events call for end of quarter push
• The key steps to building our model were:
  • 1. Clean Data Before All Else
  • 2. Leverage Historical Conversion Rates
    • We also broke our model into three different types of deals that we wanted to forecast:
      • 1) Create and close (new business deals created and closed in the same period of time)
      • 2) Carry-over (new business deals we started the period with that were created in the previous period)
      • 3) Upgrade/expansion (opportunities with existing customers).
• Share Early and Often
• Adapt with the Business

9 Annual Planning and the Art of the “Fiscal Year Flip”

• To start your planning process, seek out and document answers to the following questions:
  • 1. What are your strategic levers for the year?
    • New product/new releases/new features
    • Geographies
    • Partners
    • Pricing
    • People
    • Distribution
  • 2. What are the investments you have for the year and what will they affect? External resources/partners Systems Training Internal resources/new functions
  • 3. What are the external factors you are planning for?
    • Global markets/economies
    • Competitors
    • Industry trends
  • 4. What are the cost constraints you have?
    • Current cost profile
    • Required planning cost profile
    • Company burn rate

• Trish calls for overstaffing your S.D.R. organization above your planned ratios to provide for continuity when you inevitably have an S.D.R. get promoted or leave the organization.

10 Why Variable Compensation Design is Key to Incentivizing the Right Behavior

• Aim for 75 percent of your reps hitting 75 percent or more of their quota and 50 percent of your reps hitting or exceeding 100 percent of their quota.
• Comp plans cannot, and should not, be used to drive every single behavior you need for a company to be successful.
• Participants with a shared team goal should have lower accelerator rates because they are less directly involved in overall achievement.
• Because you have lower expected quotas during the ramping period, the ramping B.C.R. is much higher than the fully ramped B.C.R. This can cause excessive payments for larger early deals. You can protect against this by writing your plan to switch to the fully ramped B.C.R. after exceeding the ramping quota.
• The longer the sales cycle of your product, the longer ramp time you likely need to accommodate. For example, for enterprise sellers where bookings might not come for nearly a year (or more), craft ramp plans to include leading indicators of future success. Rather than having 100 percent of their variable compensation tied to bookings or some kind of draw, assign targets for new customer meetings and pipeline creation.
• Include in your launch communication at least a summary of the first three steps of our framework: Guiding principles, desired behaviors, and levers available. We also believe providing example calculations of how participants can exceed their plan can help drive the behaviors the company is looking for and generate excitement within the team.

11 Goal Setting in RevOps

• It is tempting to have goals written in ways that are binary — it was done or it wasn’t. Push yourself to find ways to measure the desired impact of a goal beyond merely accomplishing a task. For example, the first draft of a goal could be to launch a new tool. A better goal is to have a target adoption percentage or a specific reduction in the amount of time a task takes that the tool is being implemented to improve.

12 Data, Data, and More Data: The Evolution from Reporting to Insight to Prediction

• The right thing to do to clean a messy C.R.M. is to first stop the influx of bad data. Before you clean anything, you have to get at the source of the problem.
• We recommend creating a “reporting essentials” folder in your C.R.M. that provides the foundational reports for everyone in the organization to use.

13 What Happens When Things Break: How to Look Around Corners and Plan for Your Own Mistakes

• Once you have identified each possible point of failure, the next step is to create measurable reporting for every single one.
• Once you have thoroughly identified and instrumented all of your potential breakpoints, the second step is to assign clear ownership within your team for who is responsible for each component of the danger dash.
• If all of your danger dash reports are actionable, you should be able to address any issues and “zero out “any components on a daily basis. This way, small problems don’t become big ones overnight.

PART THREE Build Your Partnerships

14 Strategic Partner vs. Support Function: The Choice is Yours

• Revenue Operations charter.
  • Your team’s North star: Write a mission statement for why you exist. For example, your North star might be, “Create a high-achieving, understood, and predictable revenue engine. ”
  • The type of work your team does:
  • How your team is structured:
• Without careful messaging, clear expectations from senior leadership, or a carefully crafted foundation of trust, Ops. can take on a weird “policing” role with its internal customers. This is not a place you want to be.

15 Go Beyond Sales: The Importance of Cross-Functional Relationships

• A few sample projects or responsibilities a RevOps team might work on with marketing include the following:
  • Defining your ideal customer profile.
  • Firmographic scoring (what traits are common of companies that buy our product?).
  • Behavioral scoring (what intent signals are common for prospects that buy our product?).
  • Lead distribution and speed to lead (S.L.A.).
  • Campaign planning, forecasting, and execution.
  • Marketing automation platform design and administration.
  • Marketing spend budgeting.
• A few sample projects or responsibilities a RevOps team might work on with customer success include:
  • Designing the customer journey: Hand-offs, communication, roles, and responsibilities.
  • Customer health scoring.
  • Renewal and retention analysis.
  • Voice of the customer design and analysis.
  • Capacity planning and utilization.
  • Book of business design.
• A few sample projects or responsibilities a RevOps team might work on with finance include:
  • Building your company’s operating plan.
  • Capacity and hiring planning.
  • Designing compensation plans.
  • Tech stack budgeting.
  • Deal desk.
  • Bookings policies and rules of engagement.
  • Order forms, billing, and subscription management.
• A few sample projects or responsibilities a RevOps team might work on with H.R./talent include:
  • Hiring planning.
  • Performance management.
  • New hire onboarding/offboarding.
  • Performance review frameworks.
  • Succession planning.

16 Get Your Partners Involved: Make Sure You Have Them “Crack an Egg ”

• As Operators, we often believe that we know best. It is an easy trap to fall into and getting input takes time you may feel you don’t have with tight deadlines.
• Getting our stakeholders’ input on anything we are designing as Operators is our number one recommendation for “building your partnerships.” Not only will you end up getting support when you eventually roll it out (as we learned in Chapter 7), but most importantly, the outcome of what you end up rolling out will be better for having gotten the input.
• Seek Feedback, Not Consensus

17 Designing Your Processes with the End User in Mind

• Ops. teams are always getting all these questions and I think it really could be deflected if they just had better documentation.

18 Blurred Lines: Where Does Training and Enablement Fit With a Revenue Operations Team?

• The reality is that you can never have the very latest information if the enablement team is responsible to be subject matter experts.
• Use all opportunities you have in your operating rhythms to reinforce enablement. For example, a common operating rhythm is to have monthly sales all-hands meetings. Enablement should be at least one of the objectives for these expensive meetings. Introduce, reinforce, and re-enable the audiences during these times together.

PART FOUR Build Your Team

19 Staffing Your Team: What Makes a Good Revenue Operator?

• Operators focus on outcomes, not inputs. Operators are the perfect blend of strategic and tactical.
• Operators are lifelong learners and not afraid to be proven wrong.
• Operators believe in constant, incremental improvements and a “better, better, never done “approach.
• Design your interview team around key themes and provide each interviewer with a focus area that is connected to the job description. At a minimum, have someone on your interview team interview for technical skills, functional skills/experience, team fit/culture, and internal customer/stakeholder relationships.
• We recommend that each of your new hires have a 30 — 60 — 90-day onboarding plan created for them before they start.
• Early-stage companies, for example, need a lot of creative problem solvers who can handle lack of structure and thrive in autonomous work environments. As companies mature, they need to add Operators who thrive in more structured, specialized settings, and are good at crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.
• REVOPS AREAS OF FOCUS
  • 1. Metrics, reporting, insights, and analytics
    • 1.1. Regular reporting: Mechanisms, metrics, frequency, and audiences
    • 1.2. S.F.D.C. (C.R.M.) dashboards: Ownership and maintenance
    • 1.3. Analytical tools: Business intelligence, access, training, ownership, and approvals
    • 1.4. Ad hoc reporting: Ownership, process, and review
    • 1.5. Pricing analytics
    • 1.6. Analytics, summaries, and recommended actions
  • 2. Tech stack infrastructure
    • 2.1. Roadmap: Ownership and record of roadmap plan
    • 2.2. Funding/approvals
    • 2.3. Requirements
    • 2.4. Design
    • 2.5. Testing
    • 2.6. Approvals for changes/change control
    • 2.7. Execution of changes into production
    • 2.8. Notifications to users
    • 2.9. Training for managers and users
    • 2.10. User access controls and approvals
  • 3. Compensation and incentives
    • 3.1. Plan design
    • 3.2. Plan documentation
    • 3.3. Plan approval
    • 3.4. Calculation
    • 3.5. Review and approval for calcs
    • 3.6. Training for managers and users
    • 3.7. Sales performance incentive fund (S.P.I.F.)/short-term incentives design
  • 4. Capacity planning
    • 4.1. Annual operating plan that links with finance’s overall top line plan
    • 4.2. Regular updates (frequency) for sales/customer success/services capacity and monitoring against expectations
    • 4.3. Hiring plan: Ownership, monitoring, and regular updates
    • 4.4. Annual process to evaluate what will be required/modeling options/cost target modeling/assumption changes
    • 4.5. Mid-year changes/updates to the plan
  • 5. Territory/book of business planning
    • 5.1. Strategy for segmentation
    • 5.2. Discussion with sales/customer success leadership
    • 5.3. Account/customer health scoring methodology
    • 5.4. Account procurement, enrichment, and scoring execution
    • 5.5. Modeling proposals and visualization of territories
    • 5.6. Approvals for territories
  • 6. Training and enablement
    • 6.1. Strategy for training plan for the year
    • 6.2. New hire/bootcamp
    • 6.3. Training event content development
    • 6.4. Sales/customer success/services methodology: Training, reinforcement activities, built into cadence
    • 6.5. Application training
    • 6.6. Process/procedure (e.g. order form) training
    • 6.7. Bid support
    • 6.8. Templates for request for proposals
  • 7. G.T.M. execution, team management, and cadences
    • 7.1. Forecast
      • 7.1.1. Process: Owners, frequency, deadlines, reporting, tools/data
      • 7.1.2. Meetings: Frequency, attendees, topics, tools/data
    • 7.2. Quarterly business review (Q.B.R.): Frequency, attendees, topics, tools/data
      • 7.2.1. Facilitation
      • 7.2.2. Data prep
      • 7.2.3. Blending with other training/events/speakers
    • 7.3. Day-in-the-life (D.I.T.L.) design and supporting processes
    • 7.4. Win/loss reviews
    • 7.5. Deal reviews: Either pricing, go/no go, and/or deal strategy
    • 7.6. Product interlock meetings
    • 7.7. Objective and key results (O.K.R.) meetings/monthly metrics/quarterly metrics
    • 7.8. Cross-functional interlock meetings
  • 8. Communication strategies and structures
    • 8.1. Intranet/wiki: Ownership, content, maintenance, usage
    • 8.2. All-hands meetings
    • 8.3. Team meetings: Ownership, content, frequency, data
    • 8.4. Communication of goals, leaderboards, win stories: Medium, frequency, audience, authors
    • 8.5. Policies: Bookings guide, account rules of engagement, discounting authority
    • 8.6. Pricing: Ownership/philosophy, discounting authorities between departments, execution of system controls, deal desk structure, financial control verifications
  • 9. Organizational structures and hiring practices
    • 9.1. Strategic ratios: Presales/solution consultants, customer success, account managers, sales development representatives (S.D.R.s), Ops., etc.
    • 9.2. Ratios for Individual Contributor (I.C.) to Manager
    • 9.3. Hiring practices: Interview structures, presentations, panels, profiles
    • 9.4. Personnel review processes and whether Ops. is involved
    • 9.5. Ops. support structures and coverage of Ops. org.

20 Choosing the Right Organizational Structure

• Systems architecture, data engineering, or C.R.M. administration responsibilities are possible areas to carve out for a separate team entirely.
• “I fundamentally believe that RevOps should not be owning go-to-market tech strategy, and therefore Salesforce strategy.” – Max Maeder

21 Management Philosophies: It’s All About the People, Silly

(no key highlights this chapter)

22 Speed Isn’t Always the Answer: Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

• When Laura arrived, though, she saw areas where rapid-response changes in policies, systems, and practices created an environment where it was difficult for our revenue teams to keep up with the changes.

23 Managing Expectations and Priorities: How to Say No

• When a request comes your way, the best Operators take the time to get to the root of the question being asked.
  • What are you trying to solve for?
  • What will you do with what you’re asking for?
  • What have you tried already as alternatives to this?
  • Which existing resources might resolve this request in lieu of creating something new?

24 Get Outside of Your Four Walls: The Importance of Seeking Out Role Models

• There’s someone out there who has been in your shoes and solved the problem you’re facing before you.
• Pick role model companies slightly more mature than you:
• Present findings/recommendations internally with role model examples included:
• Seeking out role models doesn’t have to mean 1: 1 networking:
• Include networking/role model conversations in your team goals:
• Insight Partners published the five best practices that top performing go-to-market teams “over-index “on:
  • Partner: We actively manage partner channel conflict using rules of engagement and systems (e.g. deal registration).
  • Process: Sellers are mapping stakeholders and influencers in the sale.
  • Pipeline: We have a large enough pipeline to achieve bookings goals in each period given sales cycles and win rates.
  • People: Our seller attrition rate is well below industry standards (< 25 percent per year).
  • Process: Sales and marketing are aligned on top-of-funnel strategy for each segment. 1

25 Perfection is an Illusion: Instilling the “Better, Better, Never Done “Mentality

(no key highlights this chapter)