Fast forward in your mind to the end of 2024. You did so much, but many aspects of the business still feel… chaotic. Perhaps some important foundations were overlooked.

We’ve all been there. We set up demand generation campaigns without clearly defining the ICP, or we expand the sales team without sufficient demand and territories. Or worse yet, we buy tools that never get adopted and therefore “don’t work”.

The result:

• Nobody is speaking the same language
• Processes don’t produce the right data
• None of the systems seem to work together
• There’s no real ROI from tools, training, and teams

This is why, at USC, we use a proprietary tool called The Revenue Efficiency Pyramid to help clients visualize the best way to tackle big problems without forgetting the fundamentals. It also helps us assess your revenue operations maturity.

Whether you’re trying to:

• Work through a backlog of operational and technical projects
• Align teams around a strategic North Star
• Or close an ARR gap

Finding the right first step sets the pace for your entire journey. It can also mean the difference between driving real revenue growth and efficiency vs. doing busy work.

The Revenue Efficiency Pyramid

The Revenue Efficiency Pyramid is made up of 4 layers, each supporting the next. We visualize it this way to get one critical point across:

You need the right foundations in place to support increasingly complex processes and systems.

Fundamentals: Laying down the critical foundations your team needs to execute the basic steps in your GTM motion.

Adoption: Driving adoption of the Fundamentals through your organization and providing visibility into the execution and results of your processes.

Optimization: Identifying what’s working and what’s not to find more effective and efficient ways to execute the GTM motion.

Automation: Building on an already efficient revenue engine to help execute optimized processes with AI, automation, and advanced revenue operations.

Assessing Maturity Based on Outcomes

All of our clients (and probably all business leaders in general) are looking for the same things. They want to grow their business. They need to do it efficiently. They want to continue to retain and expand customers, increase LTV, lower CAC, etc. At the end of the day there are four outcomes that nearly everything leads back to.

They are:

1. Convert More High Intent Leads
2. Convert More High Value Prospects
3. Convert Qualified Pipeline to More Revenue
4. Maximize Net Revenue Retention

Breaking our Pyramid and maturity concepts out by their desired outcome (a KPI) or even by function makes it easier to pinpoint the places that need attention. For example, the New ARR / sales function may be highly optimized while the process for converting leads out of marketing is lagging behind.

The higher you go up the Pyramid, the more interconnected your teams and systems become. Most businesses need to devise a plan to get everyone on the same level before optimizing much further.

Here’s a sample of different maturity points we look for at each stage of the Pyramid by outcome:

Click here to get a downloadable PDF version of the table above.

These are just examples from the 150+ assessment points in our diagnostic (depending on the company’s GTM motions). We can’t share all of our secret sauce ;). However, these are the most common issues we see in B2B SaaS, making them a great place to get started.

It’s also worth mentioning that you don’t need to climb to the top of the Pyramid segment-by-segment. We recommend working through the Fundamentals and Adoption stages for key areas as the first priority, but ensuring that you pull in low-hanging fruit for Automation and Optimization along the way.

Once you know your priorities, you can plan them out in a RevOps Roadmap to ensure everyone is aligned on your goals.

How Long Should This Take?

Our clients are always surprised to hear that completing the Fundamentals and Adoption stages can take as little as a few weeks. This means our team is executing the foundational steps in our GTM process and far fewer things are missed or slipping through the cracks. From there, Optimization and Automation can be longer processes, sometimes taking a year or more to reach peak revenue efficiency.

In Summary…

No diagnostic is “one size fits all”, but after working with hundreds of companies to build up their operational maturity, we believe our newly optimized Revenue Efficiency Pyramid provides a flexible tool that fits most. Use this model to prioritize projects, facilitate conversations, and get teams executing together.