Exec Summary

• Most engines work the same way
  • Same components
  • The output is power
• Factories produce different products
• Using different machines to do so
• The output is customer experience
• Every experience is different
• Every company is different
• Define the “product” you want
• To know what “machines” you need
• And how they must work together
• This is Revenue Efficiency
• Repeatable production is scalable
• This is the point of Strategic RevOps

In GTM and RevOps we talk a lot about “optimizing the revenue engine.” I probably use this wording every day when explaining what we do at USC.

It feels right – it presents a great visual of well-oiled pistons and pieces of machinery firing together, with a master mechanic sweating over blueprints and wrenches to continuously increase performance.

But in reality, the “revenue engine” is a poor metaphor.

The money-making operation of your business is a lot more like a factory. And once you’re able to visualize it, the purpose of Strategic RevOps clicks.

Engines All Work the Same. Companies Do Not.

As far as I understand, most engines work essentially the same way. There are various numbers and sizes of cylinders with pistons, gas, and spark plugs that fire. The output is power.

While Formula 1 teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars perfecting how well an engine can perform, it’s still the same basic idea from a race car to a Toyota Corolla.

This doesn’t apply to go-to-market functions.

Every company has a different product, at a different price point, sold to a different ICP and Buyer Persona through any number of different channels. They each have their own marketing, sales, and customer success processes and systems. All of which produce an experience for their customers – for better or worse.

This customer experience is the output of your factory, not revenue – revenue is the by-product.

And the customer experience you deliver will be unique to your company.

Looking at it from this perspective helps us visualize what it really takes to build a sustainable, repeatable model for business growth.

What Customer Experience Do We Want to Produce? 

Let’s imagine our factory as an empty floor. Before we start buying millions of dollars of machinery, it’s critical that we know what we want to produce.

We need to know:

• What are our ICPs & Personas?
• What are their jobs-to-be-done?
• How do they want to interact with salespeople?
• How do they research and learn about solutions like ours?
• Who is on their buying committee and how are decisions made?
• What do they need to do/have in order to adopt our solution effectively
• What do they need in order to get value from renewing/expanding their contract?

This is Customer Journey Mapping. By understanding who we’re building this experience for and what the experience is, we have a much better chance of setting our factory up properly to produce it.

We also reduce the risk of spending millions of dollars on a machine (aka, a GTM motion) that doesn’t produce our desired outcome.

What Are the Component Parts? 

Now that we have our customer experience mapped out, we can know what needs to be in place to create it. The machinery on the factory floor, so to speak.

For example:

• What does our demand generation system look like?
• What channels are we going to focus on?
• Are we doing PLG or sales-led growth?
• Are we doing cold outbound at all?

This isn’t Tesla’s Gigafactory – we have limited floor space for this (aka, resources and budget). So we have to think carefully about what we can and can’t do with what we have. Starting with a narrower focus is almost always better.

Another thing to visualize, is how many machines of the same type are needed to produce the outcome we want. In other words, capacity planning. Being over capacity or under capacity in any area is going to lead to lost revenue and decreased efficiency.

(Remember, capacity planning for outbound is different from regular sales.)

What is the Production Process? 

Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

If you’ve seen Founder (the movie about the creation of McDonalds), you’ll see how carefully they designed their burger factory. It wasn’t enough to just buy the fryer and the grill. They had to think about how all of the moving parts worked together efficiently and effectively.

This is where process mapping happens – and it’s a big reason why I like to think of this as a factory instead of an engine.

Your processes are the machines, how they’re run and the conveyor belts between them. The programming that goes into them. The rules that dictate the flow of production. Now, you might be visualizing an over-automated GTM motion but let’s remember that the Rolls-Royce factory has a station where the steering wheel is hand-stitched. That’s not an excuse for an efficient operation though.

Without processes, your people have a lot more manual work to do, it’s messy, and the product (your customer experience) develops a quality control problem. This is unsustainable and creates issues when trying to grow.

You need processes like:

• What kind of leads get routed to sales?
• What is the process to route leads and respond?
• What is our sales process from first meeting to close?
• How are customers handed off from sales to Customer Success?
• How are we monitoring customer health and expansion opportunities?

Your revenue factory is held together by hundreds of processes like these (and the systems that make them functional).

With all of the proper processes in place, you should be able to stand in the office upstairs, looking over the railing at your factory floor, and see all the moving parts working together to produce a high-quality customer experience – which results in revenue growth.

We should be able to draw a line in chalk from lead, to close, to renewal and expansion, thinking through each and every handoff.

Once this system of machines is working cohesively together, you have something that can be repeated at scale. That is the function of Strategic RevOps – that’s what we do at Union Square Consulting.

Of course, when we come into the picture, the factory is already built and the machines are already running. It’s our job to look at the customer experience and by extension, the revenue it’s producing and the step by step process to produce it. Like a real factory, there’s a lot to review and we have to prioritize the machines that are the biggest problems and/or the biggest opportunities to improve production.

This is what we really mean by “revenue engine.”