QUESTION

“Hey Eddie – love the post today about the 5 whys. Im trying to get better at this myself so I can be more strategic in my role rather than an order taker. After those 5 whys, as a Revops person – would the action items be to create the more narrowed list and share/distribute with sales leadership/reps?” – Dan

ANSWER

Great question Dan. Let me try to tackle it here. Let’s begin with the end in mind.

Find Ways to Hit Revenue Targets

If you want to be more strategic in your role in RevOps, more proactive and less reactive to inbound requests, you need to find ways to help your CRO/CXO hit their revenue goals. You need to bring ideas to him or her that they’re not already thinking of and then execute on those ideas if and when they buy in.

The 5 Whys I posted about is just a part of this. (The 5 Why’s being the concept of asking “Why?” 5 times to get to the root cause of any issue.) The issue I’d start with is “Are we on track to hit our revenue goals?” and whether the answer is yes or no, I’d ask why.

Drill Deeper Into the Data

I’d drill into different parts of the bow-tie funnel, from pipeline generation to closing new business to retention and expansion. I’d go deeper into each specific pipeline source, such as outbound, paid search, webinars, etc etc. to see what’s working and what’s not working. Where is your team hitting their goals? Where are they surpassing them? Where are they falling short? And why?

Where many business analysts fall short is by simply looking at the numbers in the report and then just regurgitating them. You have to first understand what’s going into these numbers, by looking at the reports, skimming through each line item to see if there are any outliers, seeing if the data is accurate and what story is happening behind the scenes to explain the numbers.

Generate Ideas to Discuss with the CRO/CXOs

From here I’d want to form a hypothesis. Something can be improved. It’s broken and it could be unbroken. Or it’s working well and it could work even better. I’d then bring this to my CRO/CXO and start asking questions around these hypotheses. Are they already aware of the issue? What do they think? What do they see?

Depending on their answers I may want to propose or at least discuss potential initiatives.

Perhaps our outbound prospecting is not hitting targets. As I dig deep I see that all the messaging is the same and it’s sprayed out to tens of thousands of contacts across every industry and every role without any relevancy. I’d discuss this with my CRO and suggest we could narrow our focus by building tighter target lists and segmenting them by industry and then by role. Then we could have someone in marketing or sales help us write more relevant messaging for each segment.

Bring Ideas into the Roadmap and Execute

This is one example and it falls into our concept for a RevOps Roadmap. We’ve identified a high-level goal for the organization such as our revenue target, or, in this example, more specifically, an outbound pipeline generation target, and we’re suggesting an initiative to help achieve that target.

I’d want to get aligned with my CRO on whether or not he or she sees this is a top priority and, if so, put it on the roadmap and prioritize it over the daily flood of inbound requests. As you try this you may try and fail. As a CEO I shoot these ideas down constantly, but I always appreciate the effort. The more people do this the more they are seen as strategic and the more they will understand about executives’ priorities and the more they will hit the nail on the head.

TLDR

To be more Strategic in RevOps:

• Find ways to hit revenue targets
• Use “The 5 Whys” to dig into the data
• Form a hypothesis on what to improve
• Discuss these ideas to your CRO/CXO(s)
• Add these initiatives to the RevOps Roadmap
• Execute these ideas and then rinse and repeat
• The more you bring ideas, the more you’re strategic