Saliant - growth consulting

What is RevOps - the key areas

looka_production_73824926 (Kaye Sycamore) — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:09:37 GMT

Effective Sales & Marketing are essential to growth, but so is RevOps.

I simply can't imagine trying to scale the go-to-market engine without RevOps - not these days.

Yet I often have to define what it is that the RevOps team does - and what skills they bring to the table. I made this brief list of the key aspects that a great RevOps leader is going to deliver:

Establish and maintain operating cadence/rigor across all sales functions to ensure the health and predictability of the business in achieving key performance metrics including sales planning, forecast accuracy, pipeline analysis, and performance management.

Conduct in-depth analysis of the business and develop a deep understanding of the key value drivers to identify growth opportunities.

Act as an advisor and conduit between revenue leadership, operations, customer success, and finance to identify opportunities to improve go-to-market productivity by removing friction from processes .

Work with the leaders to optimise the effectiveness of technolog y , specifically technologies in support of marketing effectiveness and sales productivity.

Establish sound guardianship and develop innovative solutions for the critical marketing and sales dat a in the CRM/SFA database, ensuring consistency of input from the sales – and other - teams and managing validity of data.

Work with Revenue and Finance leaders in completing the annual sales planning proces s - including territory design, account segmentation, quota setting, and comp plan design.

Work closely with leadership and provide data & analysis to contribute to short / longer term strategic plannin g .

COMMUNITY - is this the new content?

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 16:55:48 GMT

Thinking about a COMMUNITY-driven initiative? Plus a community for Legal Tech startups.

What's that old saying about buses?

For me, that's how it's been with COMMUNITY recently.

I have a heightened awareness of all things community as I have been undertaking research to build out the business and tech plans for a new community-based initiative centred on women's wellness. Niche market play? Sure. But that's where community can be successful - a group of people, linked by a common interest or problem, one with which they engage personally and in some cases passionately, and in search of information (i.e. content) and engagement (i.e. conversation).

As I look at the specialist marketplaces in which many of my clients operate, I am seeing the potential for building communities. I know this is not exactly new - we've had user groups, special-interest groups and, going back even further, listserv groups, but the new community is a different experience, and one which delivers more value to the members, and which can be more useful to the sponsoring company. And that's what I am exploring.

In the first instance, here are a few resources I found to be useful:

Mighty Networks - this Palo Alto-based scale-up offers a tech platform for online businesses which are powered by community. I spent a lot of time with this tech, and found it affordable and flexible. What I love about the way this team is executing is that they are practising what they preach - they have a community site for their members to swap ideas about building communities, and they offer a specialist accelerator course in what they refer to as community design .

While exploring the Mighty Networks, I happened upon this community - Legal Tech StartUp Focus - and immediately joined. First impressions, I think it looks like a useful set of resources and news for those with an interest in this sector, and you can definitely count me in that group. I am looking forward to participating, and contributing.

And I found this article on the Insights Partners blog - Building and Activating a Community-Driven Motion - and it's directly relevant to my current thinking in terms of how a community-led motion may drive higher engagement, and accelerate growth.

More to come on this as I continue to do the research on the potential and applicability of community as part of a growth plan.

30-60-90 Day Plan

looka_production_73824926 (Kaye Sycamore) — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 15:50:28 GMT

Starting a new Sales Leadership role? Build your plan.

If you ever type in 30-60-90 Day Plans for New CRO (or any new sales leadership role) into the search box, you will get something just short of a gazillion results.

Some of them giving you The Actual Plan (yeah, right). and quite a few of them telling you the idea of a 90-Day Plan is simply not-a-goer. Why not? Well, some say it takes a lot longer than 90-days to move from input to output mode, and some tell you that you'll need to deliver a lot sooner than 90-days. But, when I have moved into a new leadership role or I start a new engagement, I like the discipline of having a 30-60-90 day plan.

I find it a useful way to sort and prioritise my thinking around what to tackle and in what order, and a great way to communicate and align with the CEO. I also find that this approach helps to keep me on track - as more and more information floods in the further you dig into the company and the engagement it's easy to lose sight of the things that you had seen with those oh-so-precious 'fresh eyes'. The plan keeps you grounded, it gives you the baseline, it allows you to stop and take stock, and assess: are you on course?

So, what goes into that plan?

Of course, it is going to depend on your role - are you CRO? SVP Sales? VP Sales? This article - Hiring a Sales Leader: Part III from Insight Partners has a very useful insight that highlight the differences between the competencies, and to some extent the focus, of these different-level sales leadership roles across these five dimensions:

core selling skills
sales enablement
metrics & process driven sales management
go-to-market strategy
team building, development and coaching.

This simple plan is the headline plan that I helped to set out for the incoming VP Sales of a SaaS company looking to scale sales above $10m ARR. This was done a few years back and reflecting on it now, I see it merges the second and third bullet-points (from the Insight Partners' list) into one workstream. I do think it is worth separating them - especially as I find both are often under-resourced and over-looked in scale-up companies.

Using data to manage and measure sales and marketing effectiveness is in no way new, but we do have new data, and we do have more data, and the discipline of RevOps has helped us to bring more focus to the importance of these. Looking back at my simple 90-day plan, I would say there is not enough focus on metrics.

Now when I start a new sales leadership engagement with a company, in my first 30-days I am looking for:

Revenue forecasting intelligence - how is forecasting done? - what's the process? - what's the cadence? - what's the historical accuracy? of course, these things are all one-stage beyond the immediate WHAT IS THE CURRENT FORECAST? question that has to be answered to know whether you need to go into crisis mode on either retention or acquisition.

Pipeline management intelligence - how is pipeline being generated? - how effective is that? - how is pipeline being nurtured? - how is it being advanced? - where is the pipeline weak / strong? - how does it compare to historical data? - what's the closing rate - win, loss, stalled and withered-and-died?

Performance intelligence - what does the historical data show? - what are current trends? - are there any red flags? - not just about the individuals, but also of the team - is there a good team dynamic?

The insights I gather from the above in the first 30-days help me identify the issues in terms of the results, and the processes which are or are not in place to drive the right results. This then helps to inform the 60- and 90- day sections of the plan.