The renewed popularity of a Revenue Operations function seems rather obvious at first glance. The economy is extremely tough, which has prompted companies to hire operational efficiency experts. The idea is, as the saying goes, “do more with less.”
Unfortunately, RevOps find themselves largely doing less than they hoped.
We recently surveyed 100 RevOps professionals, and the vast majority told us that instead of tackling strategic work, they get bogged down in the mud of day-to-day tasks. They fall into sticky time traps that fail to resolve the root cause of their team’s inefficiency. Of these 100 respondents, 66% said they spend too much time on data hygiene and 73% said they spend too much time on process compliance.
It was – and still is – pretty obvious that companies hire people with an overly optimistic view of what they want their new hires to achieve. But thankfully, there are ways RevOps can work their way out of this hole.
Let’s see how you can open your schedule and get the time you need. RevOps leaders need to carve out enough time for their day-to-day business before they can even think about tackling the bigger, meatier projects.
To do this, we recommend:
RevOps leaders need to carve out enough time for their day-to-day business before they can even think about tackling the bigger, meatier projects.
1. Fight ad hoc requests with a ticketing system
Email, Slack, paper airplanes, shouts from across the office—for many RevOps, these inputs are an overwhelming, multi-channel swarm of wishes, requests, and outright demands.
And for that, half the battle is in following. Even if your team doesn’t use advanced software to manage tickets, you can fix this mess in three steps.
We suggest the following:
- Consolidate request tracking in one easy-to-access place;
- Track the order (date and time) and urgency of each request; And
- Develop an SLA for yourself based on what is being requested and by whom (for example, a week or more for a business development representative’s request versus within a day for executive requests).
Your ticketing system can be as simple as a shareable three-column Google spreadsheet: Who are you? What do you need? What date is it? Just set the expectation that if the rules are followed, everyone wins. (Bonus: Codification here will certainly help leadership understand your burden and make resource decisions later.)
2. Automate, automate and automate
McKinsey says 30% of sales activities can be automated. Look for opportunities to streamline tasks to free up bandwidth. Some of the most influential areas are:
- Contact: If you or your team are still manually creating contact or lead records.
- report: If you have recurring reports that are delivered consistently.