RevOps Co-op Weekly #5 - GTM tech stack mistakes to avoid, growth edition
Your predecessor has done their best to set you up with a solid tech stack, but there are...quirks. Sound familiar?
RevOps Co-op provides resources, content and community for those who ❤️ revenue operations. This weekly newsletter features collected tweets, posts and thoughts on a variety of RevOps topics.
🙅🏻♂️ 7 GTM tech stack mistakes to avoid, growth edition
Your predecessor has done their best to set you up with a solid tech stack, but there are...quirks.
Your marketing automation platform is a bit of a mess, your CRM is usable (but clunky), and customer success is on a different, quasi-integrated system. Now that you’re scaling your sales organization, it’s time to get serious about demand generation and smoothing out hand-offs to customer success.
If this sounds familiar, the company has probably busted the startup bubble and made its way into the growth phase. Congrats! Now the name of the game is scaling efficiently, and by “efficiently,” we mean as low cost as possible.
Fortunately, you have access to enough budget to weigh going with a less expensive product or saving person-hours with a more robust solution. Usually.
Do Remember Everything Was Done for a Reason
If you’ve been with your company from the start, it’s easy to remember there was a reason you customized your systems. The customizations may not be useful today, but at one point in time, someone in the organization needed whatever is sitting there now.
Over the years, I learned to seek to understand before giving advice. Ask clarifying questions and get to the root of why something was done.
Don’t Die on Every Hill
You will discover old customizations that aren’t being used. And you will also discover people who insist you keep those customizations no matter how much data you gather to show they aren’t being used.
RevOps professionals typically have a to-do list many pages long, and no matter how many items they check off, new priorities take their place. It can feel like running in place. Don’t make it worse by fixating on every roadblock. Find another battle worth waging and put your energy there.
Do Prioritize Technical Debt
Change requests stack up quickly. Before you know it, the simple request you promised an executive you could knock out quickly ends up happening three months later.
It can be hard to convince people that a RevOps process improvement is worth putting off, say, refreshing a sales process. The way to convince leadership is by calculating your opportunity cost if you continue to put off addressing technical debt. Using the example above, Lance gained the bandwidth to complete one major project per quarter with the time savings gained with the new solution.
Don’t Leave Your Experts Out of Key Conversations
Projects to prepare your business systems for scaling will come at your team fast, and it’s impossible to stay caught up unless your business scales your department to keep up with the organization’s demands. Sometimes, the delay in getting something a business leader perceive as simple to do will inspire them to get “creative.”
This usually means either buying a tool they think will solve their problem or hiring someone to install something for them.
We’re not saying outsourcing is always a bad thing. If you do your homework and hire someone very good, it’s a great way to augment the technical side of your operations team in the short run. However, you can’t expect a fantastic consultant to come in cold turkey and know potential landmines they’ll face during their project.
Do Consider Hiring More Expertise
Contractors are great, but they’re expensive long term. Each time you have to hire a different contractor because your original contractor no longer has time, that’s potentially weeks you now need to spend catching the new contractor up on why your system is the way it is and what has to change. Contractors also have a limited number of hours they can dedicate to your projects.
Hiring a full-time person means 100% of their working hours are dedicated to your company alone. They’re also likely to be at your company a lot longer than a contractor.
Don’t Get Too Attached to Old Solutions
Switching to something new can seem daunting, but it's essential to be objective. Not selecting a different vendor may mean missing out on the ability to scale quickly. Emotions can get in the way when you’re asked to give something up you've built from day one.
Sometimes the right answer is to stay the course, but make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.
Don’t Let People Punish You for Being Efficient
This point was in our Startup Edition, but it’s important wisdom for a RevOps professional in any company.
Insist on scaling your RevOps organization proportionately to the departments you are supporting.
Read the full blog post on this topic from RevOps Co-op here 👉🏻 7 GTM tech stack mistakes to avoid, growth edition
🐦 This week in #RevOps Twitter
“Execution involves change - embrace it” - #truth
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📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
How to price your SaaS product, by Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell
Pricing is one of those topics that sits at the nexus of uncomfortable and long-term, which means companies often don’t think about it for far too long. Even when they eventually figure it out, they don’t touch it again for years.
The most successful companies optimize monetization in some manner every quarter. You may be thinking, “they change their price every 3 months!?” No, and that's the first lesson of monetization: pricing goes so much further than the actual price.
Challenges in establishing RevOps, from the IronHorse blog
Okay, you’ve seen the benefits of RevOps and understand that it’s in your organization’s best interest because it improves the dynamics between your departments and keeps everyone focused on the same goals and KPIs. That all sounds great, but what’s the catch and what are the challenges?
Broadly speaking, common challenges with RevOps fall into three categories; politics, uncertainty and partnership.
Turn your funnel upside down and shake out a plan to over deliver after a crisis, from Forrestor
For many sales reps, the daily routine has ground to a halt with the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers are in a crisis, and no one is thinking about buying anything but the essentials. However, this situation also provides the capacity to prepare for success when we move past this. There are opportunities to set your sales organization up to over-deliver at this point.
Here are four things your teams should be doing right now to set yourself up for success: 1) Salesforce automation system spring cleaning, 2) opportunity analysis, 3) relationship progress, and 4) identification of better ways to engage and interact.
Funl is an operating system for your GTM team that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together.