RevOps Co-op Weekly #95 - Building a Better Funnel for Growth and Success Teams
Understanding the roles of growth teams and success teams is important to any organization. Defining roles of teams and their leadership help create stronger funnels to increase revenue.
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📣 COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT! 📣
The RevOps Co-op welcomes Spiff as a community partner to help our members with all of their sales commission planning and management questions!
So who is Spiff?
🤔
Spiff is a new class of software that creates trust across the organization by delivering real-time automation of commission calculations and motivates teams to drive top-line growth.
With a combination of an intuitive UI, real-time visibility, and seamless integrations into current systems, Spiff is the first choice among high-growth businesses. Spiff’s sales compensation platform enables finance and sales operations teams to self-manage complex incentive compensation plans and provides transparency for sales teams.
Building a Better Funnel for Growth and Success Teams
Understanding the role of a Customer Success team and how it can tie back to revenue is a top-down job. Blake Kendrick, the RevOps manager at Thankful, explains roles and responsibilities while also outlining a Growth team pipeline design.
Investing in a Customer Success team is a big commitment. When an organization does put resources into this function, they want to tie that team’s efforts into revenue increases through renewals and upsells within the existing customer base. After all, the success of your customers should go hand in hand with the success of your business. CS is there to deliver an amazing experience to ensure customer satisfaction, retention, and expansion, all in one.
Blake Kendrick, part of the RevOps Co-op’s Creators Guild and RevOps manager with Thankful, helps direct-to-consumer brands create positive customer experiences through AI. He knows what the ideal responsibilities are for Success teams, what leadership should be doing to enable them for positive outcomes and he also understands what pipelines should look like for both customer success and growth teams.
We are using this post to highlight his proposed “Funnel Design for Growth and Success Teams”. This is a go-to guide for those of you building out Customer Success and Growth functions. He breaks down the ideal responsibilities of this function, discusses retention vs. growth, and even offers sample stages and definitions for those of you thinking through CS Deal Stages.
Blake is an amazing resource and has just about every template you could possibly need when it comes to RevOps. Reach out to him if you want to learn more about this or any of his other original works.
While his outline here is specific to subscription-based B2B organizations, it is easily adapted to other types of business models. Let’s dive in!
Purpose
This document serves as a starting point for teams looking to tie investments in customer success back to revenue increases within their existing customer base. The sections below include suggested definitions for success teams’ responsibilities, as well as an example structure for a Growth pipeline design.
Define Success’s Responsibilities
The success team must have a clear functional definition within which to operate.
Success should focus on recognizing a path to growth, or, at a minimum, retention, and dedicating efforts to ensuring those target goals are reached per customer.
The two endpoints of growth and retention can look slightly different, but they generally involve the following actions:
Identifying customer goals
Assessing current state
Defining the path to achievement
Taking action to move toward target state
Reaching target state
Wash, rinse, repeat
When to resort to retention
The success team should always be aspirational and aim for growth, as growth in existing recurring revenue will have the most significant impact on the company’s financial health.
Setting retention as a target state for a customer means taking action to maintain the status quo. A retention target state is still acceptable, but should only be the success team’s desired outcome if growth cannot be achieved.
Customer account growth may not be an acceptable option if:
The customer perceives that a push for growth/improvement would be damaging to their org.
The provider org (your company) does not have an option available for contract growth.
Note that if option b is regularly present at your org, this may be a good prompt to revisit the product and understand what activated revenue growth looks like. In some cases, a product or feature addition is not the only way to grow; outcomes like increasing active user licenses or extending contract life could be your primary mechanisms for growth.
In any case, the team’s goal should always be to analyze the customer relationship, understand where things could be going better (even if they’re “good” today), and work toward those improvements.
Growth Pipeline Design
Having a clear separation between new business revenue and growth business revenue tends to be beneficial for org health, especially in regards to setting departmental objectives. From a data structure standpoint, this likely means applying different labels to the different opportunity types.
In the majority of cases, this also means entirely customizing the stages of the sales process (and breaking out separate pipelines) to best fit the respective opportunity types.
The growth pipeline is where the success team should manage opportunities for existing business, which typically includes the following types of sales:
Renewals
Upsells
Cross-sells
Downgrades/Saves
Stages and Definitions within the Growth Pipeline
Recommended growth pipeline stages include the following:
The Role of Success Leadership
The design and deployment of a growth pipeline inherently helps organize success operations to begin working toward objectives tied to revenue growth. However, work must be completed before and alongside the opportunities themselves to actually ensure they’re created.
The environment and culture within the success department should be driven by the department head(s). Those leaders should take on the responsibility of setting expectations and educating customer success reps around:
The defined quantitative and qualitative objectives for the success program (for both retention- and growth-related targets)
How often customer performance reviews or health checks should be conducted per customer engagement
What it looks to conduct a performance review or health check
How to use and manage opportunities within the growth pipeline, and how those actions impact org-level reporting and employee performance evaluations
Objective-setting and process development within success is often a joint effort between multiple team members, especially finance, sales, and success operations. In the case of designing customer performance reviews, product team members or solutions engineers also tend to be important contributors.
…There’s more! Read full Blog here 👉 Building a Better Funnel for Growth and Success Teams
🗣 From the Community
#04_revops-questions - Target Currency
CS target setting question: Do you set the targets in region currency or company currency (EUR in our case)? Read 7 replies
#04_revops-questions - SFDC API Calls
Any recommendations on tracking how many API calls each tool connected to SFDC is using per day? Read 6 replies
#08_tools-and-software - Automated Billing
We are shifting our pricing model to usage based pricing and were handling the billing manually in the trial run (price list in Excel; Usage data in Amplitude). Now we need to automate it. Does anyone have experiences with tools like Metronome? I am a bit afraid of Salesforce CPQ and do not see a lot of other options out there. Thanks! Read 8 replies
#08_tools-and-software - Customer Journey Mapping
Hello all, what do you use to map you customer journey? Do you have any tool or resources to recommend to tackle this topic? Read 5 replies
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📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
Why Your Comp Plans Aren’t Working | Gong
Graham Collins, Chief of Staff at QuotaPath, knows how to create compensation plans that are simple, logical, and fair. He’s breaking down why your comp plan is broken (and what you can do to fix it).
A Complete Guide to SaaS Sales Commission Accounting with ASC 606 | Everstage
Since its arrival, ASC 606 has completely changed the way organizations capitalize the incremental costs of obtaining a contract. Many accounting teams, both big and small, are finding their transition from old accounting standards to ASC 606 as a complicated, high-stakes task.
5 Sales Compensation Plan Examples to Get You Started | QuotaPath
In this blog, QuotaPath‘s Chief of Staff and host of Sales Nerds Live! Graham Collins shares 5 sales compensation plan examples. Read on for a sales manager compensation plan sample, sdr compensation plan, VP of Sales compensation package, sales rep commission, and recruiter commission plan sample.
🔥 A few HOT #RevOps Jobs
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