The Keys to Acheiving “Escape Velocity” With Your Commercial Transformation
Growing a business in 2023 is now a complex, data-driven, and technology enabled team sport. Most growth investments now support digital sales and marketing channels, and the data, systems, and operations needed to support them. As a result 90% of organizations are actively changing the way they lead and align revenue teams and the operations that support them to expand customer lifetime value and recurring revenues. 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate, simplify and streamline their commercial tech stack to make selling simpler, faster, and transparent. So it’s no surprise that Revenue Operations has become the fastest growing job in America.
While Revenue Operations offers every business enormous potential to generate more scalable, consistent and profitable growth – few executives have experience deploying it. A new generation of growth leaders are learning on the job as they seek to align processes, systems, and organizations that have never worked together before. CEOs are often too far removed from the core systems, workflows and data sets that make the modern revenue engine run. As a result, many Revenue Operations initiatives suffer from a “failure to launch” because their leaders face five core problems:
- Analysis paralysis – Evaluating hundreds of opportunities to connect the dots across the commercial ecosystem
- Risk management – Overcoming significant change management, operational and career risks
- Time to impact – Balancing building core capabilities and delivering impact in the short term
- Choosing where to start – Establishing tactical priorities we are making the smartest moves
- Lack of cooperation – Getting dozens of different operations and organizations working towards a common goal
Risk management is a bigger obstacle than people realize. Commercial transformation means change, and change is risky. Many people and organizations don’t like change. Fear of change threatens business innovation, including the successful deployment of Revenue Operations. The list of commercial transformation initiatives that have failed because they were too ambitious and required too many cultural shifts is long. Long-term investments, even good ones, sometimes distract good, effective short-term management.
“Around 90% of companies we studied expected substantial change in their commercial organizations over the next three years. That was remarkable in my experience,” says Bob Kelly. “What this means is that sales leaders now need to focus on what I call change leadership versus change management. The change going on goes beyond simply implementing a program and having people understand and adopt it. Now it’s about changing the hearts and minds of the revenue team. A change leader has to help people understand why they have to adapt their behaviors, even their belief systems about what it means to be a salesperson in this organization. Establishing a common purpose is important because it gives people in disparate sales, development, specialist, and customer success role the incentives to work together to grow revenue and customer lifetime value.”
Efforts to tune the commercial engine represents a great opportunity for revenue, sales and marketing operations managers and professionals. The quest to build a “high octane growth engine” from the many modern selling practices, technologies, methods, and systems within their commercial organization is good for their businesses. It’s good for the revenue teams they support. And it’s good for their career trajectory.
Operations leaders need to stay mindful of organizational and structural risks they face as they seek to connect the dots across the many systems that live in silos across their companies. This is because the typical operations leader charged with commercial technology consolidation lacks the span of control, mandate and influence to get other parts of the organization to cooperate with their efforts. The senior leaders that have the ability to deploy capital, take risks, and control incentives across functions often push too much change management burden on more junior operations managers. But only they have the authority and span of control to establish the common purpose required to align the many stakeholders in finance, marketing, product, sales and technology required to pull off a commercial transformation project. Sugato Deb reinforces this point. “For a technology implementation to succeed, it has to deliver value at all three levels of the internal organization and extend the value all the way to the customer,” he emphasizes. “The C-level executives who direct growth strategy, the customer facing employees that execute it, and the operations team that activates them.”
Unless you address these fundamental issues and obstacles, Revenue Operations strategy will struggle to acheive lift off.
Four Keys to Acheiving “Escape Velocity” With Your Commercial Transformation
To help Revenue Operations leaders ensure their programs achieve “lift off”, the authors of the definitive book on Revenue Operations, have developed a ninety day program to help Your Revenue Operations Initiative achieve “lift off”. The Revenue Operations Ignition program helps executives tasked with leading and executing Revenue Operations get the help they need to overcome the obstacles to success:
- A Personalized Launch Plan – A fact based and personalized roadmap based on the unique capabilities, economic levers and maturity of your organizations based on a comprehensive 72-point Revenue Operations maturity model;
- A Consensus On Priorities and “Where to Start” – Providing a financially sound and externally validated based for prioritizing the highest impact and lowest risk “smart actions” that deliver immediate financial impact and build towards scalable capabilities;
- A Common Purpose Across All Customer Facing Teams – Getting all your stakeholders on aligned with common goals, measures, ways of working and incentives to drive action and teamwork;
- Short Term Results to Initiate a Process Continuous Improvement – by establishing scorecards and feedback loops to initiate a process of ongoing continuous improvement in performance.
If you are interested in learning more about our Revenue Operations book, research, benchmarks and acceleration programs please reach out to us on the form below, and a member of our team will arrange to get you a complimentary copy of our bestselling book on Revenue Operations – and schedule time to meet with the authors and practitioners who developed it to discuss your unique challenges defining and deploying Revenue Operations in your business.
