As a Revenue Operations consultant, most of my projects are built around the desire to take complex commercial requirements and data structures, and make it into a simple playbook. The goal is to end up with a process so simple that your team can spend all their energy on the things they do best, while the process and the systems are already taking care of necessary tracking, reporting, and maintenance, etc. for them.
After many years of working on countless projects within operations and process design, both successful and some better described as learning experiences, I will share with you the three absolutely critical phases of not just process design, but the change management that naturally follows.
The same three phases are described in a number of methodologies in a large variety of fields, but I've done my best to adapt them into what matters in this context.
Much like a software company should achieve product market fit before they invest another billion into specific features, we should also make sure we focus on the most valuable activities before we try to scale our efforts.
Effective: Uncover the best methods to address your most important metrics
Creating a new process, or improving an existing one should not start with doing things faster, but with doing the right things. The focus should be on answering what it is that you really want the outcome to be, and what possible methods can achieve that goal.
Let's assume your goal is to close as many new clients as possible. Phase one is not the time to work on how you can call more people per day. You want to address what actions can be taken to close a new client, and which of those actions will have the most positive and predictable result.
Experimenting with, and combining different methods of connecting with prospects, like cold calling, cold emails, ramping up advertisement or inbound activities, or connecting with people at relevant events like conferences, and other methods, will help you understand the most effective ways to achieve predictable results.
Maybe calling really is the way to gold in your industry, but focusing your lists on specific industries or personas will have a larger impact on results than hiring more staff and calling more people. You will benefit a lot more from optimizing your process after these factors have been addressed.
Easy: Change management, training, and consistency will set you up for long term success
Once you have the methods figured out and know what key activities will drive performance, you need to help your team master this way of working. Set up systems, guiderails, have training sessions, and brainstorm ways to lower the barriers and remove distractions so your team can consistently focus their energy on what they do best, without being distracted by everything else. If your team don't know the process, or don't understand why some part of the process is important, it will be hard for them to perform well.
The goal of this phase is to give the team enough time to learn and adapt to a new process, as well as making it easy and intuitive for everyone to follow the same process. Data gathering and tracking should be automated if possible, and the team should see what they need to see, without distractions.
A new member of the team should ideally be able to understand what to do and start working without memorizing a playbook.
Efficient: Optimize the process to reduce friction and improve results
Now that you have an effective method in place, and your team can consistently deliver on it, you can begin the phase all operations specialists are eager to jump into right away: Optimizing and automating everything!
Well, not everything, but you get the point. It is time to scale. Identify any part of your process where there is time to save, friction to remove, or activities that can be automated without negatively impacting the results.
Going from open answer to categorizing common feedback channels, or automating qualification emails for certain segments are some examples of typical initiatives in this process.
A typical timeline could look something like this.
The efficient stage is often an open-ended process to continuously work on improvements and adapt for changes in the market as well. A high performing process should in my opinion always be up to date and consistently updated, while the capacity you need to invest in this will vary greatly from one company to the next, and also over time.
