Building a repeatable organization

Last week we talked about the Revenue Operating Model and how important it is to have marketing, sales, and customer success come to the table with a unified view. Doing so not only avoids embarrassing executive meetings, but also accelerates a business’ opportunity to execute its plan.

Once the operating plan is in place, the next step is to develop a plan and to execute constructing a sustainable organization. This goes beyond just hiring. It’s about a plan to develop the who, what, and how.

Previously I covered at a high level the concepts of capacity and capability. In this post we’ll go over some on-the-ground details to help you build your organization out. So let’s break down the following.

1. Roles

2. Top Sales Rep Profile(s), SDR Profiles

3. Repetitive Onboarding Training

Roles

Determining roles in the organization is a continually evolving process. But during Annual Planning in Q3 and Q4 the organization hones in on the critical roles required to meet the organization’s goals. One useful tool to develop is a set of Roles Matrices. Below are two varieties of these matrices.

Level and Function Matrix

This is a sample laddering of a GTM Operations organization. I’ve used this tool to level set on:

• Breadth of responsibility

• Depth of experience

• Investment level required to surplus productivity

The next view I’m a big fan of is a Roles-Process Matrix. Before getting to that, remember what the typical sales processes may look like (image below).

Below is the fictitious customer lifecycle we discussed last week, but this time we’ve overlaid different roles with the black colored sticky notes.

To make this model work there are several different roles playing their part in the customer lifecycle. Below is a super simple view of each role. Based on your own mapping you may develop a different picture altogether.

• Sales Development Rep (SDR):

  • Day to day: Field inbound leads or prospect outbound to generate meetings with target personas/accounts

  • Skills they will build: cursory industry/product knowledge, cold calling, cadence building, time management, set meetings, qualifying

  • Success metric: qualified meetings held, pipeline accepted

• Account Executive (AE):

  • Day to day: generate net new pipeline, progress pipeline, close net new business

  • Skills they will build: deep industry/product knowledge, cold calling, cadence building, account planning, time management, forecasting, champion building, negotiating, closing

  • Success metric: revenue booked

• Sales Manager (MGR):

  • Day to day: recruit and retain talent, coach and lead team, forecast, territory / district planning, apply performance management framework,

  • Skills they will build: deep industry/product knowledge, cold calling, cadence building, account planning, time management, forecasting, cascade business initiatives to team

  • Success metric: revenue growth

• Operations (OPS):

  • Day to day: build and execute GTM processes, infrastructure, and reporting

  • Skills they will build: cross functional partnership, business systems, forecasting, consensus building

  • Success metric: SLAs met, process adoption, real time data availability, maximum viable hygiene, low variance forecast

• Professional Services (PS):

  • Day to day: review pre-customer and customer intake requirements, design solution mapping, communicate design options, feasibility analyses

  • Skills they will build: cross functional partnership, solution co-development, proposal building

  • Success metric: accept or reject opportunity based on product fit, escalate product or service customizations

• Implementation Manager (IM):

  • Day to day: engage with customers on low-touch or high-touch basis, create detailed plans to implement complex systems and solutions, oversee project from initial scope assessments to roll out and monitoring

  • Skills they will build: cross functional partnership, solution co-development, proposal building, project management

  • Success metric: implementation SLAs met,

Let’s recap what we’ve learned about setting roles.

1. Are the roles and responsibilities clearly defined? A Role-Process Matrix will help here. This goes beyond just a job description.

2. Is there a set career path or established lateral paths for the role? A Role-Level Matrix will help here.

3. Is there a Performance Management Framework in place? I didn’t go over this today but a PMF establishes what’s above and below the bar for the role.

Top Profiles

Here is a perfect opportunity to work backwards from. Hiring a world class team is the most important leading indicator of a successful business. As a reminder, the four steps of working backwards are:

1. Listen

2. Define

3. Invent

4. Refine

In this case, listening involves examining the most successful hires you’ve made. If it’s a one-off role there’s more risk involved since you’ll lack sufficient evidence to prove what will work and what will not. But for roles such as SDRs and AEs, there are a number of examples to pluck from both internally and externally. Here’s where you establish a profile of the ideal candidate(s).

Let’s say for example you’re bringing in a GTM Operations Analyst. What are the qualities you might entertain? I use this example because I’ve had to build teams myself or coach others on how they might construct their own. Here are some traits to look out for:

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A word on the Patreon Group

Thanks for reading all the way to this point. If you’re interested in diving deeper and want to get your hands on some real life templates then consider joining the RevOps Rehab Patreon group. We meet on a bi-weekly basis to talk about anything on your mind. Consider joining us today: www.patreon.com/revopsrehab. Full Substack posts are also posted on the Patreon.

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