The Process of Building Process

Wait what did you just say?

Happy new year everyone! I hope you had an amazing holiday break and celebrated the new year with friends and family.

This week is another snippet from the Revenue Operations Impact (ROI) ebook. The post is truncated and for paying members the entire post will be made available. But hopefully you still find tremendous value here!

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I’m a fundamental believer if you do not operate under the guise of a framework, you are operating blindly. Here’s my overarching framework for Revenue Operations.

Revenue Operations Impact Framework

At the center of the two rings one could imagine the word company would be placed there. I believe at the center of these two rings should be the customer. Why? The customer is at the center of everything we do. The inner ring represents the buyer’s or user’s journey. Delight the customer and everything else is taken care of. The outer ring represents the Go To Market journey. These four pillars represent the key ingredients for the company to ensure a smooth journey for the customer. 

There are fundamental tenets one brings to the table each and every single day.

ROI Tenets

Revenue Operations responsibilities vary wide and far. They also differ from company to company. They differ throughout each stage of a company’s maturity. The following tenets serve as a foundational baseline from which to operate from. The core ROI tenets are:

1. Enable the business to take calculated risks.

2. Bias for action is the answer to analysis paralysis.

3. Stay three steps ahead of your business leaders.

4. Meetings must have agendas to drive order and accountability.

5. Ruthless prioritization will protect not only the business, but also your well being.

6. Capacity planning ahead of time will enable you to properly determine resource priorities.

Feelings count more than functionality; focus on the end user experience through clear communication, thoughtful planning, and enablement. Make sure your partners feel you have their back.

Tenets. Live them, love them, abide by them

Process

Revenue Operators often talk about process as key to their success. One of my favorite quotes is from W. Edwards Demming…

If you can’t describe something as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing

Okay… but what exactly makes a good process? Well that’s what this post is all about. The process of creating a process.

Mechanisms

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned at Amazon is that anyone, anywhere can bring with them is the concept of mechanisms and working backwards. I’m going to go a bit deep here as it should serve as background knowledge for you to develop processes to truly help your business scale. A mechanism, or Complete Process (CP), is a complete, closed loop process that consists of seven key components. The next seven sections will cover specific steps in which an operator can use to build a Complete Process. The goal is to drive change within the business and the following tools will allow you to do so.

The seven steps are

1. Identify the business challenge

2. Outputs

3. Build the tool

4. Adoption

5. Inspection

6. Define the inputs

7. Iteration

Use the results of inspection to improve the mechanism. Iterate on the tool, adoption, inspection methodologies, and the inputs and outputs.

Identify the business challenge

Work backwards from a clear and concise problem statement as you design and implement your mechanism. Avoid using this one mechanism to try solving multiple business problems. These processes should be singularly focused if possible.

Start with articulating a clear problem statement with the intent of solving the right problem. The output of your process should solve this particular problem. It’s far too easy to solve the wrong problem. As you develop multiple processes, remember that multiple processes often work together. One clear example of this is that one output from one process may be the input to another. For example, the output from a process called “Lead Capture” will be the input to a process called “Lead Routing”. 

If you need help, try to answer the following questions:

1. Who will benefit from resolving this issue?

2. What undesirable impact/situation/outcome are you looking to address?

3. What is the impact of the problem?

4. What will improve as a result of this problem being resolved?

5. How can you quantify the impact?

Outputs

Articulate the desired outcome by resolving the business challenge. What results do you want to deliver, on an ongoing basis, from the mechanism(s) you design to address your business challenge?

If you need help, try to answer the following questions:

1. What is at the root of the business challenge, and how does it need to change? Try using a Root Cause Analysis

2. If my team had __________ we could deliver better results for our customers.

Tooling

The tool is the structure that you need people to adopt in order to turn your controllable inputs into desired outputs. The tool is the focal point of your Complete Process and is built using organizational levers (discussed in detail below). Tools can be simple ("teams will create tenets to align thinking across parties, and guide future decisions"), or complex ("we will create software to automate critical business decisions"). Once you’ve landed on a workable starting strategy for your tool, decide how you will use the various organizational levers to deliver the outputs you want.

Need help building a tool? Ask yourself these questions:

1. What needs to be different about the current state in order to achieve my desired output?

2. What existing products/processes can I add to in order to achieve my desired output?

3. What existing organizational levers are working for or against my mechanism? You might be able to use levers that already exist to minimize resistance to the change.

4. Who would be good to partner with on a brainstorming session about your idea? Inspiration for tools can be found from many sources: asking others for ideas, researching related concepts from other fields, or testing a good idea through rapid prototyping.

5. Is there something that already exist that if people adopted, would lead to my desired outputs?

Examples:

Adoption

Consider who will need to adopt your tools in order to produce the desired outcomes. Involve them early and frequently to ensure buy in. Teams and individuals will need to adopt and use your tool in order for the mechanism to turn your controllable inputs into desired outputs. 

The influence and effort required to gain adoption for your tool from the necessary teams and individuals will vary each time you build a mechanism. Begin this work early in your mechanism-building process by identifying the specific groups you will need to bring onboard. 

Assess what their barriers to adoption may be and brainstorm ways to address them. Assembling the correct combination of organizational levers during this step is crucial in gaining adoption of your tool. For instance, adopting a new way to measure a business result (Metrics) will only get you so far if you are not sharing that metric with the right stakeholders (Message Flow) and if stakeholders are not aligned on its importance (Goals).

Not all individuals in a stakeholder group are the same. You may need to use multiple tactics with a stakeholder group to address multiple concerns, including the "what’s in it for me" message for each of the stakeholders.

Key questions:

1. Who needs to adopt the tool?

2. What actions will address their barriers to adoption?

3. What is driving resistance?

4. How ready are they and what actions do I need to take in order to get them ready?

Thanks for reading this far.

The last three sections cover Inspection, Inputs, and Iteration. These final three portions of the process design are available to paid subscribers. Next week I’ll cover what it means to “work backwards” and the importance of policies and rewards.

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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.