Leveraging the RevOps Team to Solve a Hierarchy of Problems

“Strategy means thinking of our weakest soldier as the standard and setting conditions accordingly to secure victory.”

-The Heroic Legend of Arslan

It might be bad form to use military quotes to talk about a dynamic business environment, but the one above speaks to a deep truth about a human enterprise. At the executive level, we spend countless hours looking at the trends of our star performers and asking, “What is the secret to their success and how can I harness it for the rest of my team?”  

We spend just as much time looking at data to try and define the performance of the “average salesperson” and extrapolate it to define future success even though there is no such mythical being as the “average salesperson.”  

As the Air Force learned in the 1950s, there is never a person who fits the “average” dimensions and so the Air Force developed adjustable cockpit seats and instruments in lieu of continuing to build pre-configured cockpits sized for the “average” pilot.  

In the same way, instead of focusing on average, executives responsible for sales and revenue should look at the business processes and systems holistically and ask, “Are the conditions correct so that even my weakest representatives can hit their goals?” 

A good Revenue Operations team helps answer that question across marketing, sales, and customer success by helping junior executive and director-level leadership solve complex problems to create a state of managed ambiguity focused on yearly goals linked to the larger strategic plan. The RevOps team does this by combining objective data and performance metrics and mapping them onto the business process to clearly show what works well and what needs to be improved. 

What’s the Problem Hierarchy? 

As shown in the graphic below that illustrates the Problem Hierarchy, at the highest levels, the business environment is the mathematical equivalent of a “wicked problem.”

At this level, solutions are somewhere on a spectrum of good and bad (but never true or false), there is no way to test the solution prior to implementation, there is no defined limit to the number of solutions or approaches, and there is no inherent logic rule that tells you when the problem is solved. 

For executives, this creates a state of perpetual ambiguity fueled by incomplete information, changing and contradicting requirements, and multiple independent variables with unknown dependencies. The business strategy provides a series of decisions and assumptions that create short-term plans for junior executives and directors to execute. 

These short-term plans are the equivalent of a “complex problem.” At this level, there are multiple independent variables and requirements might still change. The key difference is that complex problems have valid solutions, even if there is a time limit on how long that solution is valid.  

If the short-term plan contains goals with measurable KPIs (such as meetings per quarter), then junior executives can work through this state of managed ambiguity to create simple problems for their direct reports. Solving these complex problems creates simple problems at the bottom of an organization, allowing your reps to gain predictability and achieve repeatable performance. 

The Problem Hierarchy (Credit to Jay Miseli) 

Example: A Team and Process for SDRs

A good example of how the Revenue Operations team can help provide value in this Problem Hierarchy framework is within the SDR realm. At the junior executive/director level, someone should own the planning documents that set goals across the organization for the year. These documents should outline the KPIs necessary to achieve revenue goals.  

Within that framework, there exists a rough estimate of the number of prospects calls necessary to achieve X meetings, which in turn convert to Y opportunities. The normal outcome is for the SDR manager to then tell his reps to achieve a quarterly goal of booking Z meetings each. 

But where does the SDR begin? How does the SDR manager leverage his experience to enable his reps to succeed? The goal for the SDR manager is to structure the system in such a way that the SDRs have no real decisions to make and can instead focus on the right performance steps for successfully executing a cadence.  

Part of this can be done by training reps on the business process, but now you are increasing the mental load on the population that is generally your newest and most inexperienced representatives. While your stronger SDRs can look at a list of contacts and determine who the best person to call next is based on what you’ve taught them about time intervals between touchpoints, the cadence sequence they are in, and priority based on activity score and time in the queue, your weaker reps will struggle with making all these micro-decisions.  

A good RevOps team enables strong, repeatable performance by building an SDR view that is already nested with your existing business processes to eliminate those micro-decisions.  

For example, the SDR view should be a rank-ordered list that automates the business process for your reps based on your distinct criteria (high-value activities, time since lead entered the system, persona, etc). This eliminates most of a rep’s micro-decisions and all they have to do is put the contact into a cadence and initiate their outreach. This also means that the SDR manager has more time to individually tailor their coaching approach for each rep. Since the system is automatically assigning call orders based on defined processes, the SDR manager can coach his weaker reps on how to better execute the process while investing time in developing their stronger reps for their next position within the company.  

Similar approaches can be used throughout a company’s go-to-market motion to increase process efficiency and reduce end-user ambiguity.  

The Bottom Line

A strong revenue operations foundation is how you create the equivalent of adjustable cockpit seats to set your weakest team members up for success by reducing the number of things they need to think about and allowing them to instead focus on doing critical tasks to an excellent standard.

RevOps teams reduce internal complexity by automating business processes and outputting views tailored to individual roles, reducing ambiguity and micro-decisions, and allowing your employees to focus on what is truly important for strong, repeatable performances that lead to more overall revenue.