90-Day Plan for a New RevOps Leader

How to get oriented, deliver quick wins, and build a solid foundation

A friend of mine asked what a 90-day plan for a newly-hired RevOps leader would look like. The right plan is going to be very different depending on the company size and context, but I thought it would be interesting to flesh out my thoughts in detail. It’s a good exercise in prioritization.

Objective

As a newly-hired RevOps leader, create a plan for the first 90 days of your tenure.

Company context

Hypothetical assumptions for the purpose of the exercise:

• Early-stage scale-up, about 80-100 employees
• Approximately $25-$30M ARR
• Blended PLG / sales-led motion
• Strong product-market fit and growth
• Strong GTM functional leaders in place
• Tech stack: Salesforce, Hubspot, Chili Piper, Gong, etc.
• No existing RevOps team. Tasks are handled ad-hoc by GTM functions with a small amount of agency support. So assume a relatively blank slate.

Guiding principles

In tackling a problem like this, here are a few key principles I’d keep in mind.

• Embrace the chaos: Your job is to work towards order, but things will be messy and imperfect for a while. That’s OK.
• Focus on revenue impact: You need to build for the future while driving the biggest impact today. Aim for quick wins and direct influence on revenue.
• Be realistic: It can be tempting to run straight towards your ideal state. But it’s dangerous to bite off more than you can chew. Start with what’s achievable and good enough, then lay plans for future improvements.

With all that said, let’s go on to the plan.

Days 0-30

Learning and onboarding

Starting at a new company gives a huge shock to the system. There are a thousand unspoken cultural norms and ways of working that will seem strange and unfamiliar.

You can’t stay in learning mode for too long, but take the first few weeks to acculturate, form relationships, and build a context-picture.

• Standard company onboarding
• 1-1s with GTM leaders and company execs
• Quick audit of existing systems
• Ride-alongs with SDRs, AEs, CSMs, etc. Get to know the process first hand.
• Review Gong calls.
• Review existing dashboards and reports.

Take copious notes during all of this. Your perception will never so fresh, and you’ll notice things that later on will become invisible.

Universal GTM reporting

In the absence of RevOps, it’s likely reporting is done ad-hoc by different teams, with each leader having their own reports with different numbers.

Without a common view of the world, teams aren’t fully aligned. And in the absence of revenue observability, the exec team has a harder time making good decisions and reacting nimbly.

So aligning the team around a universal set of executive-level GTM KPIs and reports is the first step. This is just a v1 and will surely evolve.

You should be able to pull these reports from CRM, while accepting data quality won’t be pristine.

There should be a weekly ritual to review this data as an executive team, discuss issues, and identify where action is needed. If this ritual doesn’t already exist, create one.

Get some professional help

At the current scale of our hypothetical company, it’s impossible for one RevOps person to do everything.

Plus, if you have no help, you’ll inevitably get pulled into a tactical / supporting mode and fail as a leader.

It’s too early at this stage to hire an FTE, so the best bet is support from an agency/contractor. They can help you run systems, troubleshoot, and take care of day-to-day issues while you put bigger building blocks in place.

Hypothetical-but-reasonable volume for this:

• 10 hrs / week to manage day-to-day support requests and issues from the field
• 10 hrs / week on new feature development and improvements in systems

Days 31-60

From this point, in the real world, you should ultimately be making prioritization decisions based on your KPIs. (This is the key to doing the right work.)

But for the purposes of our hypothetical plan, here’s a reasonable set of next steps.

Forecast accuracy

Job #1 for RevOps is to bring predictability and insight to the business. Without this, leaders can’t make good business decisions.

The biggest pain is usually the sales-led revenue and churn forecast. To bring this under control, we need:

• A structured pipe-cleaning process for reps to follow (expectations for updating close dates, amounts, next steps, etc.). For the renewal pipe, this would include measures of account health, escalations, etc.
• A coaching process to drive rep accountability, ensuring pipe gets reviewed weekly in rep-manager 1-1 meetings. As a RevOps leader, you also need to be applying scrutiny and creating a culture of rigour.
• An executive-level ritual to review the forecast in a weekly meeting and discuss significant changes. This ensures revenue leaders remain highly focused on keeping the pipe clean, actioning deals or customers at risk, etc.

Funnel Optimizations

Based on KPIs, call reviews, and ride-alongs, you should now have some sense of where the revenue process is most broken. And within those areas, there are hopefully some quick wins—usually related to increasing velocity and improving customer experience.

This is your chance to deliver quick revenue impact while you simultaneously build longer-term infrastructure. A few good options:

• Speed-to-lead: Improving response time for hand-raisers with a quick SLA.
• AE handoff: Automating the handoff process between SDRs/AEs using a calendar tool, so that prospects get to the demo as quickly as possible.
• New customer hand-off: Getting enterprise projects kicked off as quickly as possible and shrinking the time to value delivery.

Days 61-90

Funnel Optimizations

Continue your work on funnel optimization quick wins.

Roadmap

Plan your roadmap for the next 1-2 quarters, maximum.

At this stage of growth I don’t find it very useful to plan ahead further than this (aside from a few big rock items). The revenue function needs to be more agile and reactive at this stage, and so ops needs to flex along with it.

Here are some future initiatives to consider:

• Hiring: at around 6 months in, you should consider the design of your team for longer-term growth and your first few hires. A few likely candidates are a CRM Admin, a marketing/campaign ops role, and a sales ops / CS ops role focused on analysis, performance improvement, territory, comp, etc.
• Funnel tracking: I’m a big believer in the need for a clean data layer for funnel tracking using a custom object. This is critical for reliable funnel metrics and measuring the efficacy of different buying signals to optimize sales efforts.
• Churn prevention: It’s far cheaper to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one. Ensure you have the right processes to get customers to value, monitor their success, and react swiftly to any warning signs.

What did I miss?

This is one possible path. What would you change? What would you add?

Originally published on RevOps FM. Please subscribe to support my work.