Building your GTM Systems Strategy (Chapter 2: RevOps Handbook)

This handbook on Go-To-Marketing (GTM) Operations provides a roadmap on how to build a full-funnel Operations team.? GTM Operations is often referred to as Revenue Operations but, because that term can refer just to Sales Operations, I prefer the GTM Operations term which clearly includes all Operations teams that optimize customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, customer success, support)

If you are still wondering why you need GTM Ops, here is a great post.

While I am passionate about the value of having a single Operations team supporting all Ops functions across the customer journey (see Chapter 1) the practices in this handbook are useful for any flavor of Operations team and are written for four audiences.??

• C-Level: Who want to have strong Operations capabilities for the company
• GTM Leaders (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success):?Who want to know how to fully leverage Operations
• GTM Operations leaders:?Who desire to build a great Operations function to amplify their company
• GTM Operations teammates:?Who want a roadmap that can guide them in their role and career?

The theme that runs through this handbook is “Amplify”.?This concept is a core value at Culture Amp and is central to the role I see Operations playing in a company.?This handbook is broken into six articles to allow a deep dive into each topic.

• Chapter 1: Team
• Chapter 2: Systems (this article)
• Chapter 3: Data
• Chapter 4: Stakeholders
• Chapter 5: Capacity
• Chapter 6: Enablement

Bonus (two of the most comprehensive Ops deep dives I've seen)

• CSOPS : CSOps handbook from 'nuffsaid
• MOPS: MOPS handbook from MadKudu

Chapter 1 looks at the team, mission, scope, organizational structure, and leader you need in order to have a solid Operations team.

Chapter 2-6 focuses on each of the five core pillars of a successful Operations team.?Think of these as things “outside of your direct control” which you want to make sure you keep visible for your executive team.?Each quarter our team meets and rates how we stand on each of the following pillars and discusses what is holding us back from our mission of amplifying the company.??

Finally a few caveats.?This handbook is focused on:

• Operations foundations, not strategy: We have left the strategy for specific areas of GTM Operations for future articles around each area of the Go-To-Market motion.
• Scaling SaaS companies: ?This article is written with a SaaS / B2B perspective and focuses on how to scale companies.?We focus on companies that can budget for their first full-time Operations hire, typically a few million in ARR.

Chapter 2: Systems

Systems Ownership

Systems encode the processes and structure the data that Operations leverages to amplify customer teams.?I believe that your GTM Operations teams should own the business rules for core customer systems.?Typically what I recommend is:

• GTM Operations: ?Owns the system configurations (fields, workflows, point-to-point integrations between customer systems) as well as the vendor relationships
• IT:?Owns access, uptime, upgrades, security, complex integrations for all systems as well as any communication and knowledge management systems that work across the entire company

I believe this division of Operations ownership of customer systems is important to set the right foundation for a few reasons:

• Align with the customer journey:?Operations is deeply embedded with the customer journey and can bring the context to system design.
• Facilitate right decisions: ?Empowering Operations to own how strategic decisions are operationalized in systems puts the team in the right position to play this critical role.
• Ensure that business functionality (in addition to financial criteria) is prioritized with vendors: ?Understanding the business context puts the Operations team in a great position to aggressively manage features, pricing, and roadmap requirements.
• A balance between speed and process:?Operations optimizes for the customer team needs.?Both reliability and speed of execution are both important and Operations rather than IT is best positioned to balance these needs.?As companies get very mature and the need to formalize releases, you will need to charge your Operations team to scale up processes appropriately.

One side note is that if you don’t have Operations managing systems across all functions (see chapter 1) you run the risk of siloed teams purchasing unneeded systems or making your existing ones overly-complex.?Some challenges I have seen where systems strategy isn’t unified across go-to-market teams:

• Customer Experience: The inability to measure key metrics like call volume across marketing, sales, and customer success can lead to communication fatigue and disengagement from customers.
• Overspending on SaaS: Customer success teams buying additional tools because they can’t get the fields they need in salesforce
• Lack of Alignment: Marketing and sales having three competing lead scoring tools

"The best Rev Ops leaders are the ones that reduce friction at the various intersections of departments. Their understanding of the customer journey improves the impact of any cross-functional initiatives and they will always be objective when teams need to be held accountable". Ben Lewinsky, RevOps Leader

• Duplication: Buying separate lead routing tool as salesforce lead routing can’t move at the speed of the business

Systems Strategy

A key role that Operations plays is to coordinate the software spend across your customer-facing teams.?This ensures

• Strategy alignment
• Prioritization (within budget)
• Coordinated execution

Our GTM Operations team works closely with each business lead on systems strategy to ensure we understand their workflow, pain points, and how to align decisions across groups.?We ask our stakeholders to bring us problems rather than solutions.?We can then work with teams on the right solutions.?Often we find that we can help solve many pains with existing solutions.?We also see opportunities to engage other teams in the problem to ensure the success of new solutions by implementing across different parts of the customer journey.

Once we have aligned on the pain/need, our GTM Operations team will also work:

• With leadership to ensure we are prioritizing the most impactful investments
• With legal, security, and IT to ensure we are implementing securely

Managing Vendors

In addition to configuring the business rules managing systems requires discipline around how you manage your vendors.?Here are a few strategies and principles we have developed over the years:

• Think about the long-term with every vendor:?Regardless of the length of your initial contract, you are embarking on a long-term partnership with the vendor and will, presumably, be integrating their software deeply into your stack. It is therefore critical that both parties have the hard conversations up front to ensure that expectations are aligned. This article outlines three questions I have found valuable to ensure alignment and create the best long-term deal for both parties.
• Invest in implementation:?Many systems fail because they weren’t implemented well.?We start our implementation planning during procurement and make sure that we resource the right Operations and business stakeholders to ensure success.??
• Train the team: ?Training teams on tools helps them and also amplifies the Operations team.?If you don’t have a full enablement team (See Chapter 6) or LMS, you can always start with a Confluence page for each tool, quick videos, and manager training.
• Have a strategy for each vendor:?We track each system our team manages in a simple Google Sheet that allows us to track costs, owner, renewal, and strategy for each vendor.?Below are the categories we use to classify each vendor.?Roughly 10% of our SaaS spend is typically in the bottom two categories.

• Know the investment you have in each function:?We are thoughtful about the system cost per teammate.?Below is a chart we review quarterly which shows the per user tools by function and vendor.?Note that marketing is always low because most tools don’t charge by number of users.

• Help our vendors grow:? Buying software is a partnership! Just as your vendor is helping you grow, you can do the same for them.?Two ways we do this are serving as river guides to help them drive adoption and by speaking on behalf of our vendors.

Note: This is the second chapter of the GTM Operations Handbook. See above in article for links to the other 5 chapters.