Intent-Based Revenue Operations: Maximize your Revenue Operations Team's Impact

We Got This!

I've always seen the same issues at every company I’ve had the pleasure of supporting in revenue operations. We develop OKRs, start working on our projects, and allocate the appropriate time to do them. We then get new projects that are critical to the business function we take on. Then, we have leaders that need support with side projects they're working on. Then, the EC or board has needs that come up that inevitably become the priority. Before we know it, we get to the end of the quarter and wonder why we didn’t get enough done on our original projects.

I’m sure many of you can relate.

Operating in this way makes maximizing the value our departments bring to our organizations very difficult.

Barriers to Maximizing Revenue Operation's Impact

In Revenue Operations, we can face a multitude of situations that can make it difficult to maximize our impact on our organizations.

4 key areas that can be the source of the majority of the barriers we can face are:

Time: Is the non-renewable resource in our arsenal that can be one of the largest barriers to maximizing our impact if not managed appropriately.

Resources: Are how you’re able to unlock the additional time or skills needed to complete a project.

Skills: Are how you’re able to complete a project or task with the highest chance of success in achieving your goals.

Leadership: Is how we enable our team to spend the right amount of time on the right projects and tasks, ensure resources are used appropriately to support the team and its objectives, and support the team’s development of their skills.

Intent-Based Revenue Operations

The Intent-Based Revenue Operations Methodology allows us to minimize the barriers that we can encounter.

So, what is Intent-Based Revenue Operations?

In short, it’s a methodology grounded in considering the end results, value, and impact of everything you do from the start of your work to its completion.

Similar to change management, we are not focused on the project or task that we want to complete as an identifier of success but rather on the intended and later realized value it brings to the business

Intent-Based Revenue Operations

Start with People

People: Support, Develop, and invest in People. Your people are not only your most important asset to maximizing your team’s impact but also the means of successfully executing the rest of the methodology.

Guidance: Well-defined mission statement and strategy. If everything is important, nothing is. A well-defined mission statement supports the team in developing OKRs, projects, and initiatives that deliver the intended value for which the revenue operations team was created.

Intentions: Mission-impact specific OKR development. The creation of OKRs that are chosen specifically for their intended impact on the success of the department's mission. Intentional focus on projects that have an intended impact on the mission and not on projects that keep people “happy”, allow the department to focus on the value of the works results and not the value of completing a task.

Alignment: Maintenance of Workload & Priorities. The team's maintenance of workload and priorities and alignment to their contribution to the overall mission supports their ability to stay focused on what matters and not just stay busy.

Why is supporting, developing, and investing at the bottom of the pyramid?

People: Support, Develop, and Invest in People

Your people are the foundation on which the rest of the methodology rests.

Develop

Define the Impact and value: Develop your teams' ability to understand how to define and articulate value and their ability to re-evaluate the impact of OKRs, projects, and tasks.?Without understanding how to define the impact and value of OKRs, projects, and tasks, teams often resort to defining their value based on their relationship with stakeholders and how happy they are with their responsiveness.

Masterfully Communicate: Develop your team's ability to articulate artfully the value they and their work are bringing to each aspect of the business and the department's mission and align their communication with different audiences based on what is important to them. Your team should be able to communicate priorities, why they are priorities, and their intended impact on the mission statement.

Master Prioritization Maintenance: ?Develop the team’s ability to prioritize work based on the intended impact of projects and tasks and maintain them. This ensures that priorities are aligned against their intended impact on the mission statement and not on priorities that are defined by their relationship with the requestor.

Develop your team's ability to debate priorities based on each project's intended impact on the mission statement. This will support their ability to consistently evaluate the effectiveness of work against the intended impact on the mission statement.

Maintain, Re-adjust, or Abort

Invest

Change Management Experts: Invest in training teams in change management and Develop their ability to leverage change management best practices. All changes carried out by RevOps should remain focused on what the change was designed to accomplish and not just on completing the change.

Grow Skills: Invest in the team’s professional development through training, coaching, and events. Just like you develop in your career and skill sets, the business also develops at an equal rate. Your ability to consistently develop and grow your team's skill sets allows you to tackle new initiatives and problems the company experiences at the same rate the business experiences them.

Support

Feel Safe: Support the team’s ability to feel safe by creating an environment of trust, transparency, and accountability. Encourage and foster the team's ability to debate and ask for clarification to better understand the intended impact of requests. The team can not effectively prioritize if they don’t understand the intended impact of the existing project they're working on and the requested project.

Support re-adjustments when new information is discovered and the assumed impact does not align with the intended impact.

Build a safe environment for failure and build a culture that supports the ability to fail fast and learn fast.

Remove the fear of estimating project impacts. You have to allow your team to fail on their estimated intended impacts in order to learn how to improve them. Use failure to guide the development of estimates

Scoping exercise

Define the Impact and value:?

• Understand why they do what they do
• Understand their value and the value their work has on the business. Avoid defining their value based on their relationship with stakeholders and focus on their work.

• Re-evaluate the assumed impact of projects against the intended impact. Completing the project is not the objective. The intended impact of the project is the objective

Guidance: Mission Statement & Strategy

Align RevOps mission statement to C-level decision to invest in RevOps

In order to develop your RevOps mission statement, you want to ensure it aligns with the reason RevOps exists at your organization. You can do this by talking with the executives who made the decision to bring RevOps to the organization. Here are a few questions you can ask to help you develop your mission statement:

• Why was Revenue Operations Invested in?
• What is the responsibility of Revenue Operations?
• What resources do you have?

The Intent of a mission statement is to provide guidance and support for your team in their decisions to focus on impactful work. A couple of other forms of guidance you should look to create and deliver to your team are:

• Communication Strategy
• Organizational Strategy
• Change Strategy

Intention: Mission Impact Specific OKR Development

Set no more than 3 OKRs

When developing OKRs, you should only develop a few high-impact OKRs. This leaves time for ad hoc work that will weasel its way into your days, weeks, and months. As a best practice, I like to focus on setting three quarterly OKRs, and I prefer to set one OKR aimed at a strategic forward-thinking objective (realized impact has a longer tail). I focus on setting my other 2 OKRs on objectives where I can realize the impact in the next one to two quarters.

Start with a problem

Problem statements are statements about a problem you want to solve or issues you see in the business, such as issues that prevent growth, change, or a desired outcome. Have your team write down problem statements related to the mission statement. This could be barriers that are holding them or the company back from success or things they want to change.

Then, decide on which problems you want to solve and turn your selected problem statement into objectives.

Evaluate multiple solutions

Before aligning on the tactics to meet an objective, evaluate multiple solutions and determine which solution will yield the biggest impact against the objective. You should also include doing nothing as a solution; sometimes, the added complexity of a project and the change needed to roll it out could negatively impact company KPIs for the short term, even if it does meet the long-term objective. You should be aware of when you want the objective to be met and if it will result in risk or negative impact against company KPIs.

Are you planning for short-term negative impacts?

Quantify and determine the impact of each solution

Take the time to quantify and determine the solution's impact against the mission statement and company KPIs. Work with your team to help them determine the impact and value the solution brings to the organization. It's important for your team to be able to articulate and define the impact on their own.

Select solution with the largest expected impact on the mission statement

Once you've developed multiple solutions and quantified their impact and value, you need to select the one that has the largest expected impact on the mission statement or company KPIs, taking into account any negative impacts that could occur.

Define the expected impact of the objective on the mission statement

Now that you've selected the solution and documented the OKRs, which is typically where people finish, we are going to add an additional couple of steps to ensure transparency in our initiatives and priorities.

You should add to your documentation the expected impact on the mission statement and/or company KPIs to where you documented your quarterly OKRs. This supports transparency into why you are prioritizing the project and arms your team with the information needed to push back on requests that could be a distraction to delivering on the objectives that materially impact the mission statement and/or objectives.

Communicate the intended value of the objective

Now that you have everything documented, it is important to communicate across the team and organization what your priorities are and why. In order to reduce disruptions, people need to know what you're working on and why to support your focus on the project.

Maintain focus on delivering the intended value and not the project completion

To maximize your revenue operation team's impact as you work to achieve your objective, you need to support the team in its ability to maintain focus on the value and impact the solution is bringing and not just completing the plan outlined. RevOps should be willing to abandon a solution or adjust the solution to maintain its expected impact.

Don’t just deliver to deliver. Focus on what results you want to achieve

Alignment: Maintenance of Workload and Priorities

Time is the only non-renewable resource you have to deliver impact. The best way to maximize your time is to ensure you spend the right amount of time on the right tasks. How do we do that?

Through understanding the intended value and impact of work, being transparent about the work and its value, and communicating frequently and clearly.

1. Listen carefully to requests to ensure you fully understand the reasons and impacts driving prioritization.?
2. Clarify reasons, drivers, requirements, and business impact, with the end result being able to understand the full scope of the request and justification for prioritization.
3. Debate on which priority is highest, based on scope, justification for prioritization, and impact
4. Decide which project or task is the top priority.
5. Persuade stakeholders, customers, and team members why each request/ project was deprioritized or prioritized over another.?
6. Execute on request/ project and maintain active communication of milestones through successful completion.
7. Learn from the prioritization experience. Did you prioritize correctly? Did you miss something when determining priorities? What will you do differently next time, and what will you repeat?
8. Repeat the cycle when another request comes up. Maintain a constant understanding of your existing project's prioritization reasons to leverage for future prioritization exercises.

Summary

Intent-Based Revenue Operations methodology focuses on achieving end results and maximizing value from the start.

You can develop Intent-Based Revenue Operations at your organization by supporting, developing, and investing in your people, delivering and maintaining guidance on the department's mission, strategy, and priorities, creating goals that align with the mission based on their intended impact, and empowering your team to manage their workload and maintain their priorities.

By adopting these strategies, revenue operations teams can significantly enhance their efficiency and overall impact on the organization.