RevOps challenge: How to ensure your Revtech drives your RevOps transformation

In short: Knowing how mature your current RevOps capabilities enables you to define three short, medium and long-term transition states to ensure your maturity improves.

Through this you can develop the needed capabilities to unlock additional revenue technology (Revtech) functionality which will increase your customer success and shareholder value.

Keep reading to learn how to do this.

In the first post in this series, we described how sales (marketing and customer service) is dependent on Revtech for success. And in the second, we showed that assessing and developing complementary RevOps capabilities can unlock an additional 20-40% of Revtech functionality for users. Functionality that increases the success revenue technologies provides for customers and the economic value for shareholders.

In this third and last post of the topic we focus on how our Revenue Builder tool works.

Our Revenue Builder tool assesses the current maturity of your RevOps capabilities, the desired maturity you will need to get all the value from your Revtech, and the gap between them that you will need to cross.

It also captures details of related factors that support the development of the capabilities, such as a strong culture or deep customer understanding, and factors that hinder them, such as obsolete technology or organisational mistrust.

Understanding the capabilities and the supporting and hindering items, and how they relate to each other is key to planning transition states.

WHAT TO START WITH?

The first step in the transition planning process is to place the items on a simple two-dimensional Three Horizons Map Map that asks two questions of each:

1. First, how much energy would be required to develop each of them from the current maturity to the desired future maturity
2. and secondly, how much time would it take.

The items are placed on the Three Horizons Map as shown in the diagram.

Mapping the capabilities, supporting and hindering items allows you to quickly identify five groups, each of which should be managed differently.

1. Impossible items, e.g. regulations, are those that require a large amount of time and/or a large amount of energy to develop. They are in effect impossible to change over the life of a project without a huge amount of effort, and are best placed outside the transition plans. They should also be monitored continuously for signs of any change that might bring them inside transition planning.
2. Volatile items, e.g. automated digital communications, are those that require very little time and/or energy to develop. They are the opposite extreme to the impossible items in that they are often too volatile for transition planning. They should be ring-fenced to reduce their volatility and monitored for signs of change.
3. Horizon 1: Short-term items, e.g. teaming arrangements, are those that require a small amount of time and/or energy to improve to the desired maturity. That makes them relatively easy to develop and to earn an immediate return from doing so. Related capabilities, supporting and hindering items that should be developed together should be bundled into meaningful work packages that make sense to the business and that ideally, solve a recognised business problem. This bundling applies to the other two Horizons as well. Many of these Horizon 1 work packages will be relatively clear and may just require adopting widely-used best-practices.
4. Horizon 2: Medium-term items, e.g. new data sources, are those that require more time and/or energy to improve. They are more complicated to develop and will provide the foundation for growth in the future. The work packages developed from them are likely to be more complicated and require help from various experts to identify and implement appropriate good-practices.
5. Horizon 3: Longer-term items, e.g. new products, are those that require much more time and/or energy to improve. They may be much more complicated or even complex, and will provide a series of real-options for the future. The work packages developed from them are likely to require a combination of parallel experiments to identify emerging patterns of behaviour and help from experts to identify what to do about them.

Creating the transition plans for the three horizons is an iterative process that, although driven by the RevOps aspiration, starts from the current state and develops the capabilities in each horizon iteratively, one capability and work package at a time. The aim is to improve the capabilities’ maturity whilst reinforcing the supporting and weakening the hindering factors.

In this way, many different capabilities can be developed in parallel, each successive transition plan optimising the value available from the increased capabilities’ maturity, and increasing the success Revtech provides for customers and the economic value for shareholders.

HOW TO ENSURE YOUR REVTECH DRIVES YOUR REVOPS TRANSFORMATION – THREE TAKEAWAYS:

If you want to ensure your revenue technology drives your RevOps transformation:

1. Whilst you are assessing your RevOps capabilities, collect as many details of related factors that support their development and factors that hinder them. You will need these for the transition planning.
2. Map the capabilities, supporters and hindrances on the Three Horizons Map and identify which ones are impossible, which ones volatile and which of the three horizons the others fall into.
3. Bundle related capabilities, supporters and hindrances in each Horizon into meaningful work packages that make sense to the business and ideally, solve a recognised business problem. Tune the work packages so that they optimise the value available from the increased capability maturity.

Arrange a call with us to see how 180ops can help you get all the value from your Revtech.

This newsletter is written in collaboration with one of our specialists, Dr. Graham Hill. He brings in 30+ years of experience working for blue-chip consultancies such as KPMG, Price Waterhouse and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as an Interim Head at Toyota and Huawei Technologies and as an independent strategy consultant.

Graham has been closely involved in the evolution of customer value management for over 30 years. Starting with CRM in the 1990s, he pioneered Customer Experience Management in the 2000s and Complex Service Systems Design in the 2010s. More recently, he has been involved in projects implementing Decisioning-as-a-Service, Journey Orchestration and Conversational Commerce.

Graham is the founder of Janus spv., a boutique consultancy specialising in customer value management for corporate clients.

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