Class 1: Defining the R.E.D. and Why It Matters

Welcome

Welcome to the first class of Implementing RevOps 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking. In this course, I’ll be walking you through hands-on tutorials to actually implement revenue operations in a real, tangible way. We’re going to break down all the elements of what we call the Revenue Engine Diagnostic and look in depth at each piece.

Today’s course will be split into 6 sections, or six classes, each with a detailed demonstration and then a take-away assignment to practice operationalizing RevOps, taking the theory and implementing it in cold, harsh reality. We’ll start by talking about what the Revenue Engine Diagnostic is and then we’ll move on to the five pieces that make it up: the go-to-market survey & analysis, revenue mapping, the experience audit, benchmarking data, and building the roadmap.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, my goal is to remove the fluff so common in RevOps. I want to articulate revenue operations as a scientific approach to data, while also providing you the tools to operationalize it. I want you to leave this course feeling confident that you can begin building your own strong revenue operations foundation; that you can fully action RevOps Fundamentals.

And that’s exactly what we are going to do today!

We’re going to start with this first class: What is a Revenue Engine Diagnostic? Why does it matter? How do you do it?

Why run a diagnostic?

Well, let me start with some stone cold truth. Before we hit the gas, we have to get honest. Like, brutally honest.

The thing I’ve seen more often than anything else in my time as a RevOps Strategist is a tendency for people to balk at running a diagnostic. “Nikki, why are we spending time on this? We want to hit the ground running! We don’t have time to waste giving you a breakdown of our business!”

Most people either learn RevOps fundamentals or hire a RevOps person and think they can immediately just build nice pretty reports with all the info they need without putting any work into level-setting the goals, reviewing how the business currently operates, diving into where disparate information is kept.

Let me paint you a word picture: A dashboard without a full revenue diagnostic is just a pretty picture of a house on fire. And we aren’t here to just snapshot the current state and walk away, we’re here to accelerate revenue and help you grow.

What do I mean by that? I mean, and this is where the brutal honesty comes in so strap in, when it comes to RevOps basics, most people listen but don’t really hear. They assume that they have a single source of truth already. They insist that they have a higher maturity level than they do. They are sure they have a comprehensive data model. They presume that everyone inherently understands their business. In short, they listen to basics, immediately brush them off, and don’t look deeper.

But here’s the reality I’ve come to learn: When you start poking at those assumptions and asking clarifying questions, they either can’t answer or not everyone answers the same way.

Let me give you a for-instance: Here’s a simple question I ask every new partner as a standard part of onboarding, “what happens when a new lead comes in?” Now, depending on who I’m talking to, I might get answers like “marketing qualifies it” or “sales schedules a meeting” or the most honest answer of “I’m not sure who owns it, let’s ask X, Y, and Z.”

And that’s what I’m trying to get across here: You should all know exactly what happens. It should be documented somewhere. It should be baked into training and a crucial data point in your single source of truth, because if it’s not, you could be missing out on tons of money as things fall through the cracks!

Instead of assuming, you must know. Everyone must know.

What is the R.E.D.?

That’s why the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, or the R.E.D. as we call it, is so crucial. It’s not just about a knowledge transfer to your RevOps person or team, it’s about a shared knowledge transfer for every department and actual enacting of that single source of truth. It’s the first step in walking the walk of RevOps: you have to honestly and critically look at where you are and document your current state processes. If you don’t know where you are, there’s no way you’ll ever get to where you’re going.

The Revenue Engine Diagnostic or R.E.D. isn’t just a casual check-up and it’s most assuredly not an optional step. It’s well worth the time to understand how all the individual pieces work together, what’s not working, and where the gaps are.

The R.E.D. is a systematic series of exercises designed to help you fully operationalize and optimize your sales, marketing, and customer success data. We aren't just looking for "bugs;" we are looking for ways to create customers faster, decrease sales friction, and achieve a real competitive advantage.

We’re looking, at the end of the day, for one comprehensive, end-to-end picture of how revenue moves through your business so that we can clearly see how to optimize, where to double down, and what needs to be cut.

I’ve talked a lot about it in terms of a car engine, and that’s how I think about it. I’m a car person. It’s how we think about it here at RevPartners, you’ve gotta understand the car and its abilities before you drive it.

But you could also think about it in terms of a doctor visit, right? Here’s another metaphor to capture why the R.E.D. is worth it. Let’s say you break your leg. Seems straightforward, maybe even obvious. But when you go to the doctor, do they immediately slap a cast over that leg? No, they take an x-ray first. Because even when you think you know what’s going on, even when you’re sure that you’re on the right track, there could be blood clots, bone shards, underlying issues. You don’t know until you look.

The five parts of the R.E.D.

Alright that’s enough of the metaphorical. Let’s talk tangible. The Revenue Engine Diagnostic is a crucial part of actually implementing a RevOps Strategy and it can be broken down into multiple parts.

First, like I mentioned in the intro, we’re going to be building upon the foundation we discussed in RevOps Fundamentals, so if you aren’t familiar with these terms, stop right now and go back to that course.

Implementing a strategy requires you to build upon the blocks you’ve already got: your go-to-market motions and strategy, your current data model, and your business model. You need these three things very solidly defined and universally understood, first and foremost.

Next, you need a clear, solid understanding of your key performance indicators. How do you measure success? How is your sales team goaled? What is the revenue goal you’re working toward? Do you even have that defined?

If you can’t answer, or if you cannot quickly find the answer and trust it, then that’s a problem. That’s why the first piece of the R.E.D. is what we call the go-to-market survey and analysis. It’s the single document which we use to capture this information, to clearly document how you see your business and how you measure its success.

Up next is what we call revenue mapping, which is… exactly what it sounds like. This is where you actually document in detail — I mean draw it out start to finish — how revenue flows through the business. Everything from how people learn about you to how they are passed between teams, to what they actually purchase and how that’s tracked is thoroughly reviewed and documented here.

Then there’s the experience audit. Think of this like “secret shopping” your own business. Poke through your website, fill out your contact forms, get enrolled in the sequences you already have set up and experience your business the way your users do. You’ll be surprised what you notice when you approach the business processes comprehensively through the eyes of a new user.

Then we have the benchmarking dashboard. This is where you do create reporting that’s twofold: one piece is to document where you are right now as a business. This is important so that you know where you started. Because once you start implementing changes and optimizations you’ll need something to measure the new data against. The second half is to create the reporting based on everything you learned from your fundamentals and the survey and revenue mapping. You need to either update or create from scratch reporting that accurately reflects your real KPIs and goals. This is what I meant by it being a mistake to run straight to reporting and think that’s the first step in establishing RevOps strategy. You have to know what you are measuring and where you are now before the picture becomes clear.

Finally, you’ve got the roadmapping or project planning segment. Here at RevPartners, we create 90 day roadmaps based on everything learned from the first four sections of the R.E.D. Why? Because it gives us a strong enough foundation and direction to be able to move forward and see progress while still allowing room to reassess, check our growth, and confirm we’re on the right track. Now, whether you do a 90 day roadmap like we do or you prefer a 60 day or six month, hey, that’s up to you. The important thing will be to build it based on the knowledge you glean from the Revenue Engine Diagnostic and to ensure that you build in checkpoints where you are going back to our RevOps flywheel from the Fundamentals course and:

1. Reviewing and organizing the process and data

2. Driving or ensuring adoption and reviewing reporting

3. Creating actionable insights and optimization paths

4. Improving the process or performance as needed

Those are the individual pieces of the Revenue Engine Diagnostic.

At the end of the day, the Revenue Engine Diagnostic as a whole is a top-to-bottom examination of your entire revenue and customer journey through a lens of trying to view and understand holistically as if you’ve never seen it before. It’s a visual record of how people find, experience, and patronize your business — in reality, not how you think they do these things — and it consists of comprehensive notes on gaps, friction points, and areas for optimization in one single source.

The R.E.D. is, to put it simply, the diagnostic we run to establish the path from “current” state to “ideal” growth potential.

What you get from the R.E.D.

That’s what the R.E.D. is but what’s the end goal? I mean aside from a holistic view of the business, what’s the output, tangibly?

1. It’s a real document you can take away with you that captures all processes, all practices, all KPIs, everything that makes your business unique and pulls money into it will be captured in one document.

2. It’ll also provide you with a prioritized list of ideal goals for growth, because once you’ve mapped the current state, you’ll be able to see the growth potential

3. The third goal is to then use those identified priorities and everything from your mapping to create a hyper-focused roadmap that breaks down the exact steps you’ll take to achieve those growth initiatives.

What the R.E.D. gives you, the output, is a comprehensive picture of where you are and what you need to work on to get where you want. You should walk away knowing:

1. Any gaps in handoff or friction points and dead ends in your processes. You should be able to clearly identify “black holes” in between departments.

2. Codified and visual depiction of all departmental procedures.

3. What’s working, what’s not working, and where you need to be optimizing or doubling down

4. Full clarity on departmental goals and alignment on how they work together and how their goals ladder up to your overarching company KPIs

The R.E.D.’s entire purpose is to create a strategic viewpoint from which to examine your business and processes comprehensively and to objectively examine each component of your revenue engine. We’re trying to come together to view the business from a new angle that provides an objective look at how everything works together.

What a real diagnostic aligns

A real diagnostic creates alignment on three things:

1. Cross-Departmental Priorities: We’re going to understand how Marketing’s lead scoring impacts Sales friction, or how Sales’ discounting habits cause Customer Success nightmares, for example. And we’re going to ensure that each department knows not only what its goals are but how those goals work together — not against — other departments.

2. Project Priority: We’re going to define exactly what needs to happen and in what order. This sets the foundation for execution so you aren't just "busy," you're "effective." And it is the foundation for the roadmap you’ll create in order to achieve the growth you’re searching for.

3. Success & Measurement: We’re going to define what "winning" looks like in 3, 6, and 12 months and ensure our reporting not only documents where we are now so that we have a comparison but also captures the key performance indicators that actually matter to your business.

In the world of RevOps, your "Product" is the Revenue Engine itself. We are going to treat your internal processes with the same rigor a product manager treats a software build.

Let’s zoom back out: the milestones that make up the Revenue Engine Diagnostic are: The go-to-market survey, the experience audit, the revenue mapping, the benchmarking dashboard, and finally the creation of your strategic roadmap.

We’re going to go through this entire process together throughout the next classes, in-depth and in real time. I’ll give you the templates that I use with my own partners here at RevPartners and I’ll walk through the process using example data. I want you to end each class doing the milestone you were just shown with your own company’s information.

Before we dive in

Now, before we dive in: I want you to prepare yourself. This process might be a little uncomfortable. You might find out that your ‘rock-solid’ handoff process is actually one of those black holes. You might find out that your data is messier than a toddler’s playroom. You will probably find that you do not know everything about your revenue engine or each department’s processes like you thought you did.

And that’s okay. In fact, that’s the point! Every gap we find in this diagnostic is just a hidden pile of cash that we’re about to go collect. If we find a 10% drop-off in a handoff because of a missing notification, and your average deal size is $10k... well, do the math. We just found your first $100k win.

Alright, I hope you’re ready. Now that we understand the overarching goal of the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, and what it actually is, we’re going through it step by step. Get your notes together and your computer screens ready — first up, we’re digging into the Go-To-Market Survey!

Class 2, Part 1: Utilizing the Go-To-Market Survey

Welcome back

Welcome back to Implementing RevOps 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking.

In Class 1, we defined the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, or the R.E.D., as a top-to-bottom examination of your entire revenue and customer journey. It is the visual record of how people find, experience, and patronize your business. We talked about why a thorough diagnostic is absolutely crucial for establishing the path from your "current" state to your "ideal" growth potential. We dove into why you have to take an honest, thorough look at your reality, and now, we are going to be taking the first tangible step in that analysis: The Go-To-Market Survey.

Why we start here

I’ll be honest — and I hinted at this in Class 1, but let me get real for a minute: when I tell businesses that they need to start by taking a step back and really examining the nooks, crannies, and deep dark holes of their current processes, they balk. Every time. And I get it! No one likes having their less-than-stellar processes aired out and examined under a microscope. It’s uncomfortable to admit that you don’t actually know what your lead qualification process or who owns it; or admitting that your handoff process is "just an email Frank sends but I don’t know where it lives or what it says or if it says the same thing every time". It’s not fun to admit that you don’t know if you’re meeting your revenue goal or that you aren’t sure you trust the churn rate in your current reporting.

It’s not always fun, but it’s necessary. Absolutely necessary. We have to know where we are in order to move forward. We have to be brutally honest with how things work currently if we have any hope of optimizing them. You cannot build a high-performance engine on a foundation of "I think" or "I hope." You have to build it on "I know."

What the GTM Survey is

That’s why we start with the Go-To-Market Survey and Analysis. You can think of it like a "Business Identity" workbook. It is a collaborative exercise designed to capture your unique business model, your product landscape, and your growth targets. This document is the core of your business identity — it’s your DNA. If we don't get this right, every automation we build and every report we run  later, it's just gonna be fundamentally flawed because it won't be speaking your business's language.

And, and I can’t stress this enough, it has to be simultaneously a living document. When goals change, when the landscape evolves, when you grow or contract, you must update and maintain this document so that it contains the most accurate and trustworthy reflection of that DNA.

The Go-To-Market Survey, or GTM worksheet, should be the backbone of your goal-setting and the foundation of your data model. It’s where you not only define your current targets, but it’s where you’ll keep a running list of what your products actually are, how they are priced and sold, and, crucially, the definitions of each point on the data model will live here. I’ll show you exactly what I mean in a moment, but here’s a preview. If I were to ask you right this moment, “what is a lead?” how would you answer?  How would you define it? Do you know what the trigger is that pushes someone into that stage? Does your company even call it a Lead? Maybe you have different stages so that it’s more like Prospect than Qualified, than Decision. Or maybe you do use “lead” but you aren’t exactly sure what makes someone a lead. Well this is the time to sort that out. This worksheet is where you will come together to define, hard and fast, exactly what the customer journey is, what data points go on your data model, and how they are defined so that there is zero doubt when you ask the team for a lead count.

I touched on this in RevOps Fundamentals but the reason I’m harping on this so much is that one thing I have seen so often is tension between Sales and Marketing teams specifically caused by a lack of clarity in definitions. The key source of friction that I’ve experienced, and hey, I’m a marketer myself so I’ve experienced it firsthand countless times.  The thing I've seen most is when leadership asks for a count of leads this quarter and marketing and sales present two different numbers. Look, that doesn’t happen because one team is slacking or, whatever; it comes from confusion surrounding the definition. If Marketing thought “lead” meant “someone that has downloaded any gated content”, for example, when Sales believes “leads” are only “people that have come through the ‘contact us/request a demo’ form”… well, those are wildly different sets of people! And it’s no wonder the numbers don’t match!

That’s why this survey is so crucial, not just at the beginning but as a continued living source of truth for all teams to reference. And it’s why every department should be represented when doing the survey: it’s truly a collaborative effort. That’s the best way to get consensus and buy-in when you come up with the definitions.

And we are going to do that together in a bit. But okay so that’s what the survey is. Nikki, why does it matter?  Well, I'm gonna tell you.

Why it matters: a custom-tailored suit

Here's why it matters. Simply put: Without a unified GTM definition, growth is left to chance.

Now look, you know I’m fond of metaphors, so I want you to think about this survey as a Custom-Tailored Suit. In the world of RevOps, everyone wants "best practices." And they think that means a quick one-size-fits-most template. They think that they can go with the off-the-rack solution that worked for a billion-dollar tech giant.

But here is the stone-cold truth: a "best practice" that isn't tailored to your specific business is just a suit that doesn’t fit. It might look great on the mannequin, but when you actually try it on, the sleeves are too long for you, the pants trip you up, and you end up looking like you’re playing dress-up. That’s exactly what happens if you try to just use someone else’s metrics and standards for your business.

Now hear me here because I wanna be extra clear. Best practices are guides and you can and should use them as templates. I'm walking you through today, templates that you'll use as a stepping stone. I’m not saying you can’t ever use something like that, like our data model or our GTM survey, because that would be hypocritical. I’m literally telling you right now to use them! What I want to be clear about is that you need to put in the work defining the goals and configuring the process to your business. That’s the step that is often overlooked or balked at.

I’ve heard partners before when I present this survey and they said things like “just write in what you think is best or use what company X uses” and that is what I’m telling you not to do. That’s the significance of this survey, taking it and making it your own custom-tailored blueprint to reflect what matters most to your business. You can take the best practices, but you have to tailor them to your team.  That's how you align your departments, and that's how you get buy-in, and that's how you create tangible results.

I’ll say that again: This analysis and collaboration, the configuration of it all, is critical because it ensures that the solutions we build aren't just generic templates; they are custom-tailored to reflect what your business values most.  Let me give you a for instance, if your business values high-volume, low-friction signups, but your RevOps team builds a high-touch, enterprise-level qualification process just because it’s what company X is doing, well then we haven't helped you. We’ve strangled you.

Your strategic North Star

The GTM Survey acts as your Strategic North Star. In the middle of a quarter, when things get chaotic and  everyone's asking about lead quality you need a single, living document that you can point to and say, "This is who we are. This is how we solve problems, and this is how we create value. Here is how we have defined lead qualification or a lead”. It removes the "opinion" from the room. We don’t have to debate and become combative because we have the answer right here.

When you align your entire team around this document, you stop moving in disparate, different directions. You stop having "Frank's way" or "Marketing's way” or “well, that's just how Joe does it”. You have the Company way. This document is the anchor. It ensures that when we go into the CRM to build workflows or scoring  models or reporting, we are building them to support the specific gravity of your unique market position. If you skip this, you’re just building a generic house and  hoping that it one day fits your family.

The goal: a flight plan

The primary goal of this exercise is to create total alignment between your business goals and your operational engine. Think of it like a Flight Plan. If you’re a pilot, you don't just get in the cockpit and point the nose toward "the horizon" and hope you end up in Paris. You have to document  your weight, your fuel, your coordinates, your destination. Ideally, be pointing in the right direction before the wheels ever leave the tarmac.

By documenting your primary metrics, your products, your metric definitions in this survey, we move from "guessing" to "knowing." Most businesses are just flying on "vibes." They "feel" like the month is going well. They "guess" that their customers are happy. But what this survey gives us is the ability to build a system that captures the right data for the right people measured in the right way for you.

If we don’t know what your primary metrics are, the dashboards  are gonna be filled with "vanity metrics" that don't actually tell you if you're making money. The goal here is to create a clear reference point — a baseline — for future training and level-setting.

Ultimately, this goal is about Operational Integrity. It’s about making sure that the buttons your reps click and the forms your customers fill out are actually feeding the machine you intended to build. We are connecting the high-level "vision" to the actual on-the-ground experience of the customer. This survey is the bridge. It’s the tool that ensures your operational engine isn't just running, but is actually taking you exactly where your business goals say you need to go. We are moving from a state of chaos to a state of complete, documented  control with this step of the revenue engine diagnostic.

The sections of the survey

To get to that "Source of Truth," we break the survey into specific milestones or worksheet sections.

We’ll take a look holistically at the company then dive into specific success metrics that are being used right now, if there are any. We’ll dig into the products themselves and then we’ll define everything needed for the data model.

Company overview

First, we’ll look overall at the company: at a high-level how is your revenue segmented? What’s your team size? How is each department goaled right now?

We’ll even document things like when your fiscal year ends or what the current GTM strategy is.  We'll put everything in this document, including, we’ll break down how you make money in the revenue segmentation section.

If you have multiple partitions, like a primary revenue acquisition that’s recurring, but an additional smaller stream of non-recurring revenue, then we’ll actually look into the percentages of that breakdown and we’ll dig into how you look at revenue by partition. Do you break down per product or is it more by region?

Success metrics

Then we’ll move into the success metrics available right now. What is your North Star metric? If you remember from our RevOps Fundamentals course this should be defined as the single key metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers and drives long-term growth for the business.

In other words,  and put more simply, if you could track only one single metric, what would it be?  That's your North Star.

Then we’ll talk about source data. How are you tracking where leads are coming from, both the deal source as a general category of where the deal came from, such as “events” and also the specific source drill down category.  So for example, if the deal source was indeed “event”, how are you tracking which event?

We’ll also be asking about the current state of your reporting. Do you at this moment have dashboards for reporting, for execs, marketing, sales, and customer support? Do you trust the information on them? Are they easily accessible? Do the leads of each of those departments know where to find those?

Products

Next, we’ll dig into your products. This is where you will list everything which has a line item. If it can be purchased, then it should be listed here with the name that’s in your CRM, a solid description so that everyone knows what you’re talking about and the product details. We want the category it falls under, the type of data model it’ll use, the way it’s priced, the actual price, the frequency of said pricing and then the average sales cycle.

We also want to do the same kind of deep dive for any add-ons or fees that you may have that you tack on. For example, if you have a SaaS service that automatically comes with an onboarding service as an additional charge, let’s break that down. If you can upsell support or maintenance, that gets tracked as a product.

Data model discovery

Finally, the data model discovery. This is the portion in which you’ll really assess how the customer moves through your system. Do they start as sessions? What does that mean? Is a website visit a session?  Do you partition those website sessions by source or job title?

When does closed won actually become closed revenue? When the check is in the mail? When the first payment hits your system? What is that trigger that moves them along their journey?

How do you break down the differences between a cross sell and an expansion?  Is everyone tracking that the same way?

These are all things that we have to clearly define together and ensure that we are configuring to meet your customer’s real journey. And if you have multiple business segments and multiple data models, you will need to do this for every one of those. The more information you align on and fill in now, the much better your foundation will be. You won’t have to guess or build on the fly, you’ll have documented the truth of it right up front  and you'll be able to reference it anytime you need.

Let’s do it together

Okay, now we’re going to actually do the survey together. I’ll use example data and walk through how I would fill it out in real time with a partner. You can download your own template now in the resources section of this course and follow along using your own data,  or you can follow along as I use the example and fill in yours later. Either way, let's go to a real example.

Class 2, Part 2: Business Summary & Goals Overview

Okay, so here is the go-to-market survey along with some examples. I've got some examples and help text in here, not just the template for you, but some guide posts along the way in case you ever get flummoxed or need a helping hand.

So if I were going to walk through this with my partner, here is where I would start.

Business summary

First things first, business summary. This can be as simple as your elevator pitch. This is like, what does your business do? What is your value prop? This is a really good place to just re-align with everyone. How does sales describe what it is that you provide in one sentence? How does marketing? What's written on your website? Are they all cohesive, are they all using the same language? Really great way to just go ahead and kick it off and make sure that the alignment is there from the get-go.

Current revenue and goal

From there, you'll put in your current revenue. And by that I mean, where are you sitting at this current moment in time? So if you are filling this out mid-year, what's the revenue that you've brought in year to date so far?

Then you would put in, okay, what's the end of year revenue goal? Are you on track for it? Make a note over here. Like, how far off are you? Say if your revenue goal were, and I'm just gonna pull this out and say, okay, our current revenue is five mil and our goal for the year is 10 mil. Well, hey, it's February when I'm recording this. So if you're already halfway to your goal, then great, you're doing really well. But make a note of that. Make a note of when you filled this out, like currently, Feb and on target to surpass December end of year goal. Maybe that means that you needed to set a higher goal for yourself. Maybe you need to go back and check your reporting if this seems way too off, right?

So this is where you can start seeing your first, we'll call it an orange flag. You won't know until you get into the benchmarking data and actually like, digging into the partitions if your hunch is correct, but you can already start making notes for yourself.

Okay, here's what I'm looking at so far for where we're sitting. And if this is what leadership told me the goal was, dang, we're doing good at month two out of 12. Then, let's think about our current team size.

Team size and fiscal year

Again, this is just level setting. How many employees do you have? This is a good way for you to report later on like your revenue in terms of headcount for the efficiency of each person that's working. So for here at RevPartners, I would put in, let's see, we've got about 75 people.

And our fiscal year does start in January. I know sometimes it starts in like July. So put in here what this means.

How your teams are goaled

Then let's talk about how your teams are goaled. Now, what do I mean by that? You'll see that if you hover over this, I've got some help text for you. So if you ever get stuck and want a reminder of what the definitions are, here they are. But to put it very simply, how does your marketing team know whether or not it's on track? Are they measured by revenue or is it by tasks or is it a quantity thing? Is it by the amount of leads that come in or the amount of content produced?

However they are goaled, you'll need to actually lay that out. And it could be that there are a couple different things in here. So let's say it's by MQLs per month and it's also by event attendance. Make a note of that and then also say, like, what that is for this year. So for example, for FY26, let's just say it's broken down into 250 MQLs per month.

And… Let's say it's 100 attendees per event. Again, this way you have it clearly labeled here for each team to see what it is that they're working toward. It's total transparency. What is the marketing team doing? How well are they doing it? Everyone knows how to be able to tell. And you'll do the exact same thing for the sales team. What are their goals? Do BDRs have different goals than AEs, for example? Do the BDR goals roll up into AE goals because it's a handoff and AE is closing. What are your sales leaders’ goals? How does all of this roll up together?

Make notes for yourself here on how the team is goaled now and then put in to decide how is this rolling up into revenue. So for example, if I were going to put here that each rep is expected to — and you can write this however you want. I tend to think in complete sentences, but bullet points or whatever you wanna put  this in here as — is expected to close 20 deals per month.

Okay, if that is their goal, if it's just closed deals, then let's think about how that rolls up into our revenue goal. So for example, let's just say working with this 20 deals per month, let's do some quick math here. If you're expecting 20 deals per month and let's say that you're of these 75 people, 15 of them are sales reps. Okay. 15 times 20, that's 300 deals per month.

If we are looking for 10 million in revenue, then what we wanna do is divide that quickly by our 300 deals a month to get us to the ideal deal amount for each deal that they close. My math has it at about $34,000 per deal. So what you would want here is average deal size to reach 10 mil should be about 34K.

Right, great note for you to again, make sure that you are keeping everything transparent, everything above board level setting with all of your teams as to how they're measured, but also how what they're doing is rolling up into your overall goal.

This gives them the opportunity to see how exactly they're making a difference and how their individual tasks are laddering up to make an impact on that end goal. In terms of motivation, that's what people want to see. How does what I'm doing  affect, you know, the bottom line?

Go-to-market models and motions

Then you're going to go, okay, next, we'll move down to the go-to-market models and motions. Now, you should remember this all from fundamentals, but if you don't, what we're talking about here, what's your go-to-market strategy? Okay? Are we thinking about it in terms of PLG?

If you'll remember from fundamentals, that's product-led growth. One stage is that one sales rep only is doing the touching? Or is it two-stage? So that would be a BDR, AE team. Maybe there's some BDRs handling the outbound, then there's a handoff into your AEs. Account-based, are you actually going out and targeting very specific accounts based on a targeted list that you have? Or are you thinking in terms of land and expand? What we mean by this is are you trying to make a bigger footprint in the audience that you already have?

So for example, is your goal to take the current list of customers and try to expand your footprint inside those, like different branches or upsells of additional product lines? What is your primary focus here?

So, let's use a random example and say you have a 2-stage GTM strategy and that your Primary motion could be either Partnerships or Inbound. You could go either way because you do rely heavily on partnerships, but sales and outbound lead the way.

So this is where I would start the discussion. Let's pull in a conversation from sales and from our partnerships team and from leadership. Which is it that they want to push in terms of primary? So let's say if at the end of it, they're like, no, we're pushing inbound. We wanna make use of the leads that are coming in for us, but we do have the secondary motion of partnership.

Great, this is what you want to use this time aligning on and make notes here of any of those discussion points that came up. Is there something to talk about in the future? Is partnership really taking off to where at some point you may want to invest in it as the primary?

Make notes here so that you can reference them in the future.

Data models and revenue segmentation

All right, now let's talk about how we actually organize and segment the money. As we go through here, you'll need to think about what's the data model that you use primarily, recurring, non-recurring, or usage-based.

So for example, if you need a review from the fundamentals course, so what we mean by recurring is like money that you're bringing in per a time period. So for example, you get a monthly subscription. RevPartners is an example of that. SaaS businesses are an example of that. Amazon Prime is a really obvious example of that.

Then there's non-recurring. So that's just you get money per the transaction and that's it. So again, RevPartners is actually an example of that too, because we do have a non-recurring product line. But another good example of this would be manufactured goods or e-commerce. E-com is really primarily focused on this. They want to bring you back for other purchases, but ideally that shirt you bought lasts you for a while. So that's one purchase, that’s non-recurring.

Then usage-based is like spending money for credits. I've got the examples here of AWS and Twilio. Think of this as, you know, one good example of this would be your energy bill each month. You pay for the amount of electricity that you use. It's not like a set price. So you'll think about that.

Then you'll also think about the terms of the business segments. So like, What do you use to break down that revenue when you're building out your reporting?

So an example for us at RevPartners is that when we bring in our recurring revenue and our non-recurring revenue, the first thing that we do is look at it in terms of products, a product breakdown. How much of that was a RevOps Packaging? How much of that was our Allbound? If it was a set scope of work, how much of it was an implementation versus an integration.

If you wanted to look at a couple of specific company examples, you know, you could look at Amazon, which would do by their products. Uber would do their product lines. Was this a  ride? Was it, um, you know, like scooter ride share things? Was it their Eats product line? HubSpot uses product categories. So it's not necessarily specific products, it's the categories themselves, like subscription or professional services.

So the main thing for you to do is start thinking through that and then making notes. I have left two examples here, but ideally what you'll do is go through and say, okay, so here are my product categories, and business segments. So we have recurring and partitioned by products and region. Great, okay.

So now that you've made that note, here's what I want you to do. You're actually going to fill in this side here. Which of these, let's start with the data models themselves. How much of your business is recurring? So for example, I’ve got in here 80% is recurring, non-recurring is 20%. And we, because I'm using RevPartners as an example, we don't have any usage at this time, so I would leave that to be zero.

So now that I have that broken down, now let's look and see, okay, and then by segmentation, how do I want it? So I've got over here that I want it to be partitioned by products and region. So for RevPartners, I would put the product name and region. And I would just split that 50-50. If we wanted to do something like this, like the note I have where it would be recurring only, so we would put in 100%, zero-zero, and then let's say product name, region, and it would be 50 each. And you can add another segment. You can add multiple segments. You can keep going here.

How do you want to see your revenue broken down is the question that you should be answering right here.

Success metrics: your North Star

Let's move on to success metrics. So we talked a lot about your North Star metric. This is where ideally, and I've got a note in here. So if you could track only one metric, what would it be?

This is most often total revenue. So for example, you know, we put up here that what's my end of year revenue goal. This is where you want to put in the total amount of revenue that you're hoping to hit by end of year or by your next, reporting time segment. You could break it down like that.

But again, the question to answer here is for you, what is the end goal? If you could have only one goal, what is the end goal that you want your team to work toward?

Deal source

Okay, so now let's talk about deal source. So I mentioned this before, deal source is the overarching category of where the deal came from. So think about things like events, partnerships sourced, inbound, email marketing, the categories of how people would find you, where the deal itself was generated.

What I'm asking here, the reason I have HubSpot property in parentheses is because I want to know how you track that, not just in a general sense of, well, we label it as events if it's event. Okay, how? Where?

For example, is it a  HubSpot property that, are you using original source? Are you using deal source? Like if you're in HubSpot, we have a GTM source that is customized and configured. We have a lead acquisition channel that is customized for us. Think about the property that you have right now. So if you're using deal source, the HubSpot property deal source, great, link that, link it right here so that everyone knows that's the source that you are using as your single source of truth for where this deal came from.

When we think about deal source, it would come in as those broad categories, offline sources, email marketing, inbound, paid search, et cetera, et cetera. If you're using one of the

HubSpot standard properties, it could be as general as that. It's going to be the category.

So it'll be important for you then to think about in terms of, okay, well, what's the drill down? If it was an event, what event was it? If it was a form on our website, which form was it? If it was email marketing, do we know which email it was? What's the property or however you're tracking for that specifically? How do you know which it is? So if maybe you have in here a drill down, I know that I've seen before configurations for a GTM source drill down, maybe that's what you have in your HubSpot.

Make sure you link that again so that everyone knows. And here's the really important thing. If you don't have this, don't put something in here just to fill it in. If you don't have it, put, we don't have this. Because that's the first thing then in your RevOps strategy that you'll come back to and be like, “Oh great, this is something I need to build. This is a starting point for me. Frankly, it's a quick win for me.” So you need to make sure that you're as honest as you can be. Like we actually don't have this set up right now. We don't have it configured. We don't have it at all. Or we have deal source, again, link it, but don't use it consistently. Right?

Oh, and we have no drill down. No drill down available. Make sure that you're noting these things. Again, I just said it, but I'll say it again. Don't just write something in because you hope to have it. Make a clear note that you don't have it. Then when you go in and make your strategy, this will be one of the first things you do. And then you can update this with the either new property or the newly cleaned up property.

Dashboards

Same exact thing down here for these dashboards. Be honest about where your leadership team are getting their information. If you don't have an executive dashboard, we don't have one. We need one. If you have an executive dashboard, but dashboard is in quotation marks, say, you know, we have a spreadsheet that our finance team uses or there's a link to Data Box, but it only has a couple of reports in it, or just be really honest about where things live and what you have, and make those notes here. Would like, so for example, would like a HubSpot dashboard.

You can even say, one dashboard for all teams split into sections. Maybe that's what you're looking for, right? You can totally write that as your goal, but go ahead and link to here's what we use currently. You know, Marketing uses… I don't know, Power BI or Marketo or, you know, HubSpot Dash called MarComm KPIs. Link whatever you have currently as your current state, but don't be afraid to make notes for yourself of, okay, but here's what we want to get to.

We'll see what you have available when we do our benchmarking dashboard. This makes it so much easier and cleaner again for that full transparency for everyone to be able to see where you are. Do that with all of these. Make your notes for yourself.

How is success tracked right now? How do you see where you're going? When you go into a board meeting, where are you pulling that information from? That's where we want to see here. The goal would be for each of these to be linked ideally to a dashboard, say in HubSpot, since that's what we use and prefer. Ideally, the goal would be for these to all be in HubSpot, right, in their own dashboards.

That may not be your ideal state though. Figure out where you wanna see all your information and either link what you've already got or make notes of what needs to be updated. All right. Let's move on to the next tab.

Class 2, Part 3: Products Overview

Okay, now let's talk about Products. So this is where, like I said before, we wanna dive into each product that you offer, and we wanna break it down specifically, get real clarity on exactly what you sell and how you sell it.

Naming and describing each product

So, for example. Like here at RevPartners, we have one product that has multiple tiers. I would wanna make sure that I'm laying out each of those tiers, 'cause we are gonna talk about price and we wanna look at the difference in sales cycle for each of those.

We also here at RevPartners, we have recurring products, but we also have a few non-recurring products.

Again, we wanna compare all of these, looking at them granularly. So we wanna lay all of that out. Let's say we wanted to start with our recurring products, right?

So let's say we would do, for example, if you had multiple marketing services packages, you could do Marketing - Tier 1, and then describe it. You wanna make sure that everyone knows exactly what that means when they're saying Tier 1 service.

So this would be Marketing services/ 5 hrs per week; No custom configurations; lowest touch. However you wanna define this, make sure that it's clear so that everyone knows exactly what your Tier 1 is.

Marketing - Tier 2 could be, you know, Marketing services/ 10 hrs per week; Minimal custom configuration; And then Marketing - Tier 3 could be, you know, Highest touch/ 20 hrs per week; White glove service.

However, again. I'm making this up. It's only go along, but for this, what you would wanna do is just think through how internally, and especially if you're going to train a new person, how would they be able to tell your products apart and know exactly which one to go to, especially if they're new or if someone's getting up to speed.

Product categories

Okay, so now what we can do is make sure that all of these are marked with Marketing Services, that's the category that we want to measure.

And again, the whole purpose of this is to make sure that those partitions are set up for when you're building out reporting. If I wanted to say, how are my marketing services, how is that category doing, broken down by each of these product names and by the revenue that they are bringing in, I could do that. I can set up a report that's all marketing services only broken down by products.

Or I could do marketing services versus design services. How many are those, you know, what is each category bringing in. For our design services, Let's say that this one is gonna be, you know, Website Creation (from scratch).

Let's say we offer that service or a Website Redesign, and then we could do (from scratch) or, we could actually do Website Redesign (edits only). And those could be, you know, our different product offerings for each of these. So this is gonna be our Design Services for all of these.

And you would describe those, so this would be a completely new website. New website and branding; total overhaul, however you wanna describe this. Edits to current site only.

So, if you had these on a monthly basis, then the marketing services could be recurring, whereas your website designs, your design services, probably non-recurring. Once you've made the website, right? Then they're not paying you anymore. Unless of course you have a hosting fee, because you're hosting the website for them, in which case you would wanna make sure that that is listed here as Hosting Services, because that then would be recurring and you would wanna make sure that you're getting credit for that. It could be design services, it could be a different category, because it's gonna be recurring, but not of a marketing services product.

How you define this equates to how you want to see it broken down in your reporting later. So think through it in terms of that.

Pricing

Moving on, you wanna think about Pricing. So is Marketing - Tier 1 Set Price or is it Dynamic? Does it change based on, say, the how many ads they wanna run, like what their ad budget is? Does it change based on how large their database is?

For this, since I've made these up to be like, set hours per week, probably not. This probably would be a set price. And let's say the price for this would be, let's just say $5,000. Keep it simple. $5,000, $10,000 and $20,000 to keep it simple. To make sure that that's written in there. How much is this? Is that per month? Yeah, because I'm making this up, I'm saying it's per month.

Website creation, so this is probably actually gonna be dynamic pricing, so what you wanna do is make sure that you're putting in the range or put in an average. Make sure that you have something to go on when you're looking at this. What's the target, what's the goal?

We're gonna compare this then to our benchmarking dashboard and see if what we are really bringing in matches the ideal that we would like to set here.

So, for example, if my website creation from scratch, if what I think it is is about $25,000, then I will put that in. And then once we've run our benchmarking dashboard, I would look, over the past three years, what is the average that people have paid for a brand new website redesign? Is it $25,000? Is it actually more than that? Are people coming to us for higher end, like way more extensive websites? Then I would update this. So this would be One time.

And you'll do the same for your website redesigns, especially for something that would be dynamic, put in either your range or your average, come back and check it later. Your hosting services, it's probably gonna be dynamic, put in either or.

Average sales cycle

And then make sure you've left yourself notes here. Okay, so let's move on to Average Sales Cycle. What I mean by this is the time it takes for someone to enter into a deal for said product and on average, how long does it take them to actually make the purchase?

One of the things that I noticed a lot working with partners is some of these, people know by heart, they could know "oh, when people come in for a website, they already know what they're looking for and it closes", "they come to us looking for an estimate", "we'll meet with their design team and we can have 'em closed in 30 days". Cool. Okay.

So let's say on average 30 days. But then when they think about the marketing services or recurring services, maybe they're like, "oh, I don't know, 'cause sometimes it takes like six months, you go back and forth trying to figure out which tier they want and they're having to get funding" and, "oh, I don't know. It could be anywhere from, you know, three months to a year". Okay.

What you wanna do here is, in that instance, go ahead and write down what you think it is, but again, flag this as a note for yourself to check against the benchmarking data, 'cause you could be surprised. It could be that actually when you think it's gonna be like six months is the average for all of these, it could be that it's actually only two months for this one, but really it's a year for this one.

It could be that there's a bigger disparity than you think there is, so make note of what you think it is, but always check it against your benchmarking data.

Optional: onboarding, support and maintenance

Finally, bottom section here, this is optional. I have this in here because especially for like SaaS businesses, sometimes people have onboarding items that are an additional, like product line.

Same for support and maintenance. If you don't have these, if you don't offer these, just erase that out, don't even confuse yourself here. If you do have them, then label them exactly the way that we have for everything else.

Go ahead and think about: does this have its own category? Is it maybe a category of like fees or services? Is it a recurring or one time fee? Is it something that they can pay for additional support every month along with, you know, their tier? Would your hosting services actually fit more along the lines of these and maybe you have a services category?

Again, if you don't have these, just delete 'em right on out of here. But if you do, fill them in exactly the same way we filled out all the rest of these product breakdowns.

Class 2, Part 4: Data Model Discovery

All right, now let's move on to the Data Model Discovery.

Choosing your data model tab

So you'll see here that in my template I've given you three different tabs. So you've got your recurring Data Model Discovery, your non-recurring discovery, and your data model usage based.

What I did in RevOps fundamentals, I used recurring as the example for everything. I'm going to do the same thing today, but just know that for each of these, I have given you not just the discovery sheet itself, but also, if you scroll down ample examples on each tab, so you would be able to have something to go off of.

So, if you pop down here, you see even in discovery or even in usage base, you have the total customers equals new plus active.

So, for today we're gonna focus on recurring revenue, we'll focus on this data model. If this were the case for your business, for clarity's sake, if you don't have non-recurring or usage-based data that you measure, go ahead and eliminate these tabs. Don't even leave them in here for your source of truth. Bring 'em back when you need them, but hide them to avoid confusion. Because again, the goal of this is to simplify and clarify.

Make sure everything is very transparent for your team, not to create confusion. Have available only the tabs that you're going to use and focus on only what's valuable and right for your business.

Defining each stage

All right, so Data Model Discovery. So this is where we start having some fun with the Revenue Performance Model that we talked about last time.

If you are not familiar with the Revenue Performance Model as a data model, well you can stop right now and download a PDF that breaks down exactly what I mean by Revenue Performance Model, shows you how to use it and describes each of these metrics in detail. It's in the resources section for this course, and it is yours to reference anytime you need to.

What we've done is actually pulled the metrics that are used in that data model and put them in this spreadsheet so that you can clarify how it is you want to use the data model in real time.

So, for example, V1, it could be like a website visit or total page views per visit, total sessions on your website. How you define it. In essence, it's how people enter into the funnel. How did they get to you in the first place?

And then you move on to a lead. So for lead, like the most common definition is contact created in the CRM. Sometimes though I see people, they don't call that a lead because technically just the contact was created, the contact themselves didn't do anything to qualify, so I've seen sometimes people, they actually call this a prospect instead of a lead. It wouldn't be called a lead until they've qualified it, right? And then it would be a marketing qualified lead, so...

Think about this in terms of your customer journey. How do you as a business define each of these stages and what do they mean to you and what is the customer themselves doing?

So, for example, if you want to think about the contact that's been created in the CRM, but they've not done anything to hand raise yet, you could call them a prospect, a lead, a general contact.

Then once they have actually done a qualifying event, that's where you could consider them marketing qualified or a sales qualified lead.

So, for example, what we often have is that, you know, contact hits lead score of, and you wouldn't just say contact has hit lead scoring criteria. You wouldn't be that vague. You wanna be specific, you wanna say has a lead score of over 20 or contact filled out conversion form and then list here what you consider your conversion forms. So get demo, contact sales.

And again, you'll do this for all of these. What to you is a sales qualified lead? Does that mean a meeting has been booked? Does it mean just that they've scheduled a demo? Or does it mean that the meeting itself has been booked? Or does it mean that the meeting itself has been held, like has been completed?

Now, you'll notice that I said three things there that are very similar. But they are in fact different. So you wanna be extremely clear here. I've had some partners that stumble here because what they'll say is, "oh, well, it's a demo". Great, what does that mean? Does that mean that the demo is on the books, or does that mean that the demo has been completed and you are now creating a deal for them?

Same thing here, Opportunity. Does that mean that a deal has been created, or does that mean that they just have hit criteria, that they've been qualified? Closed Won, does that mean contract signed in your hand or does that mean that they've actually initiated payment? Closed Revenue, same question. Usually what I see here is that Closed Won is contract signed.

Sometimes I have seen it be that just contracts sent equals Closed Won, then signed contract is Closed Revenue, but most often I see Closed Won equals contract sign, closed Revenue means that we have like payment processing.

Or you actually may not even differentiate between Closed Won and Closed Revenue. You might not, in which case you could just hide this entire line to avoid confusion. Maybe you call this Deal Created instead of Opportunity and then it goes to Closed Won and then that's it.

Or maybe you do keep it at Opportunity and it goes to Closed Won, and then you don't have this, right. Make this match what your business model dictates.

So if we were gonna say SQL is demo meeting completed and Opportunity means Deal Created in CRM BANT met or MEDDIC or MEDPIC, however your qualification criteria is, you could put in here, that's another way to signify that an Opportunity is ready for it for a deal. Closed Won contract signed and then you could just hide this there, and then move into how are you calculating Closed MRR?

Is it the sum of MRR line items on deal, is the example I have. Let me be more specific. Is it the total contract value of all MRR line items? If it is, write that down.

Write down the calculation, so that everyone knows this is how I'm reporting on monthly recurring revenue and non-recurring revenue.

Can your system track it?

Oh, and one more thing before we move down. A big part of what you'll want to do when you are looking through how you've defined everything is, okay, great, this is how I want it to be. Is my system, is my process set up to reflect this?

So for example, demo meeting completed, how is that tracked? If that is how you want to denote that someone is qualified, is that they've completed a demo, you will need to make sure that you have a way to track that. Those meetings are not just scheduled, but they're being held. Same thing for the Opportunity if you want BANT or MEDDPIC or SPICED or whatever your scoring methodology is for qualification, you wanna make sure that you have a way in place for that to be tracked in your single source of truth.

So this is much like we did here where we left some notes for ourselves. This is a good Opportunity to leave comments in here and say "we do not currently track this well". Great, that's what this diagnostic is for, is to call out information like that so that you know where to go from here in setting up. Oh, okay.

Great, so this is one of the first things I need to do then is build out the process to properly reflect that that demo meeting has been completed.

Net new, cross-sell, expansion, downgrades and churn

Next, we'll move on to how we're defining the Net New, Cross Sell, Expansion, Downgrades, and Churned. So for us, we think about it in terms of Net New is a brand new partner and you know that they've reached this stage because kickoff has been scheduled and onboarding has been scheduled.

Cross Sell for us, and you'll see this down here in the examples, existing NRR customer converted to an MRR, a recurring revenue product, or alternatively, an existing MRR product gets added to, or adds Allbound, or another product. Expansion, so that would be a contract increase. Downgrade would be a contract decrease. Churn is complete cessation of services, canceled engagement. What's really important is to come here together and see how you as a company define these things and make sure that you track it here so that you know exactly how everyone is defining the same thing.

For example, if you think of an upsell instead of an expansion, go ahead and change the name of the definition. Make sure that it's something that won't cause confusion. Same thing that we did up here. Make sure that you're configuring this to meet your needs.

Primary partitions

And when it comes to primary partitions, then we're gonna do the same thing. What I want to see here is how you want these metrics broken down. Do you want to see contacts created by the source that they came from? By the job titles that they have, maybe it's by region or location? If once a deal has already been made or once a demo has been held, do you wanna see this, I'm sure you still wanna see the source that they came from for comparison, but maybe now you wanna start adding in what product type they're interested in, what category, which scoring methodology you're using.

This is where you would wanna break it down by what their score is. When you come down here for like the right side of the data model for your signed contracts, do you wanna break it down by close date? For like Closed Won, you probably wanna see it by rep, by region, by product category. And we have examples for all of these. I'll leave all of this in the template for you.

But the important thing to think about here is how you personally want to see the revenue segmented. How you wanna see whether or not you know, one product is performing better than another, or one rep is performing, how you're doing per region, so that you know where to double down your efforts.

Okay, so at the end of the day, you'll want your discovery sheet to look like this, where you have definitions, solid definitions for everything, where you've changed the naming conventions for everything needed.

You have it all mapped out here so that everyone is 100% aligned on what you call the KPI, what the trigger is that controls it and how you wanna see it measured in your reporting.

Where the data lives

Okay, so here's what you wanna do finally, is confirm where you can find this information.

So, for example, if we're looking at HubSpot, HubSpot has multiple objects where information lives. So there's the deal record, the deal object, which has your revenue information on it. The contact object, the contact record, which has personal, individual information for, you know, Billy Joe.

Then the company record, which has the company level information at a corporate level, there's lead objects, there's sessions objects. The reality of the revenue journey is that it touches multiple objects at different times, and the Revenue Performance Model was set up to make sure that we're tracking the customer activity and that revenue information in the way that it travels. So, sessions data would be found as the sessions object and reporting. Contact object would hold contact information. So for your lead and MQL, for this example, then we would move to the deals object for all the rest of this.

It would have the revenue information for the rest of this. So you'll wanna confirm where exactly you are for this. And for something specific like Closed MRR, link the property here that you use.

This is just a pro tip. The longer you use a CRM, the more properties that just sort of pop up and sometimes you'll end up having like duplicate properties and you'll see that there's more than one Closed MRR.

There could be Closed MRR, and there could also be closed monthly recurring revenue and there could also be Closed Revenue and your people are all using them disparately.

If you have used this as your single source of truth and link here, the property they should be using, then there can be no doubt. There can be no question. You can always direct them back and say, okay, this is the one you should be filling out. This is where you should find the source of truth.

Additional business segments

Once you filled out all of this, you'll do it all again if you have a second segment.

So for example, we said that we wanted to do business segment by products and then by region, you would do it all again by that second partition.

What we have done down here in the example from RevPartners is actually business segment one 'cause we have two different product lines that are very different. We actually separated it out like that. So it's RevOps and Allbound. You'll see that these are really similar from our Allbound because we do look at it in a very similar way, but make sure that you are being specific. So if it's contact has hit the lead score, make sure that it is over 20. If it's the contract sign, say what deal stage that equals. It'll just help for clarity's sake when you're training.

The finance perspective

Once you've done, we'll slide over here. Once you've done everything from a RevOps perspective, the final step here is to fill out everything from a finance perspective. Think about it in terms of your actual finance team, because from your RevOps perspective, you are working toward a contract sign or a closed deal or getting them through to the money, hitting the door.

Finance then picks it up from there. Where does the money go after that? And so they'll have probably slightly different definitions and they may have a different source of truth.

You'll see, for example, so we did this in terms of using RevPartners as an example. The source of truth that's QuickBooks and what they think of in terms of Net New is brand new invoicing set up in QuickBooks. Cross Sell is now recurring revenue instead of one time set up in QuickBooks.

At the end of the day, your RevOps reporting will be everything up to the point that the revenue was closed. Then finance will pick it up from as the payments come in, and as you have the actual money flowing.

This source of truth then will show you how each of those teams is talking about this so that when RevOps is reporting, we closed this much revenue, in the X amount in deal amount. Finance can say, okay, great.

And then from my side, here's what's actually been brought into the door. Here's the checks that have cleared is this amount.

And you can all have one single page that tells you how each of you are defining those metrics and what that means.

Wrapping up the survey

All right, and that is the go-to-market survey. You'll notice that as I went through this, I did not fill in every single cell of this document with you because, twofold, some of them may not apply to you. You want to, again, make sure you configure this to you.

And also, there is plenty of sample data in here, so if you're feeling stuck, don't hesitate to go pop through the example data and make sure that you're comparing it.

But feel free to configure it into something that works for you. If you don't use a term or if you call it something else, change it.

When you're looking at your company details, make sure that you're putting in your current revenue and your goals and what feels realistic and achievable.

Make sure that you're specific about how you are classifying how teams are goaled and what you need to build out to make sure that they are tracked in that way.

Don’t skip the analysis

Okay, once you've filled in the go-to-market survey like we just did, it's very important not to skip the analysis part of it. Review all the information comprehensively and check to see are there any red flags that stand out right away, like a complete lack of reporting available right now, or a sales cycle that stands out for either being super long or crazy short, or are there any notes that you put in there for yourself, like, hey, I actually don't have this yet and it needs to be built, or this is a property that needs to be cleaned up that's inconsistently used.

These are things to note because once you’ve finished the revenue mapping — where we actually look at how the engine is currently running and how each of these definitions are used in the real world — the experience audit — how customers actually interact with you — and the benchmarking dashboard — where we get a look at how we are actually measuring up compared to this survey, you’ll be able to assess and refine these goals and definitions as needed.

And you’ll use all this information together to create the strategy and roadmap to move your business forward. Remember this is one step of a larger machine, the Revenue Engine Diagnostic. It’s a critical step, but it’s still just one piece of the larger diagnostic puzzle and that R.E.D. requires all parts before you’ll get a clear picture.

Next time, we’ll dig into the revenue mapping, actually drawing out exactly how people find, interact with, and buy into your business and where that money goes. Get ready to map it out together!

Class 3, Part 1: Mapping the Revenue & Customer Journeys

Welcome back

Welcome back to Implementing RevOps 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking.

So far in this course we’ve talked in depth about the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, how it’s the comprehensive review of every aspect of your business’s current state, from what you want to happen (your goals) to what you think is currently happening to what actually is happening.

Last class we dove into the first part, the Go-To-Market survey, where you examine what you want from your business and candidly take stock of what you’re working with, your products and the agreed-upon definitions of your KPIs.

Now that we’ve finished our GTM survey and we are all on the same page about what we want and what metrics matter most, now we’re going to dive into the blueprint of how it all works right now. We’re going to take a long hard look at how money actually flows and what the customer journey is.

Here at RevPartners, we call this Revenue Mapping, the act of actually drawing out how you attract, engage with, and convert your customers.

In this class we will not only examine what Revenue Mapping is and why it matters, but we’ll actually do an example revenue mapping session together. This exercise is where we move from talking about the “what” — you know, away from the definitions and the product data — and into the “how”. We’ll look at how it is all done, how every team works together.

We are going to physically trace the path of how prospects find you, how they interact with your marketing and are handed off to sales, how they travel through the pipeline and even through to what happens after that sale.

Why map everything, even what’s working

Now, before we dive in, let’s get real again. I told you last class that I tend to get a lot of push back at first when I introduce the Revenue Engine Diagnostic because it’s so extensive and, frankly, it is time consuming. But it’s so important in terms of level setting. And you saw that firsthand with the Go-To-Market survey. Being able to clearly articulate the definitions and triggers of your most valuable metrics and being 1000% confident in your collective — and individual — goals having the transparency of knowing exactly how everyone is working together… that’s critical to success. It’s the key, the key, to unlocking growth, right?

Well, the revenue mapping is no different. Sometimes I get push back when I introduce the concept of physically drawing out the entire revenue journey. And it’s different objections. Sometimes it’s something like “well why do we need to spend time on mapping out marketing, that’s working well, we came to you because the sales process is what needs help” or “we’ve been meeting marketing and sales goals left and right, those teams are locked down and we really don’t want to rock the boat on what they are doing, we’re just here because we want to work on our land and expand motion.”

Other times it’s more an objection because “well, Nikki, I can tell you everything about the sales process but after we hand them off to the account team… and we don’t have anyone from that team available soooo…” and it becomes a lot more of a discussion around “can’t we just focus in on this one part, because that’s what really needs attention.”

And let me just say this, I get it. I do. Look, when I take my little Mini Cooper in for an oil change there’s a big part of me that wants them to just change the flippin’ oil and let me leave, but instead Mini always does a full inspection and films it for me and shows me all the different levels: things I need to make top priority, like a thin brake pad, things I just should be aware of, like filters about halfway through their life, and other things that are great, like yay these tires have excellent tread! And it never fails, I start annoyed that it’s gonna take longer for this whole endeavor than it would have at one of those 10-minute oil change places, but I always leave grateful that I know exactly what state my precious little car is really in. I mean, trust me, even though it’s time consuming I am always happy in the end that I know more than what I went in there for because think about the alternative, which is me driving around on a failing brake pad or cracked engine mount and only learning about that after something terrible happens.

So! Yes, I get the impulse to just focus on what needs fixing “right now” but that’s not what’s best and healthiest in the long run. So when I hear those objections I always push back to the push back. The purpose here is to run a complete diagnostic. Not a partial one. We want to take stock of everything, everything. In exactly the current state. That way we aren’t surprised later. That’s what it means to run a Revenue Engine Diagnostic the RevPartners Way.

So, now you know, no matter how tempted you are to focus in on only pieces of the journey, resist! Take the time to map as comprehensively as possible. Even if you think, even if you know, that one piece works really well, you still want to document it! This is a time to look objectively at the good with the not-so-good. You still want to capture even what’s going smoothly so that you can pull out those insights and replicate the magic you’ve got there.

Don’t stop at closed won

One more warning from me, or not even warning, more like a pro tip: we do not stop mapping just because we’ve hit “closed won”. Revenue doesn’t stop just because sales closes out a deal, does it? No. That’s actually the primary trap I see partners fall into when we first start talking about revenue mapping. They are all for drawing out the sales process… but then everything after sales (and even everything before sometimes) is just left, drifting in the ether.

True growth potential is only unlocked and realized by visualizing the Net Revenue Retention that comes post-closed deal. That’s why the Revenue Performance Model has an entire flywheel section that comes after Closed Won. We designed it intentionally to put equal emphasis on all parts of the revenue journey, not just the sales funnel.

So when we map today we’re going to do it all. We’re going to start at the very beginning, with even those anonymous website sessions or ads that draw the people in, go through each handoff and all through the sales and customer success processes, and then even consider renewals, upgrades, downgrades, the processes in place for expansion, etc. We’ll do it all.

What is revenue mapping?

Okay, so what is Revenue Mapping? I said it before but here is the official definition written out: Rev Mapping is the process of physically tracing the revenue and customer journey. I’ve got it written here as drawing the path a dollar takes from your customer’s pocket to your company’s account. It’s the visual blueprint of every marketing touchpoint, sales interaction and operational handoff.

I’m trying to be as descriptive as possible here to emphasize the importance of the visualization, of getting into the details, of actually doing the drawing and mapping. Because the reality is that yes, technically you could map the revenue journey using notes or spreadsheets or, I don’t know, word documents. You could. But, here’s the thing. And trust me, I actually think in complete sentences and narrative structure. I am not a visual thinker at all, so trust me when I say I’ve tried to capture this in other ways. But the reality is, there is genuinely something about seeing the journey that allows you to see and catch potential holes and gaps so much more easily and clearly when you have the whole flow in front of you. The cracks that things manage to slip through, those cracks hide within notes and process documentation more easily than they can in one comprehensive visual map.

Finding the in-betweens

What I mean by that is, a visual mapping of the entire journey usually surfaces those “in betweens”.

Process documentation captures in detail each step of a process. So even if you do have it — and I’ll be honest a great many places actually don’t — it focuses on a process, then the next document captures each step of the next process, right? Okay but what about the middle? What captures the transition from one process to another? The in-between?

I’ve found that, more often than not, those in-betweens are where we have the most friction or where things fall through the cracks most often. Process documents hardly ever cover this area, but actually mapping it all out at once shows everything, including those potential black holes.

So, at its root, the Revenue Mapping aims to capture absolutely every, to answer the core question of how, exactly, does your company make money?

How do people find you? How are those people moved through the pipeline? Who owns which piece at which time?

Manual processes and automation

Here’s a big question we’ll ask at every step of the journey: is the process manual and, if so, does it have to be? Because manual processes for data transfer are easily some of the most common points of friction I’ve seen. Anything manual, that does not have a solid structured playbook or consistent oversight, is ripe for mistakes, mishandling, and misinformation. Typos, forgotten tasks, things simply missed due to busyness or something as simple as vacation, means that things fall through the cracks and money can just poof right out of your pipeline.

Any time you can have the CRM do the manual “heavy lifting” you want that to happen so that processes remain consistent and your people can focus on the relationship development side of the interactions.

As we map the journey, we’ll look for any opportunities to leverage automation, even when it’s something as simple as a reminder notification, to add to our roadmap. Typically things we find and flag that are like that often end up being highly impactful quick wins.

Our objective with Revenue Mapping is not to only document the process, though that is highly valuable as I’ve just explained in detail. We’re also aiming here to note call-outs. If there are areas of friction, we want to call them out to dive into what exactly is broken and diagnose how it can be fixed.

We want to create a high-fidelity diagnostic tool. By visualizing the flow, we can pinpoint exactly which gears are grinding, which systems are broken, and where we can grab those quick wins to kickstart the momentum.

Calling out what works, too

But we also want to call out the areas that are indeed successful. What’s going well? We don’t only harp on the broken, even if it does get the most attention. We also celebrate what works and dig into why it is working so that we can replicate it in other areas.

It’s just as important to celebrate the wins as it is to hone in on the misses. Accelerating growth needs momentum and most of the time you gain that momentum most easily through quick wins and through highlighting the successes. If you have a process that’s working well, dig into it with exactly the same fervor with which you examine mistakes. What exactly went so well with it? Was it a person? A process step? Is it translatable into other areas of your business? If it is, you've just got a major jumpstart on fixing some other areas!

The value of revenue mapping

The value Revenue Mapping provides is the exact same value you see from the Go-To-Market survey: total clarity and ultimate alignment. Businesses are complex. And often crucial information can be lost in the shuffle between thinking about what should happen, what is happening, and what we actually see and know. It’s easy for teams to lose the forest for the trees, as they say.

Just as the Go-To-Market survey ensured every person knows the goals and primary metrics, Revenue Mapping ensures every single person — from the person posting ads or running social media to the person closing the latest contracts — understands exactly what they are doing and how it all fits together to impact the bottom line.

Revenue Mapping captures a comprehensive picture of your current state, providing an internal reference document that aligns your team and prioritizes the improvements, optimizations, changes, and upgrades that actually move the needle.

The outcome? Total operational clarity on how your business works, in granular detail. No more guessing where the money is coming from or who owns that meeting scheduling process or when exactly an account gets transferred from one department to the next.

Why it matters

Here’s why it’s so important, and if some of this sounds familiar, congratulations! You’ve been paying attention! The why here is similar to the why for the Go-To-Market Survey: alignment, identifying friction or gaps, and optimizing or leveling up opportunities for growth.

These pieces are all part of the larger Revenue Engine Diagnostic, all part of the same system, so their values are similar even though their functions are quite different.

Mapping out the revenue journey creates a visual representation of the processes you have in place. Just as we did in the GTM by documenting the definitions of our KPIs, the purpose here is to surface what everyone thinks is happening and then align on the true path.

For example, we talked about the differences departments have in definitions with the GTM survey. So, like, marketing could think a lead means any form fill on any page, while sales actually classifies “leads” as only people that have scheduled a demo, right? And by surfacing those beliefs and documenting them in the survey, we drive clarity and decision making; we nail down one singular correct definition for everyone to walk away with. Same exact thing here, just for processes instead of terminology and goals.

When you see the process completely from start to finish, you can call out places that are misaligned. Instead of debating what a lead is, you drive clarity on who owns the lead and when hand off is. That’s the alignment value.

At the same time, we’re going through this entire diagnostic in order to identify the bottlenecks, pain points, and gaps. Yes, we want to document where we are, but it would be useless to document the process as-is and then wipe our hands of it and walk away. The value comes from analyzing that process and extracting areas of friction that can be improved upon.

Which brings me to my third “why” point: we highlight areas of manual effort to be optimized through automation. I called this out before, but one of the most common gap areas I’ve seen as a strategist was always manual processes. If your team is spending 90% of their time on manual qualification or list building or outbound messaging, eventually there will be errors. No human process can be one hundred percent consistent and perfect every single time. So any support we can give through automation is not just a win for efficiency, it’s a win for your team.

What we map

When you sit down and start mapping, we don’t just zero in on one area. We capture the entire customer journey, throughout each department.

We start with the left side of our Revenue Performance Model, the acquisition side of the data model: how are leads flowing into the business. Most often, this is the marketing deep dive. How do names actually get into the CRM, who owns the inbound forms and follow up, when is the handoff from marketing to sales and what does that look like?

We’re diving into list imports and who owns those once they’ve been uploaded. So often people think about the inbound forms as the only — or the primary way — names get into the CRM and then when you look at source data you find out that actually 75% of contacts came from lists. Were those all imported consistently? Was that all valuable and necessary data or did you just clog up your CRM? Do you have a standardized process for importing and assigning out leads?

Which often brings us to sales. What does the lead qualification process look like? Is there a prequalification by marketing? What exactly does the sales cycle look like? Map it out from qualification to new deal created and all the way through to closed won, every step. Pull out a section for the proposal and quoting process, even if it’s relatively simple. You still want it documented. What outbound prospecting are you doing? Who owns it? Is it consistent?

And of course we absolutely do not forget that the journey doesn’t stop with sales. We map all the way through closed won. We capture the sales to customer support handoff and the steps that make up new customer onboarding. Who owns the welcome email? When is a CS brought in? Do you have an escalation process? When we get to renewal time or when an upsell or cross sell is identified, who owns the outreach? Is there an additional sales pipeline with different stages for the renewal process?

We’re looking for the complete journey; all the gritty details of a prospect becoming a lead and how that first session turns into cold hard cash in your account.

How to map

Alright, let’s talk logistics. We’re going to do an example revenue mapping together in the next video, but here are the steps laid out for you to keep and reference any time you need. You can use Miro, Lucidchart, or even a literal whiteboard as long as you then translate that into a digital document that can be shared and saved for everyone to work from. The tool doesn’t matter as much as the process itself, but I’ll be using Miro and the template I’ve provided is in there.

1. Start at the first interaction. How do they find you? Don't skip the session data. You want to know exactly how money is coming in the door so that you can both celebrate what’s working and either fix or drop the acquisition channels that don’t serve you.

2. Map across teams. Draw the lines where one process stops and the next begins and capture every step, every process, every handoff all the way through closed won and beyond. Remember there’s a reason we moved away from that old-school sales funnel and adopted the Revenue Performance Model for data: the money, the journey, doesn’t stop at closed.

3. Color code and organize. This one is a big one for me. I promise you, using different colors for Marketing, Sales, and CS will save your brain when you’re looking at a complex map later. And using different shapes to indicate “this is branching logic” or this is automated vs manual, makes the information easier to digest, especially when you’re reviewing it later.

4. And my final reminder: Capture the current state. If the current state is a mess, draw a mess. We aren't here to draw a fantasy; we’re here to draw a map that helps us find the way out. When you capture what you really have in place, the optimizations and improvements you need to make become clear and that’s what this diagnostic is for!

Note the improvements, and when you have fully implemented the changes — and adopted them — come back and update your revenue map because then that will be your “current state”.

Using the Miro template

Okay, enough talk. Let’s get our hands dirty. I’m going to pull up that revenue mapping template in Miro I referenced. It’s also linked in the resources section of this class for you to use as well. You’ll need a Miro account to use it, but you can make an account for free. Clone, I cannot emphasize this enough, clone the template I’ve provided. I have locked this particular Miro board so that everyone always sees the same thing and it can remain a true, empty template. But you can clone it for yourself and use it in your own Miro account. That’ll also save it for you to reference or copy and continue using in the future.

While we’re doing the mapping demonstration, I’ll be using example data with some RevPartners examples thrown in. Follow along as I map and then take the cloned template and map your own company’s revenue journey.

When you’re ready, move on to the next video to start mapping!

Class 3, Part 2: Understanding the Miro Template

How the template is laid out

Okay, so before we actually dive into doing the revenue mapping, let me take a minute to show you how to use this template. Because I know that when I first saw it, I was a little overwhelmed. So let me actually break it down for you. First things first, you'll remember our revenue performance data model. This template is based on that. So we have our left side here, our acquisition funnel.

We have our flywheel over here for our revenue capture. You'll see that we actually start, we start all the way at acquisition, so before they ever enter our CRM. We have conversion points, we'll talk about our nurturing and our handoff. I have actually built in here some guide posts along the way. You can take what I have here and you can actually replicate it, you can add more. There's plenty of room here for additional notes.

We'll answer the questions that are in here, but we'll also leave notes for ourselves as we're mapping the journey. For example: “Hey, this is an opportunity for improvement that I see.”

The metrics at the bottom, you'll note, are from our revenue performance model, so they're the exact same ones that are in there. You can zoom in to this Miro, which is what we'll do as we go along the path. We'll zoom in and out. This way you have the full picture, but you can also drill in and get granular.

The key: shapes, colors and lines

So that's the template overall. I do have a key up here for you. And this is what I meant in terms of organization and color coding. The way that I use this Miro board is to think in terms of shapes denoting things like decisions, key points. This right here would be an epic, you know, a larger project, which we call them epics. There's a decision here that is gonna cause branching logic. This is something that we need to document. And then the color coding. So if I have, you know, the shape here for a document, then I would color code it. Does it already exist? Does it need to be created?

Does it exist and live in HubSpot already? Or your CRM, you know, we're very partial to HubSpot here. So for me, my color coding is based on whether or not it exists, but also is in our CRM HubSpot. And then I also think too about using the outlines themselves of the shape.

In Miro, when you go to add a shape, not only can you choose the kind that it is, so let's say I wanted to add this shape here, I can then go in and actually look at, do I want it to be a dotted line? What's the color? How do I want to denote that here? The shape or the meaning of what I'm creating.

I use a lot of shortcuts in Miro to give myself notes later. And then I leave this key for myself and for others when I share this template so that they know how to read it. Dotted line is a manual process. Solid line is an automated process. So if I had an item, so our square here, if I had an item that was highlighted in orange and it was a solid line, then that would mean I have an element that is already existing in HubSpot and it is an automated system process. If I have, you know, the workflow here, the workflow symbol, and it were in yellow, then what I would say is, okay, well then that's a planned update that I have coming up. And I know at a glance what to expect. Similarly, the glossary here, these come straight from the revenue performance model. Update this with the definitions that you've come up with.

The glossary

One of the things that we do here at RevPartners is we actually link everything here into this Miro Board. So we would actually paste in the link to the Go-To-Market Survey right here so that it lives inside of this Miro. And we would copy these definitions of key lifecycle stages, our priority KPIs, everything that we decided on in our Go-To-Market Survey, we would have it here as part of this glossary.

And add that link to that go-to-market survey so that everyone has one source of truth that they can reference for understanding that this is our revenue map, this is who we are as a company, this is how we define ourselves, and here's everything you need to know to get up to speed about us.

This is the template that we will use in the next video when we actually drill in and start mapping.

Class 3, Part 3: Revenue Mapping Demonstration

All right, now that you know how the revenue template works and you understand how I've got it laid out for you, let's get started actually mapping revenue.

Acquisition channels

So you'll see here that I've got my blank, cloned revenue mapping template and I am ready to get started. We're gonna start over here on the left-hand side with acquisition channels. So as you zoom in, you'll see here that I've got it separated out into various channels.

Our template from RevPartners actually comes with many of the acquisition channels already laid out here for you. We've tried to make it as simple as possible to get the mapping started.

So we have marketing generated channels, sales generated, customer generated, partner generated, and then of course down here, we have our offline sources: our imports and our uploads.

These are the most common acquisition channels (that we see) that we've got captured here on the template. What we do first is zoom in here and actually start looking at each of these departmentally segmented acquisition channels and diving into them:

• What do we have,

• What is the process,

• Where is it tracked, and

• What happens next?

That's the process you're gonna follow, those four steps, for how you're going to complete the revenue mapping throughout this entire thing.

First things first, what do we have? And don't forget your color coding. For example, if you're starting with, “We definitely have social media. Not only do we have social media, we have social media that is tracked in our CRM.” Then we start there. I would label that as “We have it and currently it's in our CRM.” And color code it that way, too.

If we have public relations, and that's not something that we have in our CRM, but it is absolutely a channel we utilize, then get that labeled into your green color. And then you're going to start asking yourself, “Okay, what is the process and how is it tracked?”

So first thing, I've got the reminder up there that asks: How is ROI being tracked? If you don't have centralized reporting, that is the first place that you're going to come over here and set yourself a sticky note and say, we don't have centralized reporting yet. This is the first thing you're going to flag because when you come back in here and use this in conjunction with your go-to-market survey and your experience audit, when you use all of this to create your revenue operations strategy, this is the first flag that you're going to find to say, “I definitely need to have an epic dedicated resources to ensure that we are getting reporting centralized reporting created.”

Make sure as you're going through here that you are calling out areas for improvement with sticky notes, with notes and color coding and labeling. This is your white board for truly discovering what’s going on.

All right, so the next thing that you're gonna do is go through and say: okay, what is the process? So if you do have social media, if you do have reporting, go ahead and link it here. You can actually just link to the dashboards that you use.

And then we're gonna ask ourselves, “Okay, what's the process?” If you do have social media, are you running product specific ads? What platforms are you running them on? So you would say, “Okay, yes, we have paid social media ads. We have Instagram ads. We also have Facebook or LinkedIn ads.” Great, go ahead and capture what it is that you have available and, again, what the next step of that process is. Capture everything in detail.

So what happens after that? You'll see over here that our next step is connecting conversion points. What happens when someone clicks on a Facebook ad? Are they taken to a landing page? Like an external campaign landing page or are they taken to your website?

What you'll do as part of your revenue mapping is actually connect the dots. That's the goal that we're doing together for our revenue mapping: We are literally connecting the dots along the customer journey and the revenue journey. Go through and do this with each of your acquisition channels.

Now, if you don't have some of these channels that we have in this template, feel free to highlight them and get rid of them. Use the space for something else. If there are say channels on here, if there are channels that you utilize that are not listed on here, add them in. Add in specific events and referral programs and affiliate websites. Add in anything that you think is missing and be specific with it.

If we at RevPartners were going to fill out this map, one of the things that we would do for partner referrals would be to say, “Yes, we absolutely have this.” We do have it in our HubSpot. And we have HubSpot as an affiliate partner. We are a HubSpot Elite Partner Agency. We also have Clay. We are a Clay Elite Partner Agency, right? So those are two of the affiliate channels that we have. We’d label those here.

Next, I would go here and say, okay, and what happens after that? So the partner referral is a form that they fill out that takes them to a hard conversion page of an affiliate referral form.

Okay, so do that for each of your channels. This is what your assignment is. Go through each of these channels. Write down what you have, make sure you're capturing what you have, what the process is, where it's tracked, and then what the next step is.

Offline interactions and bulk uploads

Let's talk about offline interactions and manual uploads. So you'll see that I've started actually doing some of a little more extensive mapping here for you because what we've seen is there are pretty standard, pretty common, I won't say standard, pretty common ways that imports are done.

Typically, for bulk uploads, you've got two options. You've got either a CSV upload, an import, or you have connected apps that are doing the importing for you. For example, if you attend an event, let's say you attend our annual event called Southbound in Atlanta. Let's say you've gone to that and then afterwards you have a list of names that you want to get into your CRM. You would then do a CSV upload. The other way is if you have connected apps, say like ZoomInfo. If you have ZoomInfo then it is consistently doing imports for you and getting names from their platform into your CRM.

The question that you need to answer and the process that you need to map is what happens after that? What's the next step? If you do this, you consistently have bulk uploads via CSVs, who owns them? What is the process?

Is there consistency in it? Where is the process doc that shows the standardization? And then once they're in your CRM, what happens next? Are they like, if we're zooming back out, are they enrolled in conversion, like hard conversion and soft conversion points, or are they enrolled in some nurturing efforts? What is the step that is taken after you get them into your CRM?

If you can't answer that, if you don't know, then this is one of those areas that gets a great big sticky note on it saying, “Hey, I know we have a process here, but I think it might be broken. I think it needs to be looked at.”

Again, take advantage of the color coding to leave yourself some big red flags. Even if you're not sure if the process is broken, you can still flag it as well.

You can note things like: “Look, it may be working great, but I don't know it. So I need to go, I need to dig into it as part of my RevOps strategy. And I need to assess it and find the reporting on it. We need to see if there is an adopted process.” Essentially what you're trying to do here with this is flag for yourself where you need to put the resources for when you're making your strategy.

Individual uploads

Okay, so up next, let’s talk about an individual upload. This is sort of the other path. You have your bulk uploads, if you're coming in with big long lists or you've got your connected apps, but things also get into your CRM individually. One of the most common ways, which is why we have it here, is an email extension.

I've got a flagged question here for you. Are you using Gmail or Outlook and is it connected to your CRM? Because if it is, then your CRM could be pulling contacts in via your email and every time you send an email it's creating a new contact in your CRM. If that is happening again the question is what happens next? What are they coming in as?

And I’ve got another big question here for you to always remember. What life cycle stage is each of these people coming in as? Whether you are bulk uploading them because you attended an event or whether it's coming in from your email because you CC'd some vendor on some request for something. When they're added to your CRM, what's their life cycle stage and what happens next? If you can't draw a line from here to the next piece of the puzzle, then you need to flag for yourself that you've got a dead end that needs looking into.

Flagging quick wins

All right, one other flag. I've got little reminders in here for quick wins that you can note. So if at any point you're going through here and you're looking at each of these processes, always try to note for yourself, “Hey, what are the easy areas that I can fix?” One example that we see a lot of are reassessing these settings for your email extension and your connected app settings.

That can often be a quick win that we see and would just flag here with a note that says, “Update email extension settings.” One small change like this can have a huge impact on the hygiene of your CRM. So you always want to be flagging anything like that that can be a quick win.

Because like I said before, anytime you can do something small that has a larger impact, it gains momentum early on. You're seeing results quickly. And then you just want to compound on them. You just want to build on them. So anytime you see the QW here, that means there's probably a quick win that you should look for in this area.

Conversion points

All right, let's zoom back out and go on to our next piece of the revenue journey. Now we're talking about conversion points. So let's say you have your social media ads running. What happens next? Let's get zoomed in here. Are they coming in to informational landing pages? And if so, are those pages outside your main website? Are they, say, paid campaign landing pages?

Or are they some of the core pages on your site? I've got some examples in here, some of the most common conversion pages that are on most sites: homepage, product pages, pricing pages, blog pages. Add in here anything that you don't see. So for example, if I were going to add this for RevPartners, we have the RPX, the revenue performance accelerator that you are in right now, and we have a dedicated conversion page for that on our website. So I would make sure it's documented as a potential website conversion page.

Come in here and make sure you're color coding, leave notes for yourself. Check the CTAs and make sure you know what happens when people are visiting these pages.

What happens next? What is the next piece of the puzzle? Are they doing a soft conversion? Something that might lead them into a nurturing path? For example, one of the most common ones is gated asset pages. If you're leading people down a path, they would come to the campaign landing pages like I said, and maybe the page that they're being directed to is actually for downloading a gated asset. Well, that's a soft conversion that is probably going to lead them into a nurture path next. Because if they're just downloading a PDF about my product, maybe they're ready to convert, but maybe not. Maybe they need to learn more.

So, capture that. What is the logic path that they are taking once they have gotten to your conversions? The same question down here for hard conversions. Think through your hard conversion logic. What are your pages that really drive like qualified leads? Do you have any CTAs or converting pages that you would consider automatic qualification? For many people, especially if you have, going back to our go-to-market motions, if you are product-led growth primarily, then you would have a free trial conversion page, which could be considered automatically qualifying. Some of the others that we see a lot are “get started,” “contact us,” “download.” There are many possibilities.

Again, sometimes that download actually is for a soft conversion because they're downloading a PDF. Sometimes they're further along in their journey. So a download is significant of them being a hand raiser. If you don't have this, another one that I see a lot is “get demo.” I see that a ton as a really hard conversion. Like, “Yes, I'm here. I want to see your product. Show it to me because I'm qualifying myself.”

All right, once you have gone through and you've signified which of the conversion pages you have, make sure you are marking everything like, “Yes, I have this, but it's not in my CRM, but we do absolutely use it.” Or “Yes, we have this and it's in our CRM” or “I don't know, this one might be broken. I need to come back and assess this.”

Make sure you're leaving notes for yourself. Say “I don't know what happens,” if you don't know what happens after the follow-up of something. If you're like, “Okay, this contact us page, I can't remember right off the top of my head if it goes to a meeting scheduling link, or if it just sends an email to sales and sales has to reach out to schedule. It could go either way.” And if you can't confidently list out the steps here, then you need to flag this as broken, because you're going to find it out in your experience audit. And this tells you what to come back and look for and where to focus your attention.

After the conversion: lead nurturing

Right, zooming back out on our journey. So once you've listed your acquisition channels and then you've thought through the conversion points and the key pages, the next thing that we're going to do is think, “Okay, after that hard conversion, what happens?” Or after a soft conversion (considering the lead nurturing could be an option), what’s next? Essentially, after a conversion, what happens?

And you've kind of got three options here. Let’s zoom out a little bit, again. So you've got the product-led qualification, and you've got the lead nurturing if they need a little more attention, or you've got marketing-led qualification. So think through when you are classifying each of your conversion points here, what would be the next logical step? Going back to download as an example, if “Download” is the conversion point that they came from. If it were, say, a PDF, like we have a PDF-gated asset for our revenue performance model, the very thing that you are seeing an example of, we have a “how to use” PDF that we offer. So if, for me, it were “download,” where's the conversion point?

The next thing that I would map would be nurturing because for us, the process that we have after that is an email sequence that they get delivering the asset itself, following up with some tips and how to use it. And then a third sequence that's, if you wanted to see this in action, we actually have a revenue performance accelerator course on this, et cetera, et cetera.

So I would map right here each of those steps. Come over here to our shapes and I would actually put in here: step one. Just as a little pro tip, Miro does capture the last thing that you did color-coding and shape wise. So if you saw that coming in as red, that's why. I know what this process is. And I actually know confidently that it's not broken. So I would not label this as red. I would put this in here as email marketing and yes, I would label this as RPX, email follow-up one. And you would label this whatever it's actually labeled in your outreach process. So that would be the first thing.

Now, if you had “download” as a soft conversion and then it came over here into your lead nurturing, map out from download what happens and then connect the dots over here. What are the next steps? And I would list out each of those steps all through, I think it's three emails. So I would list out each of those three emails and then move on. Okay. And what, when they get to the end of that, what happens? Are they disqualified or are they moved on to further qualification? So that would be “download.”

If we're zooming back in here and we were using “free trial” as the conversion, well, free trial would actually go up here to the product qualification, that would be the next step for that.

Product qualification

Okay, so once you've connected the dot there for that PQL, so now you're gonna go up here for the product qualification. What is that process? How does your product actually pull people in your free trial? What are the steps that they are taking? Do they get limited access to your platform? Are they getting, as part of that limited access, are they seeing ads for the next tier or for, like, for example, if we were thinking about HubSpot itself, if you had the free tier of HubSpot, you would get a reminder for when your free trial is over with links to their pricing for their other tiers. If you were using Spotify, they have ads that show up that say, “Hey, if you're seeing this it’s because you're on Spotify free, you wouldn't have to see this if you're on Spotify premium.” So the product itself is doing the heavy lifting of qualifying them and handing them off.

Here you would pull in your process steps and capture each step that the prospect is having to go through that gets them to the actual product qualified deal created or the next like the next step, the handoff. Again, if you're thinking about it in terms of if it's a free trial and then sales comes in and creates a deal for it, what is the process there that gets someone to a deal created? What did they have to do to trigger the salesperson to reach out to them?

Marketing qualification

All right. And then our third path. So if we're coming back here again and we're saying, okay, if they clicked on our “get started” or “get demo” page, well that then would lead them into the lead generation or the qualification stage. So that is actually our next slide. Once you've captured your nurturing and your product qualification processes, the next step for you is to go over here to your marketing qualification.

And you'll see here that I have a lot of the little quick win reminders because we often see a lot of quick wins in the qualification area. Starting with how are your leads even assigned? If they are manually assigned, a quick win would be: Can you automate that process pretty quickly? Can you get a rep round robin or territory-based lead routing set up? Can you get that pretty quickly in your RevOps strategy pipeline? Because that will make a huge difference in the turnaround time between interest and outreach.

You’ll see I've got a question here, this time about Slack. Do you use Slack or Teams or an IM? Often a quick win would be getting the notifications here automated in some way. Yes, if you get a rep or a lead assigned to you, often you'll get an email or you might get an in-app CRM notification, but those are easily overlooked. I mean, just think about when you come back from a vacation how inundated your inbox is. Our emails are very busy. It can be easy to overlook that. Whereas if you are getting a notification there and in-app in the CRM and also in your IMs, it's way harder to miss.

Okay, so before I move on to the other quick wins let’s dig into this process. So the first part of the process here is you're going to actually map out each step. What is your qualification process? So let's go back to following that journey we were on earlier. So it's like following from, okay, someone clicked on a social media ad for our product. They were taken to a landing page where they then downloaded a PDF about our products and services. That put them in lead nurturing and they received a three email series about how we benefit them and I've mapped out each of those three steps here. And then at the end of it, that led them to clicking on one of our hard conversion CTAs, our “get demo,” or something similar which convinced them. And now we have the qualification process. So what happens next? Great, they've hand raised, like they went through all this nurturing, they know about your product and now they've said, great, I'm ready to hear from you. So how is that assigned out? Are you sorting it based on company size, industry, territory? How do your reps know that they're next in line? And how are they notified? Then once they are notified, what is the next step in their process? Do they have a standard email that's like an introduction and next steps?

Again, that could be a quick win. If you don't have that standardized, you could standardize that and put it in your CRM. Another one, how are meetings arranged and scheduled? Do you have a shared meeting calendar? Do you have a round robin calendar? Are people, your prospects able to access your calendar link in a digital way that puts the power in their hand to pick the time that works best for them?

If you are often using calls, do you use Zoom or CallRail or Avoma or HubSpot? Something that can record, track the calls, give you metrics and insights on it, track it in your CRM. Is there an integration that you're using that can make this more powerful and can keep tracking this journey?

Once the MQL is passed to sales and sales has it, what steps does the sales team take to actually qualify that lead? So again, you're going to bring your symbols over here and you're gonna actually say, this is step one and that leads to step two and that leads to step three, which then leads to an actual SQL generated lead and then that is what goes in our pipeline.

Lead scoring

So you're going to track each of those. All right, before we actually go to our SQL trigger, there's one more thing. So you'll see that there's a lot of empty white space here because there's one other step. So if you noticed from our lead nurturing, once you've got your steps in here, there’s another important question, what is your lead scoring model currently? Do you have it? Do you have both types of scoring, fit and behavior?

And what I mean by that is demographically, do you have scores for job titles and geography versus behavior scoring? And what I mean by that is actual actions that the prospect has taken equals X amount. So like if they've downloaded one PDF, that's one point. If they've attended a webinar, that's five points.

What is your lead scoring model? If you do not have one then again, this is a huge sticky note for you. We need lead scoring and that is one of the first things that you would put on your RevOps roadmap when you're thinking about the next 90 days and how you want to spend your time prioritizing. We want to know the quality of leads that are coming in because that's how sales is going to prioritize their time.

Disqualification

Next, what about disqualification? So I'm coming back here to the lead nurturing section because one of the things that I talked about was you're going to map out each of your steps. So yes, like this step leads to this step leads to this step. Okay. At any point here, what happens if someone opts out or stops responding or responds with, you know, “Oh my, this is a Home Depot. I thought I was coming to a Wendy's.” Look, we all get them. We all get leads that come in that are just like, “Wait, this is not what I needed, my bad.” And they disqualify themselves. Or they're just not a fit for your product or your service or your tier or your price point. And they need to be disqualified or they just vanish.

So what is the process there? At what point do they drop out and then get listed as your disqualification criteria and need to be labeled appropriately in your CRM. And what is the process for that? What happens? So this space right here is for you to capture your disqualification process. So this space right here is for you. If you have disqualification criteria in a spreadsheet or a Word document or you just want to capture it here with, you know, one of these boards, capture it. Make sure that it's here in your source of truth and that you know what happens, not just how the disqualification occurs, like what was the trigger that they met that labeled them disqualified, but what happens? Is it a lead status that labels them as disqualified?

When they do get that lead status, are they kept in your CRM so that you don't keep having to qualify the same people? Or are they removed so that your database is kept clean? What's the actual process? Do you have a referral process for certain types of disqualified people?

Here’s an example, okay, so I used to work for a warehousing company that specialized in a specific type of weight and dimensions and any inquiries that would come in that would be too small or too large, we actually had referral partners. We would disqualify them for us, but then we would refer them to someone else. So right here, I would capture exactly what that process is, capture every step from “labeled as disqualified lead status”, through to “referred to X person over here”.

Sales pipelines

All right, so now we're gonna move to the next step. And as you'll see, as we're zooming out here, now we're getting into the actual sales process and our pipelines here. Then CPQ, our configuring, pricing, quoting process. So we're right here to the end of the acquisition and sales funnel and we're getting closer to our revenue flywheel.

Okay. So now we're getting back in here and we're getting into the actual pipelines themselves.

So first things first. Let's go back up here and think about the product qualification itself and let's go answer this. What are exactly the steps that a product deal takes to becoming a customer?

The reason that this product pipeline here is often separate from your sales pipeline is because, oftentimes, a product pipe, like the product itself, those sales, those deals, they go through different stages, right? It's a different process for them. Again, thinking in terms of a product like HubSpot, which has its free tier, then you can self-upgrade. So their product pipeline, for people who are self purchasing and doing self checkout, would be something like, okay, they get pricing or they go to the pricing page, they request a quote, the quote is automatically generated by HubSpot, they pay the invoice, that is a closed won deal.

Versus if they were handed off, if they needed a large, custom, or an enterprise account, right then instead they wouldn't necessarily be a product-led deal They would be a sales-led deal and they would go through the sales pipeline of sales would have a discovery with them, sales would make sure that they're qualified to buy and then give a presentation of this is “The level of HubSpot I think you need and these are the hubs that I think are most beneficial and here are the areas and the elements of them that I would recommend using first. And this is how you'll get the quote for that. If you agree with what I've presented, I'll create a quote for you and we can go back and forth with the negotiation.”

So this is why you want to think about in terms of what the process is, both from your side of things, from internally what you are doing, but also what the customer is doing as their stages along their pipeline. So again, the product pipeline steps would be then what the customer does for their self checkout.

And then as you're zooming in here, what are the steps then for a net new opportunity that sales is doing? So when sales is creating a new deal, what is the minimum entry criteria? What is the minimum viable information that they need before a deal should ever enter into the first stage? And what's your first stage called? So you'll see that I've got in my template here, I've just got some generic stage names.

You’ll want to change this to fit your stages. So let's say your stage one is, “discovery meeting scheduled” or held or whatever. Go ahead and put in here what it is that matches your sales stages. And then again, you are going to pop in here exactly what your steps are. What is it that sales is doing throughout this? How does that get someone to the qualified to buy stage?

What automations do you have set up here? Are you utilizing your CRMs, reminders, deal tags, and required properties? So that's a really big one that you really want to clarify here. Before someone can move to “qualified to buy,” what is the minimal viable information that I need?

I would set that up as required properties in your CRM. For example, you must at minimum know what their budget is. So you fill out that property. You must at minimum know what products they're looking for. Go through each of your stages.

Quoting and contracting

And I mentioned this in the last class, but when it comes to quoting and contracting, you do actually want to take a moment here and dive deeper into that process. So through the sales stages you can capture what's happening in those stages here pretty well. But for your actual quoting, your proposal process, that one dive into. So when you get to that stage, you actually follow the map here that's like, okay, so now what is the process for actually generating that quote?

How are line items added? What is the step for me that I need to know in order to get those line items in there? Do I need to do discounting? Do I need to do approvals? Maybe there's a place here where it's like, I need to go through and make sure I'm checking for discounts and tax exemptions and things like that. And then here would be, now I need to send this to my VP for a confirmation for review and then once it's approved, then I'm connecting the dots to my quote sent and coming back down here for quotes sent. And you can leave more notes for what sales is doing, but dive into that quoting process. Actually think about what tools you're using and how you're coming up. If you have a proposal process, really dig in here.

You can add more, you can extend this and add more boxes and really dive into all aspects. Do you have a negotiation phase? Do you send out a proposal that has four options, then they come back to you with their feedback and then you narrow it down to two options? What does that look like? Actually nail down the process as you're going through here and then don't come back here until the quote is sent, not just a proposal, but like the quote or contract they will sign and agree to.

Okay, caveat: it could be a proposal if they could then just pick one and purchase it and then that would move them to closed won. But what I mean is don't come back here until whatever this step is would lead them to closed won. Capture, dive in, dig in, list out all the processes that they would go to. And then if “quote sent” or “proposal out,” or it could be “negotiation complete and signature” is what gets you to that closed won, that’s fine. Whatever it is that is the entry criteria for your closed won stage, that is the ending point that goes here. And before that, you dig into all the steps that led up to that.

Closed won

So once you've gotten here to whatever is the entry gate for your closed won trigger, great. Actually, I'm moving this down. It got moved around.

For your closed won, awesome. Okay, now dive in here. What happens at closed won? Again, pretty quick win. Who's notified? Is finance notified and they are sending a contract, like an invoice. Is an account person notified immediately that they have a new account incoming? Is your sales team doing a quick celebration? Who's notified and then what is the next step? Also, I've got another quick win here for the closed won stage because another simple win is asking why did they win?

Answering your closed won or closed lost reasons can provide valuable insights for you. So it could be a super quick win to create a property that captures why people closed won or closed lost. And then after about three months, you're looking at the data. Okay, why most often did people not go with X product?

See what trends you're seeing. Maybe your pricing is way off the mark. Maybe there's one product that just needs to be rebranded, remarketed. Maybe there's a sales rep that's really struggling with their territory. You can start looking and one small change, adding the closed loss to closed won reasons. One small change like that can be super impactful. So look for your quick wins.

Closed lost

And then finally, lost. At any point, obviously people can come over here and move to the closed lost stage. So think through what the process is.

What happens when someone hits closed lost? Are they moved back into nurture? Are they labeled? Is their lead status updated? Are they removed from your CRM? What happens? What are the steps that are taken? If the deal is just dropped into closed lost and left, that’s a red flag for you. If you're just dropping them into closed lost and you're never really analyzing why they were lost or nurturing them, because maybe it was just bad timing, you always want to flag that. If something is just dropped here and there isn't a next step, that's always something to flag and keep in mind for your revenue operations strategy.

All right, so those are your sales processes. That's your sales stages, your product pipeline, your configure, price, and quoting steps.

Onboarding

Obviously our next question is what happens next? So they reach the closed won deal. And then what happens after that? Well, they are a new customer, right? What does that mean?

Again, we're doing revenue mapping because we're mapping out the process, the actual steps. We don't want any fluff. We don't want just, “well, they're a customer, Nikki. They're a customer.” Great, cool, fine. Super awesome. Love that for you. What is next though? What happens along their journey?

So for this, you're gonna go up here and you're going to actually map out if you have an onboarding process, you're going to map that out. The whole process.

Now, one quick caveat. You may in fact not have a specific onboarding process that's separated from your customer success team. It could be that a new customer here actually goes right up into customer success immediately. If that is the case, just take this onboarding here out of your revenue map and just move the line from here right up into customer success.

Because again, the point of this revenue map is to capture your process, your customer journey, your revenue journey, as it is or should be. So if this flow isn't exactly the way that you have it, that's okay. Make it your own. This template is made for you to make your life easier, but not to be the be all, end all. You want this to capture you.

I'll go back and say, if your sales process, if you have multiple pipelines that are slightly different, great, copy this. See there? Add. You can add another stage here. You can add three. You can have as many as you want. As long as you're making sure that you are capturing the accurate process all the way through, that's what we want. We want that granular detail. We want to dive in there. So if you have more than one, get them in here. Dig into each of those stages.

All right, so moving on. Back to our onboarding. If you do have an onboarding process, what are the steps? What is the customer expected to do? If there is guided onboarding, for example, if you have a SaaS product, how does it work? Do they get a dedicated rep and if so how is that assigned?

How does the representative themselves know that they've been assigned and how does the customer know who it is? Is there an official handoff? When exactly in this messy middle right here, from closed won between onboarding, when in here does the ownership actually transfer from sales to an onboarding or customer success representative. Label that and document how it's done.

If it is that I message Fred and say, “Yo, you have a new person.” Hey, document that. Document exactly what your process is. If it is actually a round robin and it is set up in our CRM and it is based on who has the next available capacity. Great, great. Track that.

So how are customers assigned? And then also underneath that say, and from the customer's perspective, they actually get both an email introduction listing the name and the contact information of their onboarding rep. And they get a quick video or live meeting intro of about 15 minutes, and the sales rep owns scheduling that and then invited are the sales rep, the main point of contact and the onboarding rep. And during that, they get the new contact information and then moving forward, the onboarding rep schedules everything. Whatever the process is, capture that here.

Then capture how the notifications are currently handled, how you want them to be handled, and how any follow-up from sales is handled. When in your CRM is ownership of that contact actually transferred from the sales rep to the onboarding rep or to the customer success rep? Is that automated? What is the trigger that actually causes that switch to be made?

I've got some extra space here, because it could be that your onboarding process is more extensive so again if that is the case just extend this add some other add your other steps in here but capture as much granular detailed information as possible every single step and the goal is for us to get them through onboarding into either repeating revenue or hand it off so that they are a live customer they're owned by customer success.

Customer success

Let's go up here and let's talk about customer success. We want to, just like we've done everything else, we want to document everything when it comes to how accounts are assigned to the customer success representative and how is the customer success representative notified.

Exactly the same thing that I said with onboarding. You want to think through this process both from your perspective but also thinking about handoff and how the customer is notified, how they receive this information, what the steps are that they go through.

You internally will go through more steps, but you should be labeling out too what it is that they are expected to go through.

And then you also wanna take a step back too and think as a customer success team, how then am I re-engaging customers and what is my process as a customer success team? When issues are brought up, how are they given to me? Do you have a troubleshooting platform? Do you have Zendesk? Do you have something where they can submit tickets? Do you have a knowledge base? Who owns the knowledge base?

If someone goes to the knowledge base and they can't find something, is there a chat bot that they can then convert to a ticket submission? If one of your users comes up with a problem, how do they find you? How is success measured?

So the next process that you would wanna do is, okay, not thinking so much like bugs or issues or escalations, if something goes wrong. Instead, now let’s think about success. What does that look like? Is there a process? Are you tracking things like, hey, these are the milestones that they've hit from a customer success point of view, and I wanna check in with them.

Net promoter score surveys are one of the most common use cases here. So what is your process for that? Is it that every 90 days you as a customer success rep, do you send an email? What is that? Who does that email go to? What does it have in it? What are you doing with it once it goes out? Or are you actually having a pulse check call with them? Who owns that? Who all is involved in it? Is it just you scheduling with a main point of contact? Or are you joining a weekly call, or are you meeting with multiple points of contact? And then what are you doing with it afterwards?

Customer engagement

And then finally, customer engagement. Who owns getting your customers involved in the promotional work, like case studies, testimonials, referrals and references? Who owns that and what is the process you have in place?

So if someone is very excited with your product and with your service, do you have a standardized process of: “Great, I'm so happy to hear you say that you love us and you can't live without us. Here is a quick Google form, would you mind filling out this referral form or would you mind if I quoted you specifically when you said to share on our website?”

What's the process for that, for your customer engagement? And how do you follow through? How do you save that? Where is it stored? Who all owns it?

Here's a big question to ask when you're thinking about the amount of detail to go through here. Think about this. If the person who is currently owning, let's say, customer engagement, if they were to leave the company and just drop all information, like they don't leave behind any process docs, how would someone else pick up their role?

Ideally, you would have enough information in here so that someone new could come and come and look at this and say, “This is the process that I'm supposed to follow and here is where I can find all of that information. And this is the cadence that I am expected to follow. And this is what the outcome that I'm working toward is.”

So if you're ever thinking about how in-depth you should go with all this: More is always better.

Remember, this is gonna be a living document. You're gonna update it as you update these processes, but be as honest as you can and be as detailed as you can.

Because this is gonna be something that ideally you'll use over time to continue training and developing your people.

Renewals

All right, last but not least, let's talk about returning and recurring revenue. So this is the last piece of our flywheel here. We definitely wanna dive in and we do wanna map recurring and returning value.

So what's the process that you use right now to ensure lifetime value? What I mean by that is how are you tracking when users reach either the end of their current term and need to renew or when they have interest in expansions, upgrades, cross-sells, downgrades, etc. What's the process for that and each individual step?

For example, let's think about renewals specifically. Let's think about a SaaS company that has recurring revenue and it's because they sell their product one or two years at a time.

So at the end of, let's say you've got a SaaS product, it's on two-year terms. So at the end of year two, how do you as a company know that they are approaching year end, that they're about to run out of their service and that they need to renew?

First things first, what are you using to track them? Do you have reminders set up? Do you get notifications?

When it's 90 days out, are you doing regular pulse checks so you know what people are thinking, whether they want straight renewals, the same exact tier and term length over again, versus if they need to adjust the amount of seats they have or adjust the amount of users, or maybe they need to also add on another product, or maybe they need to go up a tier because they need more attention. How are you tracking that?

That’s the conversation that needs to be had. Get all those processes captured here and then think about what happens next.

So when it's a renewal deal, a straight renewal, is it a different process for the sales team? I imagine it is. Most often I have seen and recommended that it be a different process.

Think through, for example, I've got just a standard pipeline here, but think about it from the customer's point of view. If I've already met with you, if I know you, if I've used your business, your service for two years, do I need to go through the discovery again? Do I need to be qualified again? Do I need a presentation? Do I need to receive a custom quote or could I just get basically an exact copy of my last quote, probably pricing updated, we all know how inflation is, but could I just get basically a copy of my last quote, same tier, same number of users, and then not go through these first stages?

Or maybe you have a service that does need to be re-qualified regularly? So think about this from the customer's point of view, what it is they're going through, and then adjust your steps and stages accordingly. I mean, most often, yes, I see that renewals pipeline is separate because then you can, not only are you tracking it as the stages that fit the customer's journey best, but you're also reporting on it in an entirely different way and you're approaching it from an entirely different mindset.

So capture the process, just like we did with the sales pipeline, just customize it to what the renewals process is and capture each stage in here that gets them to closed won or renewal deal closed lost.

Upsells and cross-sells

All right. The same question I asked about the renewal pipeline, I would ask about the upsell pipeline. How are you approaching the conversation if people want upsells and even cross-sells? Is it the same, are they having to go through the same pipeline?

Now, for a straight renewal, it might be that they don't need to be requalified or have a discovery again. Whereas for an upsell, you may actually wanna keep those stages in there because if they're considering upgrading, maybe you do wanna have a discovery with them to make sure that you know what exactly they're looking for and recommending an actual product or service or tier that is going to fit their needs.

So as you identify the opportunity, again, put the steps in. How do you identify it? Just like you did with the renewal itself, who is owning and flagging upsells? Who owns starting that conversation or handing it off to sales or is it customer success that owns it? And what is their process?

Who’s actually creating the deal and then if it gets into the pipeline, what does the pipeline look like? What are the stages and what are the actual steps?

And again, is it a different pipeline so that you can have its own stages and it can be thought about and reported on completely separately?

And you're going to think about cross-sells in the exact same way. So I have them here in our cross-sells. Of course, this is NRR which would be non-recurring revenue. It could also be MRR. It could be like monthly recurring revenue. But what basically what I mean here by cross-sell is, this, is it an entirely separate conversation and scenario and identification if they are moving, either moving from one product type to a different product type or if they are adding on a different product category to what they already have.

How is that identified? Capture those steps in here. Capture who owns it. Capture how the notifications are. Everything that we've been doing. Minutely capture each step along the way.

And then again, capture what that pipeline, like what the actual sales process for that cross-sell looks like. Again, it could be that it's just one pipeline that you have and you just send them back to sales when they're ready to renew.

Okay, if that is the case, then yes, you could just replicate your sales pipeline here. But in my experience, the sales process is not the same for renewals and recurring and cross sells because again, think about it from the customer's point of view. They already know you, you already know them.

It would just introduce, it tends… actually, I won't speak in definitives, but it tends to just produce more friction if you try to make them go through a qualification process again to renew what they've already got. You wanna make it as seamless and simple as possible for them.

So you want these processes to be tailored to the journey that they are on. So that's why I have this separated out here to be different processes, different pipelines along the way. And the goal is to get them obviously to this very last piece here, which is the maximum impact for your business.

Recap

So zooming back out, that is how you want to use your revenue map. That is how we go about this piece of the revenue engine diagnostic, the investigative puzzle.

We start with our acquisition channels. We clarify what channels we actually have, what are the steps that we have along the way. We actually physically connect the dots between those channels and the conversion points. We connect the dots between those conversion points and what happens next.

Do they go straight into qualification? If so, is that qualification that the product itself is doing or is there a marketing or BDR qualification that is taking place? If you're looking at your conversion points and it's actually more of a soft conversion, you're thinking about nurturing. You're thinking about this nurturing process here and how you're pushing them along the journey.

And you're actually putting each of those steps, you're diving in deep and you are logging and documenting each of the nurture paths that you have and what steps people experience on them.

And then you're not forgetting disqualification. You're not forgetting to think through your lead scoring models and your disqualification matrices.

And you're documenting all of that. How does someone get qualified, but also how does someone get disqualified? And most importantly, what is the process for them once they are disqualified? Are they removed from my system? Are they just labeled and left? Are they sent back into a different nurturing stream? What happens for them?

Then we're going on to our sales processes. So whether it's the product that's doing the selling and you're going ahead and you're taking into account all of the pieces of product led growth, the self checkout and how they get their reminders and how the deal is generated versus the sales process, how a sales team would own, getting them qualified, getting the presentation done, getting a quote recommendation ready for them. etc. And then you're diving into that quoting and configuration process. Is it proposals? Are you going back and forth? Are you negotiating? Get all of those steps in there.

Then you're going and you're not stopping there. You are not stopping at closed won. You're moving into the flywheel side to make sure that you're capturing, if you have onboarding, what that process looks like, how you're getting customer success involved and what each step along their ownership of an account looks like, how you're tracking recurring and returning revenue. If those pipelines and those sales processes look differently, actually physically mapping out each stage along the way until you get all the way over here to maximum impact lifetime value for your users.

Your turn

Alright, you’ve seen how I do it. Now it’s your turn.

Take the template, clone it, and make it your own. Don’t worry about it being pretty, worry about it being honest and comprehensive. If there is an actual step in your process that is honestly “eh I try to remember to slack the rep” then write that down. If you don’t know what happens to a lead after they fill out a form, write a question mark and then go back later and find out.

In fact, finding out what really happens throughout the experience is exactly what we’re going to do in the next class with the Experience Audit! Now that we’ve captured the current state processes from our internal lens, we’re going to actually walk the path of a prospect or customer and see just how closely it matches to what we’ve just mapped out.

The Experience Audit is a crucial component, the last spoke on the wheel of the investigation side of the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, if you will. Because just because we wrote down that our definition of a lead is someone who fills out a form and just because you mapped that once said lead fills out that form they get a follow up email to schedule a demo doesn’t mean that’s the reality from said “lead’s” perspective!

You know what you want to happen, you now have mapped out what you think is happening, next up we’re going to find out what really happens! Get mapping, and I’ll see you in the next class for auditing!

Class 4, Part 1: The Experience Audit of Your Current State

Welcome back

Welcome back to Implementing RevOps 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking.

This is class 4: The Experience Audit.

So far in this course, we’ve dug deep into the diagnostic investigation. We spent time diving into exactly what a Revenue Engine Diagnostic is and why we at RevPartners created the process as it is.

Then we actually started doing it together! We started out with the Go-To-Market Survey, to comprehensively capture and articulate a business’s goals, product offerings, and key performance indicators. We talked about the importance of critically reviewing your goals, expressing vividly how they ladder up to overall company goals for motivation, and ensuring everyone is completely aligned on what the primary KPIs should be, how exactly they are defined, and what triggers the movement between each metric.

Then we moved on to Revenue Mapping and literally drew out the customer and revenue journey from start to finish. We captured how people find your business, how they are passed from department to department, what triggers and notifications you have in place, what your pipelines really look like, and what happens after they reach the “customer” stage.

Now, we’re going to dive into the flip side, and review the entire process again but from the prospect or customer perspective instead of our own.

Introducing the Experience Audit

We call this the Experience Audit. We want to put ourselves in the actual seat of the customer and feel what they feel throughout the process. This is essentially the part where we take the customer journey we mapped out last class and stress-test it for ourselves.

Up to this point we should have a solid understanding of the internal workings of the business. We know what we want to happen and we know what should be happening from an internal departmental perspective, now we get to see it in motion.

The Experience Audit is where you get to see all the inner workings together and make sure that what you planned on paper is coming together in real life in a way that flows seamlessly and makes sense. Because sometimes the solutions we draft don’t play out in the real world in the right way.

The sinking library

There’s an old architect and construction anecdote I always think about when I think of the experience audit: An award-winning architect was commissioned to design this state of the art new library and he comes up with an amazing design. The builders he commissions brings it to life and it looks fantastic and everyone is impressed except… after a few months they realize the building is sinking. He forgot to include the weight of the books in his design schematics. So now he’s left with this fantastic structure that’s literally being buried under the weight of one tiny miscalculation.

That’s how revenue operations strategies can be, too! You can design out something stunning and gorgeous. You can get everyone’s buy in and all the accolades. And it can still fail in the real world because one pivotal calculation was missed. That’s why it’s important to go through the revenue flow yourself and see firsthand just how the pieces feel together. It could be that something that seemed logical in concept, isn’t how users actually interact with it at all.

A real example: the demo form

Here’s an example from my personal experience: This was a few years ago, but I was working on a client’s website redesign and as part of that I was taking stock of all their forms. One stood out to me because it was their primary Get a Demo form and it had one of the highest click rates on their website. The heat map showed that it had the button with the highest traffic and it was taking up prime real estate on the site, so obviously it was high priority. But when I started looking at the backend, trying to brainstorm what we needed to do to update it to match the new site design, I realized that while it had a high click rate, it actually had a massive drop off. Like hardly anyone actually finished filling out the form it seemed.

So now I’m curious and frankly confused. Their leads ratio hadn’t dropped off, they hadn’t reported a dip in sales. In fact, no one seemed to have noticed. They knew the button was getting clicked, they knew they were getting leads. They hadn’t realized those two things weren’t actually related.

So I went full Sherlock Holmes and started digging into the acquisition data of their latest leads and then went to look at the form again. Here’s what the form was designed to do:

1. User fills out form
2. Form fill triggers an email with a questionnaire to provide more data for the sales team to work off of
3. Sales follows up to schedule a demo

Seems logical. We all know sales always wants as much information as possible to make the best use of that demo time, right? But here’s what was actually happening as I found out:

1. Users were clicking on the form
2. Users saw that form would send a follow up email with more questions
3. Users were going to a different page and scheduling the demo directly on the sales calendar to skip this step

See? That’s what I mean about the disconnect between how a process can feel great on paper but not be adopted in real life. Users are going to follow the path of least resistance 9 times out of 10 and they are going to follow a flow that makes sense to them. The Experience Audit tries to help catch those friction-laden flows before they cause issues with your inbound metrics.

What is an Experience Audit?

So, what is an Experience Audit? I mean, the exact definition? It’s the process of imitating a prospect’s or customer’s journey by walking through your business processes firsthand. It’s a comprehensive walkthrough of every touchpoint — from the moment a lead clicks a button on your site to the moment they get a sales call — to see exactly what your users see.

Again, this kind of examination of your processes can get a little… uncomfortable. I’ve had partners tell me "Nikki, our follow-up is lightning fast. Our leads get an email in five minutes, and we’ve never had a complaint."

Well, a couple things here. First, what does lightning fast mean? Like what’s your actual service line agreement here? Fast to you could mean five minutes like you said and yet have you actually sat there clicking refresh for five whole minutes? It’s a lot longer than you think.

Secondly, and this is something that is super important to keep in mind in the age of reviews: a lack of complaints does not equate happiness. Users who are frustrated with the speed of response or amount of information asked usually don’t leave you feedback explaining that frustration, they just leave. They express the frustration by moving on. And if you’re waiting on them to explain themselves before you make changes you’re gonna be waiting a heck of a long time.

So even if you think that your follow-up is lightning fast and that your email is solid, you always always want to test that for yourself. It could be that something happened and the workflow to send said email got turned off, so it just never arrives. Or maybe it does arrive but it’s not 5 minutes it’s 5 days. Or, my personal favorite, it does arrive in 5 minutes but comes with the old “Hi [Error]” or “Hi [blank space]” because the personalization token went wonky.

You cannot fix what you don’t experience. Period. You can see that there are gaps and you can try to trouble shoot based on best practices but simple facts are that unless you actually see and feel what is going wrong you’re just going to be guessing on the best solution.

With the Experience Audit, we move from assuming this process is intuitive to validating that the experience is intuitive and easy.

Try it yourself

Why don’t you test this for yourself right now? You can with a simple experiment. Go to your website right now, find one of your forms — on your live website not the backend — and fill it out using a personal or test email address. And let’s see what happens. Go ahead, pause the video and give it a go.

Now, what was that like?

1. Ask yourself, how many fields did you have to fill out? Was it five? Twelve? How many were write-in fields and how many were button clicks?

2. What happened the second you hit submit? Were you redirected to another page or did in-line thank you text pop up? Did you clearly and easily know what was expected of you next? If there is an explanation of next steps, is it vague or precise? Did you get a generic “we’ll be in touch” or did you get something like “you will receive an email with a meeting link within the next 2 minutes and will receive an optional follow-up survey to provide more information”?

3. How long did it take for the response or confirmation to hit your inbox? What was the actual time table and did that response have the information promised? Did it feel automated or personalized?

This is where the rubber meets the road, as the saying goes. It’s the moment of truth, where your process becomes someone’s lived experience. And if the expectations set by that process are not met, you’ve broken the trust of your user. You’ve given them unnecessary friction and frustration — and that is a massive potential revenue leak. Because, trust me, if you’ve already frustrated your user, then even if they don’t immediately walk away, you’re going to be working from a deficit to regain their trust and delight them enough to get them to buy.

The friction tax

Every point of friction we find is what you might call a Friction Tax. If your follow-up is slow, you pay the tax in lower conversion rates. If your data isn't populating, you pay the tax in manual rep work. If your checkout process or “contact us” process isn’t intuitive, you pay the tax in lost sales.

Why it matters

Why does this matter? Because the Experience Audit is your reality check; it’s the only way to see your company the way you are actually perceived. Like I said before, this is where we bridge the gap between the plan and the practice.

This audit is where we compare what we think the process is internally — or what we as a company believe is happening or should be happening — with what actually is happening to the user. Understanding these minute interactions is the only way to truly optimize your RevOps Strategy from the outside in.

And, again, I know I’m getting a little repetitive here but it’s because I really want to dig in and drive home this point: the way your process is created is not necessarily the way it is being used or the most intuitive way it could be used.

Our objective is simple: Validate the assumptions. We’re checking under the hood, so to speak, to make sure everything does work and is working smoothly. We’re looking for areas of improvement, broken automations, and hidden friction that stops a prospect from becoming a customer.

What you get from it

The Experience Audit gives you an actionable list of broken or outdated processes, visibility into adoption, and prioritizes areas of improvement.

Now, I know what you’re saying, “But, Nikki, that’s what we’ve been doing this whole time!” Yes, yes we have and we’re gonna keep doing it! Because the purpose of this whole endeavor is to do an all-points, comprehensive, no-stones-unturned — and whatever other metaphor you feel like using — inspection. We have been examining, documenting, reviewing, analysing, and prioritizing this whole time and we will keep doing it. Through the GTM survey, through the Revenue Mapping, through the Experience Audit, and on to the Benchmarking Dashboard. We are looking at everything so that when we get to that roadmap of priorities and updates, we can be utterly confident that we know exactly what’s going on in our company and what we need to do to get it to the next level.

At the end of the day, what we’re aiming to do here with this Experience Audit is to align your tech stack with the actual lived human experience of your users. Because when that happens, your clunky, gap-filled journey becomes a seamless revenue-generating experience for you and your customers.

How to run the audit

When we do this, we follow a specific path. We aren't just clicking around; we’re intentionally following the intuitive path as a first-time user would.

1. Step one: Go to your website and really look at it as if you’re seeing it for the first time. I know this is hard sometimes but try to put yourself in the mind of an entirely new visitor. Is contact information clearly visible and easily accessible? Are your CTAs clear? Check out your forms: Are they overwhelming or clear and simple. Test any conditional logic by actually filling out those forms just as a real user would. Submit your info then flip over to the backend.

2. Check the CRM: Did the info actually show up? Are the fields right? Think about how the fields are being passed through to the CRM. I’ll use HubSpot in my example Experience Audit here in a bit so for me I’ll want to consider on which objects those fields are living. Is it easily accessible for the contact owner to find contact specific information versus company or product information? Are the fields clear and concise? One thing I always think about is how many “write-in” fields you’re using versus dropdowns or checkboxes because any field where people must type in information is ripe for typos. And why would that matter: in reporting. Let’s think about address fields, for example, especially when you think about state (like here in the U.S.) or country fields. If you use a write-in field for that, you could end up with Massachusetts being spelled out completely, misspelled as something like MassaCUEsetts, abbreviated to MA or Mass or who knows what. And then when you go report for users from the state of Massachusetts what are you going to end up with? A mess. So these are some of the things we’re wanting to flag in our audit. Not only how things are used but how they are mis-used and where they can be improved to prevent errors.

3. Check the follow-up: We mapped out how our follow-up process should be, like what we designed it to be and what we expect, back in our Revenue Mapping so now what we need is to check that. Map what the reality is and compare it to that RevMap. What emails are automated? Which are manual? How fast is the follow-up in reality? Does it match what you expected?

4. Check the “no engagement” follow-up: Don’t respond or click. See if your "automated nurture" actually exists or if it's a ghost town. If your users filled out a form, say for a demo request, but then never actually go through with scheduling a meeting or replying to you again, what happens? How persistent is your nurture flow? Do contacts get removed from follow-up after a certain point? If so, is that part of disqualification logic?

5. Test that logic: Try to get disqualified. See if the system handles you correctly. Do the same with your qualification process. Try to find ways to “break” the system you’ve got in place. The only way to know how good it really is is to test its limits.

6. Review the reporting: Look at the conversion rates, the source data, the metrics you have in place so far. What does the reporting tell you about your interactions as a “lead” or “opportunity”. When we get to the benchmarking phase of the Revenue Engine Diagnostic, fully reviewing the reporting available is a critical part, but you can get a jumpstart on that now.

7. Finally, check on the automations and notifications you have in place. Who gets notified for what? Where do the notifications go? Are they in the CRM only? Sent to your email? IM’d via Slack or Teams or something? When they come through, are they acknowledged and helpful or just adding noise?

Questions to keep in mind

As we go through this, I want you to keep these questions in your mind:

• How much of the journey is automated and do I know where those automations live? You should know your revenue operations strategy like the back of your hand, which means you need to absolutely know all the pieces that make it up. You need to be able to confidently review the automation workflow or the process document whenever asked.

• We kinda asked this before but think about the follow-up you are receiving in your Experience Audit — is it clearly meeting the expectations you set? Is it adhering to your service-level agreements?

• Did my test record show up in the right reports? What metrics can I see and by which partitions can I review this data?

• What is actually happening in reality? What’s the adopted process by both the user and the internal team? Is the process being used effectively?

• Which fields filled themselves out or were super easy and quickly filled out? Which were manual? How many ways can someone mess up the fields and still successfully submit?

  • This is an important call out because here’s the truth: your sales reps, your teams, they are busy busy people. They need to make the most of the time available to them. And if people can submit half-filled or gibberish-filled forms, those are gonna happen — and it’s going to be time-consuming for your team to figure out or fix wonky submissions.

Up next

Alright, it’s time to pull back the curtain. In the next video, we’ll do an example audit together. I’m not going to show you every single aspect of the audit, that would turn into a crazy long demo because there are lots of nooks and crannies to cover, but I am going to show you what to do.

I’ll pull up our own website here at RevPartners and we’ll go through a lead flow together, looking at both what I’m submitting on the frontend and how it comes through in the backend. Then I want you to take this all and put it into practice on your own site and go through the entire journey, the whole thing.

If you can finish an experience audit in less than half an hour… I gotta tell you, you’re not looking at the whole journey, the whole site, or the backend in-depth enough. Remember to take your time and examine all the pieces your prospects and customers might touch.

Alright, if you’re ready, let’s go audit!

Class 4, Part 2: Live Experience Audit Demonstration

Okay, now that you understand the experience audit in theory and we've been through all the steps in detail, let's actually look at a couple of conversion points live. I'll go through the RevPartners website.

I'm not going to go through an entire experience audit. Like I said earlier. You have all the instructions, you have access to your website and to your CRM. You go through each step like we talked through in the last video on your own and make notes.

Take your time. Really dig in and take a deep look at how the journey would go, how each page feels, how each conversion point feels to you.

So let's do a couple together, then I will hand it over to you and you can do a full audit on your own. Let's start with the RevPartners website.

Conversion point 1: the “Contact us” form

So I'm here on our homepage. This is the very first entry point to RevPartners. If you type in revpartners.io, this is the first thing that you see. And as I'm looking at this, I'm gonna look at the very first conversion point presented to me. I'm gonna go with the obvious, the “contact us” up in the top right corner.

Let's check this one. This is the most prominently positioned, so it probably gets a lot of use. In fact, I know it gets a lot of use because I've seen our backend. But if I were looking at this as a first time user, my assumption would be: “That's very prominently placed. They probably want me to click on that first if I want to connect with them.”

And in fact, that is true, that is what we want you to do. So as I am looking at this, let's look at it through the lens of a new user.

The first thing I notice: it’s clear, concise, like the form is really prominent, concise verbiage on there. I know exactly what is expected of me. It loaded really quickly. So far, nothing there that I feel the need to flag.

The personal email restriction

All right, so as I'm actually looking at this, the first thing that I would want to note in our experience audit is that this form has a restriction on it. Personal emails are not allowed.

Now that is an intentional decision that we have made and I do know that already, but again, from the lens of an experience audit and a first time user, what I would want is to note, why do we have that? I want to, in my experience audit notes, dive into that.

Are we missing any potential leads because we are restricting personal emails? Is there ever a reason that we would want to open that up? It's a required field. As you can see, all of the fields on this form, all seven fields are required. So I can't get out of answering this.

So what if I don't have a professional email and I'm trying to contact you about a partnership or well, hopefully you would have a professional email. That's a bad example. What about like careers or I'm looking for a role? I would need to get out of this and go try to find another entry point. So that's just something to flag for my experience audit. What was the basis of that decision? Is that restricting my form in any way? There are questions to ask.

All right, so getting back to looking at the form, this is not an overwhelming form, seven fields. I can definitely easily fill those out. We have a mix here of write-in fields and drop-down fields. So the first thing is the website it's asking for. I'm just going to use our RevPartners website because I'm filling this in as a test.

Labeling test submissions

And actually I'm going to put that as my last name is test or I would put somewhere in here that this is a test submission. So this is just a pro tip for you as you're going through and doing your experience audit, try to make it clear which records like use your personal email as much as you can, your test email as much as you can and actually put in the name of your contact that this is a test record or a test submission.

Here is the reason for that. One, it makes sure that everyone knows, especially if you've got notifications set up that you've just gotten a form submission, right? And make sure that everyone knows, hey, this was someone doing a test. This is not someone we need to follow up on. This is not someone that we need to segment.

It also makes it way easier when you're going through your CRM and you're doing your data hygiene and you're keeping things cleaned up. It makes it easy to see which were tests and which are records that you need to get out of your system, right? So it just makes your life a lot easier.

So I went through the website, I went through the first and last name. Yay. Okay. Alright, so the next thing is my email. It's not going to let me use my personal email, which is fine. I've still indicated that this is a test record. I know that this is a test contact that I will then delete out of here, so it's OK for this one to go through and use my work email.

I have informed my team that I'm running a test, so I've covered all of my bases and so even though this is not a personal email. This is not like a very obvious test email. There are other ways that you know that this is a test.

Drop-down vs. write-in fields

All right moving on so now we've got the three fields down here, which are used for segmentation. You'll see the first two are drop-down fields. Now. This is great. I'm glad that we have these as drop-down fields because imagine asking these questions. What best describes your company and what do you want to talk to us about? What would you like to connect with us about?

Imagine asking those as just write-in fields, right? You could get some wild answers here. And it's not even so much too about like the answers that you get. From a user standpoint, I don't know what you're looking for. I don't know how much or how little information you need, like exactly what you're asking for.

So I would default into maybe describing my company, I would give you my whole elevator pitch plus the industry and the location that I'm based in. And it could just be like a paragraph that I would end up giving you.

What do I want to connect about? I could go off on tangents and be really specific with all the different ways that I want to talk to you about migrating and all the problems, like migrating from one system into HubSpot and all the problems that I've had as I've been like trying to migrate on my own, it could be a novel that people are writing you, which is a problem for, again, the user because they don't know what you're looking for, they don't know how to narrow it down and they don't know how to give you the right information.

And it's a problem on your side because then you don't know, one, how do you do reporting on something like that? So, like how do you segment? How do you narrow it down when you've got paragraphs of information from people?

Similarly, how do you segment when you've got too much detail in one area and not enough in another?

So, here's a “for instance.” If you ask what best describes your company and someone gives you their elevator pitch that they would give to their prospects, that might not ever actually list their industry.

And if I actually am looking at this, at the dropdown that's available here, it's actually looking for industry. So you've got manufacturing or retail or nonprofit. And if someone were to give me their elevator pitch, that specific word may not ever be in there.

So then from my perspective as the RevPartners RevOps strategist, as I'm in there and I'm trying to create a reporting that is narrowing it down by how many retail companies sought us out this month, I could miss some of them because I didn't know that in their elevator pitch they didn't use the word retail.

The other thing to think about here is usability for the user. Think about if they were filling this out on mobile and how difficult it would be for them to type away all the different descriptors that they might want to put in here, the details that they would want to try to provide for you if they're just furiously typing away on their phone. They would default to giving you less information, which again might not be the information that you specifically need.

So, it’s a plus that these are drop downs. Love that.

As we go through here, we'll see, like I'm just going to pick some random ones cause this is my test. Okay. So then that brings me to the very last field, which is a write-in field.

The “How did you hear about us?” field

Now this is going to be the next thing that I personally note from this experience audit. Does this have to be a write-in field because here's the reality. If you know your customers and your users well enough to be able to group answers to these questions into drop-down categories, then you probably know your users well enough to be able to categorize how they heard about you as well. And I highly recommend that you do that again for reporting.

Because think about the answers that you could get to this. How did you hear about us? Well, how specific do you want me to be? If I heard about you because I saw Rob Jones do one of his music parodies on LinkedIn, do you need to know that I saw Rob Jones on LinkedIn or is just social media enough of an answer? It might be.

If I had a drop down here, I would be able to know that, they're just looking for either social media or an ad or email marketing or an event instead of knowing the exact platform. As it stands, what I personally would probably default to writing in here would be something like the actual platform itself, like LinkedIn or Google or one of the AI platforms.

But again, since I'm not sure exactly how the company expects me, like how detailed the company expects me to be. I don't know if that's the right answer.

Think too about the just variety of ways that you could get this answer from people saying like instead of social media all spelled out, what if they just said socials? What if they did the platform itself?

If you had events, like what if someone just threw in networking? What does that mean? Did you see us at an event? Was it our event, our Southbound event that we have every year? Was it a HubSpot event? Was it an event that just one of our employees attended?

How do we know which channels specifically are working for us if people are being more vague?

So, use as many opportunities as you can to sort of control the narrative and really give people categories and options to choose from, it helps them and it helps you for your reporting.

I'm going to go through here and just, I'm going to fill this in this way and then go click let's chat and I'm gonna see what happens next.

The scheduling step

Okay, so I've submitted the form and now my next step in my journey, I've got two options here. So one, I could exit out of this and I could just wait and see if RevPartners is gonna email me or we've given the user the option to actually take control and schedule time for themselves.

So as a user, if I'm looking at this, hey, yay, I don't have to wait, I could go ahead and schedule time and keep the ball rolling.

Great, so that's something that I'm gonna note in my experience audit as just, hey, as a user, great, I'm glad we did that. Let's go through and see how this feels as well.

If I did want to go ahead and schedule some time with RevPartners, let's just pick a random time and look at what information is required of me to do that. Again, it's first and last name that should fill in.

Now required information, so the website URL, it’s asking me for that again. Why didn't that go ahead and pull over? I did just fill that in on the first page. So this is one of those places in your experience audit where you just want to note what are the redundancies?

Anytime a user has to fill the same information in over again, that's going to lead to user fatigue and that's going to lead to frustration. Think about the absolute ire you feel when you have got your resume all uploaded into a job forum and then they ask you to copy the information from your resume, right? It's the worst feeling on the planet.

The same principle applies here. If you've already asked your user to type in something and then you're asking them to type it in again, especially if it's a write-in field, if they are typing it in, that's just frustrating.

So this is going to be another place where I will note in my experience audit notes, “Hey, we've got a redundant field there. We either need to make sure that that's copying over like the name, first name, last name, and email address did, or we need to take it off of this form because users are not gonna wanna do that.”

Next is company name, great, we did not ask that on the first one. So that's not as redundant. So let's do RevPartners. It's required so I can't get around it. I have to type in that website URL again.

Then it asks some optional fields here. Like for our purposes, one of the most valuable questions we can ask is, do you have HubSpot already or are you evaluating it? This really helps us try to determine how we want to segment the conversation.

So this is also from the user's perspective, the area where they can give us more information that they might have wanted to include in the first fields. So if you will recall, we asked, why are you connecting with us today? And we gave very limited options in that dropdown field so that we can segment, so that we can do our reporting.

But this, this is a write-in field where if you wanted to, so let's say on the first field you chose, I'm migrating to HubSpot, this is where you can give us that additional information. Where are you migrating from? What are some of the pain points you're experiencing?

So again, it's an optional field, it's not required, but if the user so chose, they could give more detailed information. I think that's great.

As I'm going again through this experience audit, I would probably note there, maybe we wanna make that a little more specific of a question just so that it ties in to the first question that was asked. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's great that we have it open-ended so that we're not like dictating how people think, but it is something that I might wanna think through for the user flow.

I'll just flag it and we'll come back and I'll come back to it later in my strategy to look at. And then the phone number. Then I would hit confirm.

Testing every branch

Okay, so I went through, I did the contact us form, and then I went through and saw what the next step would be. Here is a pro tip for you. So I did exit out and I didn't actually schedule the meeting, I just assessed what the second step was asking from my experience audit. This is a tip for you. Do all options, all branches that you can in your experience audit so that you know what the options are that people are seeing, what possible journeys they could go on. The point of the experience audit is to do everything that your users could do.

So if it were me, I did it to where I just went through it, did the original contact us form. And then I actually, I assessed the second step, but I didn't hit submit. So what I'm going to see from my back end is as if someone didn't do the second step at all.

What I recommend is that you go back in and then do the whole process again and then do the second step. That way you can see both sides, both branches of the puzzle and you're seeing exactly what the journey would be for someone who scheduled a meeting and someone who didn't.

I can show you right now what happens to someone who didn't schedule a meeting because I have already gotten the follow-up that has said, “Hey, you selected the contact us but you didn't connect with anyone yet. Can I go ahead and connect with you?”

So I went through and I didn't actually do the second step and get time on the calendar. So what I got then, just a few minutes later is a “Hey Nikki, you recently submitted a contact us form on our website, but you haven't connected with anyone yet. So let's get that meeting in the books. How does your availability look on Tuesday or Thursday? If it's easier, here's my meeting link.”

The great thing about this is not only does it again give the option for them to schedule immediately, like it followed up so that now I've got a name to connect with, it follows up with some suggested specific times. Hey, how about Tuesday or Thursday?

And then it's, here is my meeting link again. If you want, let's get this in the books. So now from my experience audit, what I'm going to do is actually I'm going to not reply to this and see what the next step is.

I want to wait, and it's going to take a couple of days. You're not going to get to see it in this class, but what I want to do is actually take a step back and see what happens if I don't actively pursue. What is the sales team doing? What's the cadence that they are reaching out on? What's their scripted emails?

And I'm making a note of how it feels to get those.

Okay, so that was one of the conversion points that I'm going to show you today. So I am going to continue making notes of that flow over the next couple of days.

As you saw, I went through one of our forms, I went through one of the flows, I made cursory notes, and then I'm going to continue seeing how if I'm not an active participant, how is the conversation kept going?

What are the templated emails that I've sent? How does it feel to receive them? How do they look? How do they show up? What's the personalization added to them?

Is there eventually a nurture sequence that kicks in at some point? Like maybe if I filled out that contact us and then realized, I'm actually not ready to talk to them. Is there a flow that picks up or does the conversation just drop?

These are all things that I'm going to analyze over the next couple of days as I keep getting those in. Make sure that you're doing all the different paths that you can take.

Schedule the meeting and see how that conversation looks. Don't schedule the meeting and see what happens next. Don't schedule the meeting, but then schedule it on like the third email. See what happens.

See how the flow feels if you stop it midway. If you can do an experience audit in an afternoon, you're not doing it comprehensively because there're so many paths that you'll have set up. It is going to take a while for you to actually really fully dig into every journey that you can take.

All right, so that's one of the flows that we did today. Let's go look at another one. Let's go look at a different one.

Conversion point 2: a PDF download

Okay, so here in a minute, we'll actually look at some of the backend stuff too, but before we do that, let's stay on the front end and do a different kind of flow. So that was more of a sales outreach or like a direct conversion, one of those hard conversions, if you'll remember from your revenue mapping. Let's look at some of the soft conversions. Let's go in here and actually do a downloadable flow.

All right, so I clicked on the first PDF available to me. This one should be familiar to you because it was referenced earlier in this course, the ebook that talks through how to use the revenue performance model. So as we're looking at this, again, this is a really simple form. There are only five total fields. Only four of them are required.

Okay, so I tried it with my personal email, it wouldn't let me again. So again, that's something that I'm gonna note for my experience audit. This is a soft conversion form. There are people that we're recommending go here to nurture. Maybe they are in between roles or they are wanting to look at this on their own personal time, do we need to restrict that? Do we need to not allow personal emails?

I'm gonna note that in my experience audit and just say, we may wanna reassess this rule, especially for PDF downloads.

All right, let's keep going. RevPartners is my company name and are you a current HubSpot user? Yes, I am. Those are pretty easy. These are all really simple fields. I can fill this out super quickly.

The other thing to really look at: read through the content.

That’s the other thing before I move on, so I've been really focused on how the forms feel to me, but it's really important to look at the content on the page as well.

Do I know exactly what I'm going to be getting from this download? Have I got the expectations set correctly, right? Do I know that if I get this, do I know what's gonna be in it?

Maybe not all the way, but I should have a pretty good idea. Let me put it this way. You don't want your landing pages to be clickbait-y. You want people to want to be able to make an informed decision for what they're about to provide their information for and receive.

They're giving you their personal contact information, right? It's a valuable thing that they're handing to you. They want reciprocal value back. So you want to make sure that you're not click-baiting them into handing over that information, you are setting up expectations in such a way that they know they're making an informed decision before they click submit.

So we click submit and then what happens? So the first thing that happens is I actually get my download immediately. You can see it. This is great. I didn't have to wait for an email. I just immediately was taken to my download. Awesome. Love the flow of that.

I also can see here that if I want to, I can go ahead and download and save it myself so that I can keep it. But what I'll do, I'm not actually going to do that for this one. I'm going to wait and see what if… yes, I got the download immediately, but what if I didn't download it myself?

Does it show up to me also in an email? Hopefully it should. And as you can see here, it did show up in an email, which is great. if I, like as a user, if I thought about saving that for my, like, so as a user, if I hadn’t thought about it, I could have downloaded it from there. But if in my excitement I close my tabs, I don't have to worry about it. It's already in my inbox right here.

The follow-up email

All right, so let's take a look at this email. So here's the download button where I can just get it right straight from this email if I wanted. I'm looking at this email, short, sweet, to the point.

I may add a note in my experience audit here. What if someone had already read it and they wanted to take the next step? Should we have a next step here?

So for my experience, I'll just flag that for myself. Do I want to give them a next step in that very first email or wait? I know that there are other emails that are going to come because this is a nurture sequence.

So maybe I do want to wait, but again, the point of this experience audit is to really question everything that we have in place. So that's going to be one of the first questions I ask. What would someone do after download?

Checking the backend in HubSpot

Okay, so now that you saw how those flows feel from a couple of conversion points on the front end side, let's go see how the information came through on the backend.

So I'm in HubSpot, I've gone in here and I'm looking at the form submissions that have come through and there's mine right there. So let's go look at it.

So I'm in my personal contact record in HubSpot. If you're a HubSpot user, this will look familiar. And I'm looking through here to see what the activity was, what has been updated in here.

Okay, so now I want to see how the information came in, what fields were collected based on that form.

I'm looking at the form submission and I'm seeing these are the fields that I wrote in, LinkedIn, and then here's the UTM information that came in captured by that form.

Then from there, what I'm gonna look at, is okay and what happened next? So I was enrolled in a sequence. That's what sent me that email. So I would go in here to the back end. I would actually click on and look at that sequence and see what are the next steps. What can I expect?

And then I'm going to let that sequence run and see how it feels on the user side. What do those emails look like when they come through? Because sure, I can open up the sequence and I can see what it's supposed to be, but this is the experience audit. I want to see what actually hits my inbox. So I know that that's what's gonna happen.

And then we have several operations that are happening in the background. My lead status is being updated. Was that intentional? How does that flow work?

I would open that up to see, what's the path there? The operational property of how did you hear about us, was updated because prior to this I had never filled that out before or maybe I had but I had filled it out differently so that was updated.

So part of my experience audit is going to be to look at my contact record in depth and open up all of these sequences and all of these properties that were updated and see how they came through.

Here's the email that I received. I already saw how it looked in my inbox. Now I get to see where in the flow of being added to the sequences it showed up. And then if I come up here, this is the next form submission. And the only thing that was updated from there is the change back, because I forgot and I didn’t intentionally do that. I forgot to label myself as a test record.

Naturally, it was updated that my last name was changed based on my most recent activity.

That was an oopsie that I need to note because again, my whole purpose here is to make it really obvious that these are test records that I'm trying to go through.

So I'm trying to be very intentional and careful as I'm going through here so that I'm not confusing anyone from my team and I'm making data hygiene very clear and easy to handle in the background later.

I want to make sure that this is like clearly labeled as a test record okay all right so keep going on keep going on through here and look at the sequence that you were enrolled in.

I filled out the download form, I got the email that my download was here, and then I did get a sequence activity that was for the other form — although based on the PDF download, I haven't been actually enrolled in any nurture sequence.

That's a big red flag that I'm gonna put in my notes. “Hey, so what is the intentional next step? Shouldn't there be one?” I need to go back and look through all those workflows and ask myself: After you've gotten the RPM download, what would be the next logical step?

So far, based on the back end here, I've not been enrolled in anything and that's a big missed opportunity. That's what this experience audit is for.

Recap

All right, so now I know that that was a very truncated and whirlwind experience audit, but that should be enough to get you started.

You've been able to see my thought process as I go into the front end and I'm filling out forms as a test record. You've been able to see my thought process as I'm in the back end and what I'm looking for.

And you've been able to actually hear from me what I would call out in my notes. Things like: Do we need to restrict personal emails? What's the next step that someone can expect? Why was there repetitive information from the first step of the contact us form to the second step of the contact us form? Why was the website asked twice? Things like that, think about callouts like that that I would then put in my notes.

So you've seen it done. Yes, it was a shortened version, but you've seen how you would get it started. So now I want you to actually do it. This is your turn.

Your assignment

Your assignment is to go to your own website and be your own worst customer. Fill out the forms, wait for the emails, and check your own CRM records.

Don't actually get caught up fixing all the bugs and errors yet! You could go down rabbit holes for days and lose your place completely. Unless something is horribly messed up, like a form missing a submit button or a workflow was actually turned off, leave it and just document what you find.

We need the before picture so that when we move into the Benchmarking Dashboard in the next class, we know exactly what we’re measuring against. And we need the comprehensive picture of everything we find in the Experience Audit combined with what we found in the GTM Survey and Revenue Mapping to create our revenue operations strategy and our roadmap.

Think: what if you wasted time updating and recreating a broken workflow you found in the Experience Audit only to realize that you learned based on your goals in the GTM Survey and the process that your team uses in the Revenue Mapping you don’t even want that workflow anymore!

You’ve just wasted time then and gotten yourself off track. You should be thinking smarter and looking at the big picture when we create our strategy. Everything with intention.

Alright, now it’s your turn: go audit everything just as your users experience it and I’ll see you in the next class to talk about benchmarking and reporting!

Class 5, Part 1: Benchmarking the Data

Welcome back

Welcome back to Implementing RevOps 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking.

This is Class 5: Benchmarking the Data.

We’ve come quite a long way in our Revenue Engine Diagnostic. We started by completing the Go-To-Market Survey, where we defined the DNA of our business and got everyone aligned on the key performance indicators and their definitions and triggers.

Then we dove into actually visualizing that revenue and customer journey, really drawing it out with Revenue Mapping. We created a comprehensive blueprint of how money moves through the system that is our business model and we intricately captured each step of each process, both from our internal perspective and the steps the prospects and customers expect and see.

And in our last class, we dug into an Experience Audit, the reality check and feel of that journey from the perspective of our users. We reviewed our websites and marketing and sales content with the eyes of a first-time user and actually went through the conversion flows ourselves so that we know 100% how the path is experienced, making notes along the way of friction points and repetition, red flags and areas of improvement.

Now we’ve made it to our next major milestone in the Revenue Engine Diagnostic: Benchmarking. By now, you’ve done a lot of the hard, manual labor of looking under the hood and assessing that revenue engine, and today is the day we examine our reporting and establish a dashboard that will both snapshot where we are right now, so that we have that launch point, right, and will also set us up to be able to measure the growth and acceleration we achieve as we implement changes and optimizations.

Why benchmark?

At this point, you have a lot of information: you have the goals, you have the map, and you have the reality check. Now, it’s time to lock in on the data. Like I said, our aim is to document exactly where you are today so that every optimization we make moving forward has a "before" and "after" story.

Without a benchmark, your optimizations are just expensive guesses. We are documenting that before state so that when revenue jumps next quarter, you have the concrete baseline to show by just how much it jumped and to prove it was your strategy that did it. We’re turning RevOps from a cost center of elaborate guesswork into a strategic growth engine.

Think of this as a line in the sand that shows your starting point. In RevOps, our value is often invisible until something goes wrong. If you optimize a process and revenue goes up by 20%, you need to be able to point back to this moment and say, "On the day of the diagnostic, our conversion rate was X, and today it is Y." Without a benchmark, your hard work is just an anecdote. You don’t have anything to solidly point to as a success, you only have the breakage and oopsies by which to measure yourself. But with a benchmark, your hard work is a proven ROI. You know where you started, so you know how far you’ve come.

Partition your KPIs

Another note here is that we are going to be diving back into our Key Performance Indicators from our Go-To-Market Survey. And that’s not just the primary KPIs we defined them, but also the secondary KPIs, the partitions by which we want to measure. If you remember back in our Fundamentals course, the secondary KPIs are the drill downs we want in our reporting.

So for example, when we build our reporting, we want to make sure we’re building to represent our primary KPIs and then show the drill downs that we can dive into for investigation. When you look at your performance dashboard you not only want to see anomalies and “danger zones” but also the “whys” behind those anomalies.

Don't just look at your overall conversion rate. I want you to partition by, for example, lead source. Like, okay, so I got a lot of leads this quarter. What are the channels that are feeding that source?

Product line, think about your products. Are there some products that are converting at 40% and others are at 5%? Maybe you had some solid closed deals this quarter, but dive into which products were they buying?

Same thing with sales reps and territories. You want to look not just at how you performed overall. Yes, we had X number of closed deals this quarter. You also want to see where and who is performing.

And remember, this isn't to yell at people. It's to find the process gaps. It's not about judgment. It's about optimization. By segmenting and partitioning your data, you've got way more information for your strategy and your roadmap. You're seeing not just that a drop in leads happened, but you're also seeing it happened specifically in the West Coast and with this product.

Now you can build a roadmap and strategy with that target and information. That's what the diagnostic is for.

It’s okay if you don’t have data yet

And by the way, when you are thinking about benchmarking think about this: You may not have data yet. And that’s okay!

This isn't about looking for "good" numbers; it’s about looking for Baseline Reality, whatever that baseline is. If your data integrity is low — which you would have discovered during your audit — your benchmark might actually be "Unknown." And that’s okay! Documenting that "we currently cannot track MQL-to-SQL conversion" is a benchmark in itself. It gives you your first project: Fix the tracking. It gives you somewhere to go and it's the first step on your roadmap.

This level of detail is what allows you to be surgical and precise in your roadmapping and that is why we are doing this diagnostic.

Why reporting isn’t step one

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but if you just start with looking at reporting, then you don't really know what picture you're seeing. You have a lot of numbers, but you don't really have a lot of information.

That's why when I say that people who run immediately to reporting as step one of their revenue operations strategy, it's usually a mistake because… Look, you can't trust numbers if your forms are broken. You don't know what's really happening if your handoffs are just black holes.

The dashboard is what you use as your strategic ground zero, but it's also just one part of the rest of the diagnostic that we've been doing this whole time.

When you're thinking about building dashboarding, you have to think about what the foundation is that you've got in place so far. You can't measure leads if you haven't defined them yet. That's part of the go-to-market survey. You can't track your sales velocity and your growth if you don't know what the handoff points actually are and where the friction is in that. That's why we do the revenue mapping. And you can't trust numbers, like I said, if forms are broken.

That’s why we examined forms in the experience audit. If you're looking through and you're looking at a form that has no new leads for this quarter and you just accept that without diving into, well, why was that form not performing? Maybe there was a link broken in it. Maybe it didn't have a button on it, right? It all works together. This is all spokes of the investigation wheel, if you will.

That's why the Benchmarking dashboard is a dual purpose reporting tool. It's both the starting point of your current state and it provides you that reliable direction. But it only works in conjunction with the rest of the revenue engine diagnostic. It transforms raw data into a measurable roadmap for your growth, but only when you take it in the context of everything else you've learned.

Pro tip: take a snapshot

Now, here's a pro tip for you. When you're going through and you're looking at your benchmarking dashboard once you've got it built or repaired, the first thing you want to do is actually take a snapshot of it. Sometimes you need a frozen record of what business looked like the day that you started your optimizations to go back through.

When you go to look at your strategy over the 90 days and see how things have grown, sometimes it's good to have an actual image, a frozen static picture. This was the point in time that we started at and now we can look at it in comparison with the new dynamic dashboard that you have.

Now, not everyone does that. But I always like to do that because as you're updating and you're optimizing your reporting will grow as you do. Sometimes it's good to just be able to look back and say that was my starting point. That is where I was. This is especially crucial if you don't have many numbers yet. Maybe, like we said, sometimes you aren't tracking something. Sometimes you're tracking it, but it's very low or zero, right? You wanna be able to have proof that, okay, that is where I started from and here is where I'm going. This is how you turn RevOps from just hoping into an actual growth center.

A line in the sand

Benchmarking the data is so important because you can't really measure growth if you don't have a starting line. Sure, you can see that things have changed, but without being able to point to a starting line, you won't know how they've changed and what is truly working.

Think about it this way. If you're looking at reporting that says, okay, last quarter we had 50 closed won deals, and this quarter we have 100 closed won deals. You could just celebrate and move on.

And hey, do celebrate because something went right. That's great. But you also want to know why. Was it because one of your products worked really well? Is it because of these optimizations that you're doing? Is it because you found a hole in the system and you fixed it?

You need to know why so that you can double down on that and so that you can point to, okay, great, this came from these optimizations that we're doing and the adoption of them. We need to continue on this path.

Or if none of those did affect it, that's also valuable because now you're looking at it saying, okay, well, our sales still went up, but it's actually not because of these optimizations that I focused on over here, it's because of this.

And what that tells me is just as valuable because it tells me I prioritized the wrong area. I need to be over here. I need to be in this line.

What you get from benchmarking is a concrete baseline, a powerful line in the sand, like I said, that will show you exactly where you started so that you know not just where you are now, but exactly what is making the impact.

The goal: data and direction

The goal with benchmarking data is to align your reporting with the actual business reality. It's to make the reporting work for you. I've said this several times throughout these classes, but you could just take templates of best practices and you could try to work from them. But at the end of the day, nothing is going to work so well for your business as something that's tailored to your business strategy and your model.

When we go through here, we want to make sure that we're looking at not just what works or doesn't work, but what works for you. And then when we come to build our reporting or to rebuild it, we're building it so that it reflects a true guide for your goals, the goals that we identified in our go-to-market survey for your business model, the business model and the process that we identified in the revenue mapping.

We want to make sure that your benchmarking and that all of your reporting moving forward delivers both data and direction. That it's not just numbers, it's not just vanity insights, it's actual strategic insights that you can action and move forward with intention.

By benchmarking your data, you have a clean, reliable, accurate dashboard that serves as a single source of truth, not just for leadership, but for the entire team. And that ensures that every optimization is both measured against the before data, but it's also in line with your growth strategy.

Data-driven accountability

The outcome we're driving for here is data-driven accountability. When you finish this, you won't be guessing if it changed work. You won't be thinking, well, okay, let's just try this and see what happens. The idea here is to be strategic. We are having a strategic roadmap. We are not troubleshooting. We're not just poking things to see what happens.

We're creating a roadmap that is actually going to lead us to the growth we want to see.

When we think about data-driven accountability, I want you to think about it in terms of, for example, look at your conversion rates from SQL to opportunity. If we move that needle by just 5%, how much cold hard cash does it actually bring into your bottom line? How much does that actually mean to you? Is that good or is that not the growth that you need to see?

When you think about it this way, you're not just looking at numbers, you're looking in a cardinal direction. You're getting marching orders. That's why we're driving toward data-based insights.

Questions to ask of every report

When you're thinking about your reporting, as we're going through this process, what I want you to do is look at each of the reports that either that you have or that you want to build, and I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, what does this report tell me in terms of my go-to-market survey, in terms of my goals?

This is a trap that I see a lot of people fall into. They want reporting for minute things that don't necessarily ladder up to their overall company goals. Not to call anyone out, but sales leaders, I see this from you more often than anyone else. And specifically in terms of activity reporting for your teams. One of the biggest requests that I personally have seen is this desire to see minute activity tracking per each sales rep.

And the first thing that I ask is: tell me how exactly that ladders up to your goal, your overall North Star goal? Maybe it does, because maybe you can walk it back to say, well, in my experience, it has been proven that X amount of emails per week definitively leads to X number of closed won deals. Maybe you can.

But in my experience, more often than not, actually you can't. Those activity reports don't tell the same story that a definitive pipeline review would tell you. So think about that. When you're looking at your reporting, think about what story does this report tell me in context with my goals.

The next thing I want you to ask yourself is: When I'm looking at this report, is it focused on my primary KPIs? And do I have secondary partitions that will give me the amount of information I need to create a strategy here? That's how you should be really examining the reporting that you're asking for and creating.

When you look at your reporting, when we go through this demonstration together, what I want you to do is be analytical with how you're viewing the reporting you have available and the reporting that you currently want to use. I want you to look at everything with the precise eyes of someone who's looking at it for the first time and asking it to tell them a story.

Once you know which lever to pull, you're gonna be able to build the roadmap. So this is incredibly important that we get the reporting right so that it tells us exactly which levers we need to focus on.

We want to look at everything and make sure that we're examining it. Sometimes, harshly even, we have to ask, does this tell me a story that ladders up to my goals? Does it give me the amount of information I need to be able to action the insights? Is there anything in this that I can operationalize?

If there's not, then it's just noise. It's not adding any value.

Up next

Okay, in the next video, we're going to actually examine benchmarking data. We're going to look at a benchmarking dashboard through the lens that I've just told you, the analytical lens of asking what story is this telling me, what can I learn from this, what insights can I pull from this?

And then I'm also going to make some notes of recommendations. Here is the kind of data that I look for in a benchmarking dashboard and in a performance dashboard moving forward.

Here's a note: I am not going to teach you how to build reporting. If you would like to learn that, there are many HubSpot Academy courses on that. There are many, for those that don't use HubSpot, there are many other courses out there. What I'm going to look at is reports that have already been built and draw insights from that and make recommendations from there.

All right, let's go do some benchmarking.

Class 5, Part 2: Creating and Analysing Benchmarking Data

What benchmarking data does

Okay, so let's dive into the benchmarking data that we have. This is the fifth piece of our revenue engine diagnostic, our investigative journey that we've been on. And like I said, the benchmarking data serves a twofold purpose.

First, yes, it's your starting point. You're gonna take a snapshot of the data that you have now because when you start making optimizations, it's gonna show you how far you've come. It also, though, is gonna tell its own story. The benchmarking dashboard that you have is going to be a pivotal piece of the revenue engine diagnostic all on its own.

We've looked at the goals from our Go-To-Market survey, we know what data it is that we want to be measuring. We've looked at our processes in the revenue mapping and we've looked at the experience audit and we see how data is coming in.

Now is the time that we look at that data critically and we see what story is it telling me? What can I learn from this that is gonna lend itself to that roadmap I'm creating?

We want to think critically about what it is that you have in front of you, looking at it all analytically, what's missing? What do I need to update? What's outdated? What's not useful?

That's a really big one. Like I said in the last video, one of the traps that I see often is people falling into wanting reporting for every little minute thing. They want reporting for every activity. They want reporting for every possible conceivable function. And over half of it doesn't actually ladder up into their North Star metrics, their primary KPIs.

So what you have to do is look at this, where can you trim the fat? What is not serving you? What's just adding noise?

So the benchmarking piece of the revenue engine diagnostic is all of that. It's snapshotting where you are right now. It's looking at what where you are right now has to tell you. And it's looking at what you're missing and what needs to be repaired.

Example reports: contacts and qualification

Let's get in here and actually look at a few example reports so that you can kind of see my thought process when I'm looking at benchmarking data.

Some of these, as you'll see, I'm just gonna make some observations.

Okay, so this is an example of some benchmarking reports that I would make for a new partner here at RevPartners.

The first thing that I would wanna start looking at is contacts, contact creation and how they're moving through the journey. So I would make sure that I'm seeing volume, like how many contacts are being created over time, what is the qualification journey looking like? How many contacts are being qualified per month over time?

What's the source breakdown? So, looking at your contact journey in conjunction with partitioning data. So you'll see that this one is by source. Not only do I know how many leads or contacts are being created each month, but I'm looking at where they're coming from. Then of course we're looking at the life cycle stage funnel, the journey themselves.

So this is another way of looking at the qualification journey. This one is just about marketing qualified leads. This one is about the full journey so that I can see how my contacts are moving through the pipeline.

These are four of the most common reports that I start with when I'm benchmarking data because this is going to tell me how people have been moving through the business from a reporting standpoint most comprehensively.

Spotting anomalies

So the first thing that I'm looking at is contacts created over time. So we're looking for any anomalies. First thing I see, I mean, look, we need to just jump right ahead because this is a big anomaly and this would be the first thing that my eyes zero in on when I'm looking at a benchmarking dashboard. If I'm looking at a new partner's report, I'm going to look at this and say, my goodness gracious, what happened in August? You've got quite the spike here.

Now that I can come down here by my partitions, I can actually see by source data what we're looking like. We've got offline sources as a significant portion of that. So there probably were some uploads here, but we've also got quite the spike in direct traffic that much. I mean, a crazy spike compared to how many leads came in from direct traffic every other month. What was going on in August?

Again, this is what I'm telling you and I'm telling you to look at this, this data, the exact same way you looked at all the data from your revenue mapping, from your experience audit. You're making notes here.

What was going on in August that caused this spike in contact creation? What were we doing with the website? Because this is direct traffic. What were we doing with the website? Were we at an event? Did we have an event coming up or something that we were driving a lot of leads to the site, or was there a partner campaign that really kicked off? What was going on? This is the first piece of the puzzle that tells me I need to dive deeper into what was happening in August.

Spotting consistency

The next thing that I'm looking at through here, after we’ve flagged anomalies, the other thing that I'm looking at is anything that stands out to me as, I mean, it's still, guess, would be an anomaly, but anything that stands out to me, consistency or inconsistency.

So again, as we're scrolling up here and I'm looking, this is a pretty consistent rise that we've got for contact creation. This is good information to know. I would make a note, hey, we seem to have consistent month over month growth in terms of contact creation.

For my benchmark, what I would do is actually look and do the math. What is the percentage of growth that we are seeing month over month in this 12 month period? So that I can have that and then I would actually do that math and then I would snapshot that.

Great, then that is my benchmark. That's what I'm working from in terms of contact creation. Same thing here, it seems to be that we have these smooth rolling hills of MQL qualification aside from this spike here. So I would again, start looking at what's the average. What are my average qualified leads per month?

And again, snapshot that, do that math and then mark that down because that's your starting point. Same thing here, only we're gonna look at those partitions. We're gonna look at on average, what does each channel bring in over this 12 month period? What am I looking at? What can I typically expect from direct traffic?

Do the math and then snapshot that. That's your benchmark for where you're starting at in terms of your source channels.

The conversion funnel

All right, so the next thing that I would look at is the conversion funnel. So as leads are moving, as contacts are created, as they're getting qualified, what are my percentages looking like as people move through the funnel? Do I have just an obscene amount of leads and very few of those are being qualified?

It could be that that is totally fine and normal for your business. Because when I'm looking at this here, what I could see, what I could take away from this would be, hey, you're bringing in a lot of contacts, but you're actually only qualifying a small percentage of them.

Is your qualification criteria too extreme? As if I'm looking at these 26,000 contacts here who weren't qualified, what if we missed some golden nuggets in there because we were filtering too minutely, right?

So this is just, again, we're looking at all of this and we're trying to see investigative wise, like what this is telling us and I would just ask, I would ask that question. Based on this, we did pull a lot of people into the net, but then we threw a lot of them back into the ocean. Did we miss any good ones there? Do we need to go look at our qualification criteria and see if maybe we're being too harsh or maybe we have too narrow of a lens of what it is that we want to consider qualified?

Step 1: Review every report

Okay, so now that you've done the first step and you've made notes of what story each of these reports are telling you.

I've just done a couple of examples here, but you need to go through every bit of reporting that you have available. Think about this exactly the same way that we looked at the experience audit. I only did a couple of conversion points live on the demo, but you, you need to do the whole experience audit of every piece of the journey that is available to your customers and prospects. The same thing applies here.

Every bit of your reporting needs to be looked at critically. You need to see what story each of them or each of those reports are telling you. You need to pull out notes. You need to go through and investigate everything you have available.

Step 2: Clean up

Then you need to move on to the next step. You need to look at each of those reports critically. You need to look at them with a harsh eye and say, okay, now that I've pulled the information out of this and seen what this is telling me, what of this is relevant? What of this is laddering up to the goals that I know are important to my business? What applies to my KPIs and my growth goals as I have set them?

And then you need to make notes of which ones to get rid of. Maybe what you need to do is just like I said before, take a snapshot that you're saving somewhere and then you're cleaning out old reports so that you have a nice, clean, clear, definitive, accurate dashboard for you to review and measure growth with. That's okay. Or maybe what you need to do is just take a whole dashboard and you archive it and you label it very clearly. This is my benchmark. This is old data. I want to save it. Nobody touch it, because I'm gonna compare it. This is my starting point, but that's old. We're not using that anymore other than to see how far we've come.

But clean up, right? That's the second sort of step here. Looking through and setting yourself up for success. Purge anything that doesn't serve you. Trim the fat. Make sure that you're consolidating, and edit everything. Update the partitions, the data that's showing, make sure that it all fits your KPIs, your goals, your triggers and business definitions. That's step two.

We're gonna look through here and we're gonna look at this and say, okay, yes, I definitely wanna see the volume. I do wanna see the volume of contacts created over time. I do wanna see it in this kind of chart so that I can see the line as it's growing. I do wanna see the qualified leads each month and I do wanna see it month over month.

But maybe what I wanna see here is also a secondary partition. I actually do want to see maybe source data on where these came from. Maybe I want to see, maybe I want to be able to click into this and pull a report that is of these 710 marketing qualified leads. Here's what their lead score is. Maybe that's a second report that I want to show like a table.

That's something that I wanna dive into. You need to see what's missing, make notes for yourself. Again, this gives you a good step on the journey of what you need to build next in order to see what matters most to you.

Step 3: Build what’s missing

Okay, so then once you've looked at everything critically and you've gone through here and you've seen what stories they're trying to tell you, the next step of the puzzle is to look and see, okay, what do I need to build now? So for example, in your go-to-market survey, if you noted that I absolutely want to see how our products are performing, then you really need to make sure that you have a report in here that shows you revenue information based on product.

You need to make sure that that is something that you've built. We do have that here. We can see a breakdown of how our products are performing by the count of deals that we have for them by the amount, the sum that they're bringing in. And we've also added here an additional partition of how many days it took to close it on average with this product line.

So go through, make sure that you are looking at what you have, what story it's telling you, what you need to either get rid of, what's necessary, what needs to be refined, and then look through and see what's missing and start building it to set yourself up for success and make sure that moving forward you have reporting that matches your goals and your growth initiatives based on the information that we've gotten from the rest of the revenue engine diagnostic.

Your assignment

That’s it for the Benchmarking Dashboard and that is the end of class five. Now what I want you to do is to dive into your reporting. Start with the first half of the benchmarking assignment: assessing. Remember this is all part of your diagnostic, so you want to look critically at what you have available. Then I want you to look critically at what story that information is telling you. Use it as further evidence and information to guide your roadmap.

Remember, don’t be discouraged if the numbers are messy or if you aren’t even sure what the data is telling you because it’s not fitting your company goals or metrics as you’ve defined them in the GTM. If that happens it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a sign that you need to build all new reporting and start from there. Don’t forget, it’s okay to start from the bottom, because when you do, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Once you’ve reviewed your reporting, update it to match your goals, KPIs, and trigger criteria. Make sure it reflects exactly where you want to go, and build from scratch whatever is missing. And then when you’ve finished that, get all your notes together and review everything you’ve learned so far. Because in our final class, we’re going to take everything we’ve learned — the goals and definitions, the mapping notes, the audit findings, and all that benchmarking info — and we’re going to turn it into your 90-Day Roadmap.

So I'll see you next time for the final class. Good luck benchmarking!

Class 6: Building the Strategic Roadmap

Welcome back

Hello again and welcome back to implementing Revenue Operations 201: Revenue Diagnostic, Mapping, and Benchmarking!

This is our final class together. This is all about your 90 day roadmap.

We've made it to almost the finish line of the revenue engine diagnostic. Throughout this entire investigative journey, we dug deep. We have investigated, we've interviewed, we've made notes. We have filled out the Go-To-Market Survey and aligned everyone on common definitions and clearly defined our primary and secondary key performance indicators.

We got everyone in the same room and actually visualized the revenue journey from start to finish. We mapped out the processes, the handoffs, the qualification, everything that someone might go through to become a customer and actually get money in our account.

Then we looked at the other side of things, what the user actually experienced. We looked at our experience audit, as if a user with fresh eyes was going through all of our website and our conversion points for the first time.

Then we looked at our benchmarking data. We actually looked at what data we have available, what it tells us right now, what we need to prioritize based on that data and what's missing, what we need to create, what we need to add, what we need to get rid of because it's redundant or doesn't fit our definitions and goals.

And now we have tons of information and the vision is starting to clear, right? You're starting to see these areas that you definitely need to focus on.

Today's class is all about prioritizing that information, taking it and seeing what we need to focus on first and what is gonna build off of other things to make sure that we're achieving our growth.

From detectives to architects

At this point, we've basically, to put it in medical terms, since this is a diagnostic, we've basically taken an X-ray of the business and we found every fracture. Now we know what's broken, but we need to move on to the second part, the actual diagnosis, the plan, the “how we're gonna fix it”.

And that's what the roadmap today is all about. We're no longer detectives. Now we're actually architects of growth. We are actually strategizing.

In this class, what we're talking about is building the strategic roadmap. And that means translating all of the investigation that we've done up to this point and putting it into steps that we can actually execute, into operational steps that will ladder up into these overarching goals.

Now, this isn't just a to-do list. This should be a 90 day action plan of projects and priorities that will work together to help you achieve that overall growth goal that you listed on your Go-To-Market Survey.

What we want to do is we want to move from being reactive, from just putting out those fires as they pop up, into being proactive, where we're actually driving performance; where we're operationalizing all of these insights that we've found.

What is the 90-day roadmap?

And that is what the 90 day roadmap is. It's an action plan that translates diagnostic findings into execution. It moves beyond a simple to-do list into organizing and prioritizing. You want to organize the work into high-level objectives that tie every technical task back to a specific growth initiative or business goal.

Now, I'm being very clear here because we want all of our goals that we set to ladder up into that one North Star metric or those overarching growth goals that you have as a company.

Anything that you create down here should ladder up goal-wise. Anything you create down here should ladder up into those overarching goals.

And creating your roadmap and your objectives is no different. Everyone is motivated by knowing exactly how their piece of the puzzle ties into overall goals. They want to know how it matters. They want to know that what they do matters and how it affects the overarching objectives.

We're going to break out our roadmap objectives the same way that we did our goals.

You'll have your overarching priorities and then you'll break them down between departments and everything should ladder up.

The roadmap ensures that you're acting with intention. You're creating clear timelines, you're aligning leadership and you're aligning priorities and you're managing expectations to show everyone exactly what is being built, exactly why it matters and when it will be delivered and how it all affects the overarching growth goal.

This is how you eliminate departmental friction and silos. You open up the conversation and you have everyone on the same page working toward clearly defined goals based on the objectives in your roadmap.

Why 90 days?

Now let's get into the why, because you all know I love the why.

The 90 day roadmap is so important. And again, let me take a little step back. I keep calling it the 90 day roadmap because that's what we use as our template. And that is to my brain, the most effective.

You work per quarter. It gives you enough runway to accomplish high level objectives, but it also gives you runway. It gives you enough runway so that you can achieve those high level objectives, but it also gives you a compact enough timeline that if you need to pivot, you can.

You're not wasting too much time if you start realizing that you're on the wrong path, right? So I like to think of it in terms of 90 day roadmaps. That's what we here at RevPartners like to call it.

That's why you keep hearing me call it that, but realistically, as I've told you through this entire thing, what you need to do is make sure that this is working for you.

So if your company and your goals and your business model is better built on a 30 day roadmap or a six month roadmap, that is up to you.

Make sure you make it fit your business, but also make sure you're making something that is giving you enough runway that you can actually hit those objectives and it's realistic, but also isn't too much time so that if you are on the wrong path, you can't pivot.

Now back into the importance of all of this. Like I said, the importance here is clear. You want to have total transparency so that everyone is working toward the same overarching goals and so that you're eliminating one more source of friction.

Everybody has their growth goals. They know exactly how they're laddering up and everything is moving the company forward. Think back to those Go-To-Market Maturity Levels. The maturity framework that we talked about in RevOps Fundamentals.

You want to make sure that you are moving up along that framework and having all of your goals, having all of your objectives ladder up into your goals and all of your departments working together with clear timelines, clear communication — and one single source of truth is the first step in that journey.

So the goal with your roadmap is to make sure that you are creating manageable intervals in which to check that high performance engine; that you're creating goals and finish lines that you can actually meet.

Think back to our revenue mapping. When I was telling you about quick wins and how they gain momentum. Anytime you cross one finish line and you can celebrate, you just gain further momentum and excitement that will drive you further into even more finish lines.

Quick wins, major epics and ad-hoc work

So you want to break up the work into distinct categories, but also into measurable, manageable intervals.

And then within those intervals, you want to make sure that you are categorizing the types of objectives that you will work towards.

So for example, first quick wins, those momentum gainers, anything that you can knock out quickly that you can all celebrate.

Then major epics, the big significant changes that you know will heavily impact and optimize your revenue engine overall. These are things like, for example, tearing out your whole lead scoring and qualification criteria, like burning it all to the ground and starting that over again, that would be a massive epic or objective to undertake.

You would break it down into smaller tasks that are moving you forward, but overall that's a big investment of time. So you wanna make sure that you are labeling it that way, that, this is gonna be where I'm focusing for this quarter. Yes, I'll do the quick wins and I'll gain my momentum, but this is going to be my primary focus.

And then of course, you do have to always keep in mind that there are going to be ad-hoc things that come up that they're going to be… Look, let's just be honest, those fires are never going to actually stop. They happen.

And as someone who works in a CRM every day, there are going to be little things that are constantly coming up, small things that you got to be pulled in on, things that people are asking, “Hey, I just realized we changed our pricing on this one page and we forgot to change it over here. So can you stop what you're doing? Cause I really need you to jump on this. Our pricing has to be right.”

And that's true, okay, right? You definitely want to have your prices right on your website. So that's something that for sure needs to be a priority and is worthy of you stopping what you're doing and moving into that, absolutely.

But you also want to make sure that you are tracking that as something that you've changed.

First of all, very important there, always document everything that you do in your source of truth. That's why we have one.

But also it's so that you can definitively look at, well, I spent my time on these seven or eight Ad-Hoc things and that's why this big epic is taking longer to move forward or we had to switch our priorities over here, but now I'm focusing back on this major epic here.

Again, the big thing here is transparency and making sure that you're recording everything that you're doing for your source of truth, but you're also making sure that you are being transparent for other teams so that they can see what you're working on.

It could be that you start noticing a trend in all those Ad-Hoc tasks, right? If you start seeing that you got pulled in to update this pricing page four different times while you were meant to be over here focused on this major epic of lead qualification — that could be a problem.

It could be that you need to actually take a step back and say, “Okay, actually I've made an error here in prioritization. I should have prioritized total revamp of our pricing page as being the major epic of this quarter. That should have taken priority because that's customer facing and that's really important and that's where I should have been focusing my time. So let's pivot real quick. Let's make that the focus and then I'll come back to this lead qualification.”

You want to make sure that as you're labeling clearly, you're documenting everything for your source of truth, and that everything that you're working on is something that is your strategy. It is your prioritized strategy, and it is all going to ladder up and work together to achieve your growth goals.

But you have to make sure that it's flexible enough so that you are pivoting when you learn things and that it's not just a static, unchangeable thing. It is a living document that you are following no matter where it takes you.

The outcome

The overall outcome of having a thorough, well thought out 90 day roadmap is that you walk away with a transparent company wide guide to achieve your goals.

And again, company-wide, transparent, everybody aligned. I've said these things like a bajillion times because it's very important that when you think about your source of truth as a source of truth for everyone.

Everything should be laddered up in the company to that North Star goal and this roadmap should be reflective of how you are all gonna work to get there.

It eliminates departmental friction because it shows you exactly what is being built, why it matters, and when it will be delivered. Yes, you saw this sentence before, you heard me say this sentence before, you will hear me say this sentence over and over again because that right there is the crux of a RevOps strategy.

It brings everyone together and eliminates one of the most obvious places of friction and siloed information because it brings us all together and shows us where we're going, why we want to go there, how we're going to get there, and what your piece of that puzzle is.

It's the roadmap; it's the strategy. To quote Shakespeare, what we're looking for is the “be all, end all” of RevOps strategy.

That's what our roadmap gives us: It is our strategy in physical form. The be all, end all, right? This is what it is that we've been working so hard for this whole time.

And it's the roadmap itself that transforms RevOps into a visible driver of business growth.

A living document

All right, so let's think about using the strategic roadmap. So again, think about it like a living document because it is and should be. The roadmap is your strategy made tangible.

And it does not or should not end after 90 days. If you can only think of 90 days worth of things to optimize in your business, well, hallelujah, you are the elite of the elite and I am not sure why you are here because trust me, everybody else knows there are always things that we can optimize, right?

There are always changes. There are always things that we're learning and tweaks that we can make and improvements to go around.

So every time you create a roadmap, you want to be thinking far enough ahead so that you can achieve those goals, but still not so far that you're not flexible.

Make it a living document so that at every checkpoint we are returning to that RevOps flywheel from our RevOps Fundamentals course. We're gonna document, we're going to review the data that we have available, we're gonna drive adoption, we're gonna check adoption to make sure everything is being built, we're gonna create insights and then we're gonna see what we learn from those insights.

This is how we should be actually using the roadmap every time.

We work on an objective, we implement it, and then we pull back to our RevOps Flywheel and we review that epic.

So at the end of your objective for lead qualification, you're going to have redone your lead qualification. You've got it all looking good, right? You're very excited about your new qualification process. So at the end of that, you implement it and then we take a step back.

And we review. Is the process organized the way that I thought it was going to be? Is the data organized? How's it looking in the system? Did I get it all in there? Is it working the way that I thought it should?

Adoption, is the team actually using it? Are they using what I built? Is it working for them the way that I thought it would?

Especially when we're talking about qualification. Think: Was my qualification way off the mark? Am I being too strict? Am I not being strict enough?

Look at the insights, look at the data that you have in front of you. What does your reporting tell you about the optimization abilities that you have, about the improvements that you could make? There's always something to learn, even if you just implemented it, there's always something to learn.

And then you're going to optimize. You're gonna take what you learn. You're gonna take those insights and you're going to implement them. You're going to iterate and you're going to take it to the next level of maturity.

Example: a roadmap in ClickUp

Okay, so now that you understand the roadmap, now that you know what it is that you should be building, I'm going to show you just a quick example of a roadmap that we here at RevPartners would build so that you can see it in action.

Okay, so you can see we use the project management tool ClickUp. That's what we use for our day-to-day lives here as RevOps strategists at RP. We are inside ClickUp all the time and we use it for both our 90-day roadmap planning, our objective setting, and also in our daily task list.

This is how we at RP have transparency over what we're doing with our partners. We build it all in ClickUp.

There are lots of project management tools out there. There are lots of ways that you could build a 90-day roadmap. You choose the one that works best for you. But personally, I've really liked ClickUp. So that's why you're seeing this example.

So let's look at what a roadmap could look like in real-time.

First thing, we break everything down in terms of very clear cut statuses. Here's what we've delivered, here's what we have in progress, here's what is accepted or upcoming or next, and this is what's not started.

When we're in here making roadmaps, we want to make sure that it's very clear that you know not just what we've done, but what we are working on and you can see the vision so that we can all, every department, can see how things are going to fit together, how things are going to flow together.

So you can see in this example, the next epic or high-level objective that we're working toward in this example is implementing nurture campaigns. And you can see that we have that set as being due roughly at the end of this quarter.

Now it's very important to make sure that you have deadlines in your roadmap. The reason for that is because one, again, it's expectation setting and it's transparency for everyone.

But it's also a timeline for you as well. It's a timeline that they can rely on, that your company can rely on, that other leadership can rely on, that other departments can count on, especially if it's something that they may need in order to do the rest of their job.

But it's also a timeline for you. It keeps you honest, it keeps you on track. It makes sure that when those Ad-Hoc priorities are popping up, you have the agency to say, “Okay, no, I really need to focus on this because my deadline is coming up and here you can see that this is where this ends. But if you'll wait, I've got some time built in later after I finish this for that.” Right? This gives you that agency.

So this is an example of how you could build out a roadmap. You've got your in-progress for the next, 90, 180 days, however long you want it to be.

And this one actually keeps going further than that in our example.

Again, make sure that you're building it out with enough of a ramp that you know what you're working toward and how things are going to fit together, but you're also not afraid to move those priorities around.

So this is another reason that we really like ClickUp. It's super easy to drag and drop and flip and rearrange priorities if we start realizing that we were on the wrong track.

Breaking epics into tasks

And the other thing that you want to do is, okay, yes, we do have our overall campaign here. So what you would also do is make sure that you see what is underneath that campaign. What are the tasks that are part of that nurture campaign?

So for example, you want to make sure that your high-level objectives are all on your roadmap and you want to lay it out in a way like this so that you can be sure you're seeing at a high level: what are we working toward, what's next, what's upcoming.

But you also want to see, granularly, what is it that makes up this nurture campaigns objective?

What do I mean by that? What does it take to implement nurture campaigns? Like specifically, what are you spending your day on? And how do I, as a RevOps strategist, work toward this overall goal?

Well, the way that we do it, we break it down so that each high-level epic like that does have subtasks. Again, that's a project management tool thing. We actually have tasks that roll up to that objective.

And here again is an example of the tasks that would go into that nurture campaigns epic. We would have our pre-discovery, our discovery, and then the actual build stage. We always leave room for measuring because we always are going back to the RevOps Flywheel. Then it's the delivery, you know, the actual handing this off to the partner for us.

For in-house work, it would be actually handing this over to the team that's gonna use it and getting adoption and buy-in. And then you measure that adoption. You never hand something over and then just throw your hands up.

You always come back to it and see how it has been adopted.

You’ve completed the Revenue Engine Diagnostic

Okay, now I want you to go and I want you to build out your roadmap yourself because we've done it. We are at the end of this course.

You have officially done a revenue engine diagnostic with me.

Let's take a step back and let's congratulate ourselves because that is a huge thing that you just went through.

The revenue engine diagnostic is massively important and just straight up massive. So think about how far you've come.

We started this journey with just a simple question. Do you actually know how your revenue engine works?

And think about what we dug into over these last six classes. We really dove in. We wanted to make sure that we have stopped guessing and we have started knowing, knowing facts.

We sat down, we did that Go-To-Market Survey together, and you got everyone aligned with exactly what it is you want to be measuring.

We physically traced out the path of the user journey and your customer journey in our revenue map.

We put ourselves in the shoes of our users with our experience audit, and we looked through our data and what's available to us and we really dug into asking what do we need? What do we have available right now? What story does it tell us?

What do we need to get rid of because it's redundant and how can I set my reporting up for success in a way that matches the goals, the definitions, and the KPIs that I outlined in this revenue engine diagnostic.

Now you're gonna take everything that you've done and you're going to put it in that 90-day roadmap, that strategic achievable roadmap of how you're going to reach the goals that you've set in this diagnostic. You're going to have data-based insights that you're going to turn into actionable next steps.

All right, we've gone over so much. Look, if RevOps Fundamentals, if the last class was the blueprint, this class is the actual building.

You have everything you need now to go forth and implement. You can go make your very own extensive, high-impact revenue operations strategy.

You've got the templates, you’ve got the data, and the most important thing that you have now is clarity and information.

I hope you've gotten a lot out of this revenue engine diagnostic. I know I always do. It has been great to guide you through this process. So now it's your turn. The power is in your hands. Go build something amazing.