Modules
Session 5: Project Scoping + Change Mgmt
Slide Deck
Transcript
Hi, everyone. Welcome back.
Happy, happy Wednesday. How are y'all doing?
Hopefully, feeling good.
Brian and I were just talking. For those of you in the states, we have long holiday, and now tomorrow is already Thursday. It's crazy how time flies. So hopefully, you've had a positive and productive week. So happy to be back here with all of you. Welcome to week five of RevOps.
Without further ado, I'll go ahead and welcome Brian. I don't have any housekeeping today other than please reach out to me if I can help in any way. You can message me on Zoom or Slack. I'll be here. Thank you, Brian. Welcome.
Alright. Thanks, Allison. Hello, everybody. Thanks again for joining. Thanks a bunch for, kinda having that break.
Midway, it was definitely helpful for me. Maybe one in the call do anything fun. Did anyone go on vacation?
I went to the beach and played some golf, so I kind of enjoyed my time off. But I know it's not the whole group isn't Americans and probably didn't have time off. But did anyone else go on vacation, or is everyone stuck working, all last week?
Southern California. Alright. I like that, Jennifer.
No one else, I guess. That's okay.
Has anyone, has anyone completed the full workbook? You don't have to share the link necessarily, but I shared mine, last week. Has anyone completed all of the assignments in the workbook?
No? It's okay. It's this is not this is not a test. I'm just curious. I've got my example here.
Hopefully, this kinda helps you guys kinda get started. It's okay. I know you guys are busy and have a bunch going on. I just figured I would ask, because we're gonna be using it again like we do in every single class.
But, hey. At least Chris and, Jennifer were honest, so I do appreciate that.
Alright. We've given some people a couple of extra seconds. So let's go ahead and get started, and we will kick off class number five.
Alright.
Let me go back to the top. Alright. So session five, this will be around project scoping and change management. So last week or I guess it was two weeks ago, talked around, CRM is a product, not a project, and talking about adoption, specifically the credit framework.
So we've talked a lot about, data modeling, metric tracking, and then some of the more, soft skills or more of the more, slightly less tangible things of revenue operations and kind of, like, scoping, planning, management. And so we'll get into a little bit more of that today. And then next class will all be will be a we'll dive back into the data. We'll talk through, how to set goals, how to tell a story with data, and then talk through quarterly business reviews.
So before we get started, I'll just go ahead and drop the workbook link for this week into the chat so that you guys have it accessible. And what I do, like, every week, I just grab the slides, and then I copy them into my master workbook, which is now up to thirty nine slides, which is kinda crazy.
Alright. Let's go ahead and hop in. I will share my screen, and we'll get going from there. If you can't access any of the documents, just ask Allison and chief of support.
So what's the agenda for today?
The agenda is gonna be really three main parts, deciding on projects to prioritize. So for many of us, definitely my company q two ended, you know, on June thirtieth, about a week and a half ago. And so how do we, take that data and begin to prioritize our next projects to work on? How do we influence things in rev ops? The second is going through once you decided on a project to prioritize, what are the five phases of scoping a project and executing it?
Then we'll get into change management. How do we actually, get executive buy in? And what's a a template for alignment and all the different stakeholders and some initiative change? And then we'll talk through project plan timelines, how to, plan these effectively so that you can actually, you know, deliver your projects on time, to all the key staplers.
Okay. So first thing is just begin thinking of begin thinking about or thinking through a project or an initiative you have in progress currently or will start in the next thirty days.
So just begin thinking about something you're working on. It can be a rev ops project. It can be not one. It can be something internal. It could be something, I guess, potentially external. But begin thinking about something you either have in progress and just started or something that you want to start, you know, sometime in the next thirty days, maybe in July, because we'll be going back to that several times throughout this, this session.
Gil is gonna be implementing Voci. I'd love to see that, Gil.
Okay. So I'm gonna walk you through my process and kinda what I do and kinda how I plan through how to prioritize my next ninety days. And the first thing I do is I need to decide where I'm gonna make an impact. So a lot of us just kinda go and start working on random things, but it's really hard to get alignment, especially that change management piece, if we're not really deciding specifically where we can make an impact. And so this is the thought process that I've gone through over the last two weeks to figure out what I can impact the most. So I always start with the data model.
I know it's simple and it seems high level, but always start with the data model and figure, you know, figure out where you can impact. So we've got our primary KPIs here. We've got everything set up in the CRM. We've got our volume metrics, our conversion metrics down here, the different sections of the bow tie, and then these are all kind of like the different kind of customer journey touch points that we do have.
And so always go back to the data model, make sure the entire team is aligned on what happens within the data model. The next step that I do is I have a table, and I go through the our primary KPIs. These are fake numbers, but it's the same structure, and I start tracking the last quarter. So for my company, June thirtieth was the last day of q two.
So on July first, I could pull all the new numbers. And so we had four quarters of data from q two twenty twenty three all the way through q one. Now I'm adding a fifth row, and this is now a fifth quarter of data. So, for a lot of you, you should be looking at the the data you have in your CRM for the last calendar quarter.
Compare that to different goals you might have or at least see what kind of trends you have. Put it into a table like this, it only takes five minutes to update, but the story begins to tell itself and you begin to figure out where you can impact. So let's just start here with sessions.
I'm noticing an upward trend here in sessions. Right? From ten thousand, which was a low point in q four of last year, all the way up to fifteen thousand, almost. That's almost a fifty percent increase in two calendar quarters.
Right? How are we capturing this new found demand? Are we capturing this? Right? So we can see leads generated has increased as well, which is great, which has turned MQLs to increase as well.
So you would think if sessions are increasing, leads are increasing, MQLs are increasing.
Obviously, deals will be increasing, but that's not the case.
So you can see here that the marketing qualified lead, the deal converted percentage has decreased quarter over quarter quite drastically.
So rather than capturing, this upwind of new sessions, we're actually not capturing this at all, and we're kind of in this stuck holding pattern. We've plateaued the last three months. Our deals created has been essentially the same for the last ninety days even though our sessions lead in MQLs has drastically changed.
If you look at closed won, these are closed won deals here. You can see that our conversion rate is kind of like every other quarter. We kinda get to the twenty four percent mark. So I'm glad this quarter, we went from twelve percent in q one to twenty one percent in q two, and that allowed us to close ten more deals, which is a big positive sign.
So from my point of view, if I can impact these deals created and if this was, you know, let's just say one thirty three instead of one thirteen and this number was closer to thirty, that's positively impacting our business, and it's a lot of net new revenue.
And so these are the types of questions I'm asking myself to figure out what I can actually impact within my area of the business and what we can do. Does anyone else in this chart see anything that I'm missing or anything that you are interpreting differently?
Because if you start with the bow tie, you really should be thinking, which of these do you know you have an impact on and which one can do effect to a positive direction?
You can see here our deals greater goal, we we missed it by seven.
But our, conversion rate, we had earmarked fifteen percent, but we had twenty one percent. So we really, really beat that, but we still missed our, closed one count goal by by two.
So Can you, can you elaborate? I'm sorry. But can you elaborate on what sessions means in this context?
Website sessions. So anonymous website visitors.
Okay.
So at HubSpot, it it'll track. We have, like, a pixel on the website, and it'll track the number of visitors. I don't have names to these people yet, but I do have the number. And it will give me the source.
It is direct traffic, organic, or whatever it is. And so, that's why it's kinda hard to influence because I don't it's not like I've got four thousand new contacts in my database. I just know that there are likely more people coming in the website, but am I doing a good job at capturing it? And so that's what I'm trying to answer right now is if our demand generation is increasing, that's great.
But if our demand capture is decreasing, that doesn't really help. And if the quality is drastically decreasing in terms of this conversion rate, that doesn't help either.
And so someone said, what is the reason for the decline? And that's what I'm trying to to kinda figure out because, it's not super obvious. But if I if I can get deals created up to one thirty, one forty, one fifty, I really think I'm gonna be able to impact the revenue the most positive way. And I feel like I can control this more because the volume is lower, and there's a lot of noise with these conversion rates between leads and MQLs and deals that I might not be able to impact it as much.
Yeah. Why the screen greater closed one deals? Sorry. Go ahead.
Yeah. And so so one one question that I have is, you're obviously looking at closed one in terms of number of opportunities, right, rather than the volume as in, you know, the the the, you know, like, the the dollar value behind it. Right? Why who who set that target to start with, the the twenty sixth that you have, And and why do you do it that way? I'm sure there's a really good reason, but why?
Yep. So I don't have this on this presentation, but the next slide is all about average deal size, total revenue generated, and all of, like, the other metrics that go past close one. And so we definitely look at that. In this case, actually, average deal size remains very, very similar, so revenue is very different. Who sets the goals?
So our COO sets the goals. But next week, I'm gonna go into the goal matrix we use. And based on different conversion rates and sources and, different kind of revenue goals we have as a company, how to come up with this number. So we are gonna talk about that next week. But you're right. There is the other side of the coin is if all of these deals were five thousand dollars where last quarter they're all hundred thousand dollars, obviously, that would be a different conversation. But the context here is that average deal sizes has remained the same, and so the count is actually the biggest indicator.
Juliana has a question.
Thank you. I'm not sure if you said this at the beginning when you're introducing the slide because I joined a little bit later. But then what you're trying to show there is everything that's generated in the quarter, closed in the quarter, qualified in the quarter, but not at cohorted? Meaning, when one lead comes in, how you follow the lead throughout the the lead journey.
Yep. So this is not cohort based. Our sales cycle is around ninety ish days, and it would take too long to do this. And I'd I'd have to look at q four data to actually get this full chart, and the numbers might be slightly, like, more correct.
I I I don't think they're gonna make a big impact on the direction I go to figure out what I prioritize. So, yes, I use kind of this rolling average whereas, you know, just sessions last ninety days, leads last ninety days, MQLs last ninety days. And so the conversion rate is not cohort based, and I get it. There's different ways to look at that.
The way that I do it is more simplified because, again, I'm looking at key trends and key factors. And if this number is twenty three percent instead of twenty one point nine percent, that's not that's not enough of a reason for me to have to wait ninety days to make sure every single lead had a chance to close. But that's a very good question. I know Lindsay had the same one.
And so if you guys do it differently, that's totally fine. That's just the way that I do it. Okay. So our primary KPIs would be analyzing these a bit, and then we start looking at our secondary KPIs.
And so you guys each have one of these sheets in your workbook. And so if you fill this out, this is what I look at next where I say, I've got all my primary KPIs up here. What are the specific custom properties in my CRM that I can view to to to look at this data slightly differently? So we have different stuff on the contact object versus the deal object.
If it's green, I've got a hundred percent of of the information.
If it's orange, not every single record has the correct information. And if it's blue, this is this future state. I update this KPI visibility chart every single quarter. Like, company type is something new we're doing this quarter.
Going back to this, these are all the secondary KPIs I can look at. So if I wanna influence if I wanna look at deals created, that's the deal object. I'm gonna look at the secondary KPIs they've been available, and I wanna look at deal source. I'm most, curious about deal source because I think that will have the highest impact on what I can control.
More so than deal owner, pipeline, create date, product type, things like that. I'm gonna start with the deal source. So I'm picking the secondary KPI, and I'm gonna go into HubSpot where your CRM have created a report.
So looking at that's why it's important to have clean data in your CRM because if you can look at three or four quarters of data, you begin to analyze trends. So these are our six most common deal sources, and this is the trends that we have.
You see that the total for these hasn't changed a ton, but the volume in between has.
So if I look at inbound, this is by far my biggest channel. Last quarter, it was sixty six out of one eleven, so that's over fifty percent.
And you could see it's been the highest volume for forever. So this is this is pretty good. And while we could figure out how to optimize this, this is not what I'm gonna focus on because this is actually remained pretty stable, and it's actually trending in the right direction.
If you see HubSpot, this is, like, trying to source deals with HubSpot reps. This has remained extremely stable. We actually kinda have, like, a limited amount that we can pull from them, and so we don't have enough, like, much more juice to squeeze from this relationship. Like, they they wouldn't give us forty four deals this quarter just because we asked for those. So we're kinda capped at this twenty five, and so that's something that I feel like I can affect either, but it is it it it brings up about twenty five percent of our deal. So it's an important source, just not something I'm gonna prioritize this quarter.
You look at, VCPE. This is venture capital and private equity, and then this is customer referral.
Each of these has decreased quarter over quarter from q three of, twenty twenty three. This is something that's a big red flag to me. What relationships do we have with our current customers or these BCPE firms, and where are those gone? Do we have some new managing this that doesn't manage anymore? Are we not actively engaging these people?
You know, where has this gone? Because this is decreasing, completely.
And the last one is outbound. We haven't we've been, like, a hundred percent inbound or channel, and so we haven't really thought about outbound. But I think we're at a point now where we're growing as a company. Our revenue goals are increasing.
We need to generate more sales opportunities, and I think outbound is an undervalued asset that we could potentially play. Running an outbound play with all the different tools you can get in the marketplace now, it's actually something that you can try pretty quickly and try to get validation. And I think within ninety days, you definitely could. And so I'm looking at outbound and saying, we haven't even scratched the surface on if this is even a potential source for us.
And this, this this kind of channel or more relationship based, there's definitely some more, juice we can squeeze out of them. We're just not prioritizing it.
And so while inbound and HubSpot make up about eighty percent of our, you know, deals on a quarterly basis, I don't think I can drastically improve those by twenty percent.
I do think I can potentially improve these by not just twenty percent, but I could, you know, improve by a hundred percent, a hundred and fifty percent. And so that's what my focus is gonna be is because these ones seem more malleable. The value the the volume's so low that if I just change this three to a a ten next quarter, which is three x unit, that could potentially lead to some revenue that we're not capturing.
Alright. So I do have some questions. I've got, Prachi.
Yeah. So two questions. One, like, what is outbound?
Is it, like, something where it's inside sales or you guys are calling on someone and actively going after This is like, yeah, this is like traditional outbound prospecting, like, cold outreach.
Okay. And, then any seasonality that you look into all of this because maybe the budget cycles are affecting some of it, and you may have to have different goals for different, RevPartners?
Yes. Of course. There's there's always gonna be, like, external factors. I am I am personally rule ruling seasonality out.
But for your business, it might it might not be that case.
Sergio?
Yeah. So can you double click again and explain why you decide to focus on venture capital, referrals and not in inbound? Because what I'm seeing, like, in q three twenty twenty three, you got, like, eighty four is a huge volume, and that decrease from eighty four to sixty six is huge for me. So I don't know why focus on that and not on this one.
Well, I mean, sixty six to eighty four is what? Like, twenty percent decrease, whereas six to eighteen is three hundred percent.
And so that's kinda what I'm looking at. And, Yeah. I mean, look. If you made this decision here, you can kind of really focus on inbound.
That one seems to be more of a lag measure. And what I'm the reason I'm focusing on this is because we already have a group of seventy five customers we could go after. We're just not doing that play correctly. We already have these relationships with these VC firms.
Right? Because we used to have them. These people didn't go away. They're still they still work here.
We just haven't nurtured these as well. So we're not starting these from scratch at all. And this outbound motion is which I'll go to in a second. It's actually pretty easy to get started from scratch if you kinda focus on it.
And so that's kinda why I'm focusing on it. So it's a combination between the impact and the easy to implement the strategy that you want to put together. Right? Yeah.
And look. I mean, this is an entire business. This is not just me and my team and my role. For the purpose of this session, I'm focusing on this because that makes sense as an example.
But I'm not saying I don't care about inbound, obviously. We have a team that's focused on SEO and PPC and making sure we nurture that and having different lead forms and lead magnets. And so we're not going to inbound as a company. I'm just saying for this presentation, I wanna focus on these because they have a more tangible impact for what I'm about to go through.
Thank you for clarifying.
So the decision that I'm making is I'm gonna increase the outbound or outbound motion. Allbound being more relationship based. So converting website visitors, that session increase into deals, nurturing those VC, PE, and customer referral channels, and really trying to make an impact on the.
So what's a project? You guys are analyzing my data and say, hey. You're wrong. You need to look at this, which is great.
So let's ask you. What's one project you've already identified for q three to help increase revenue? Right? I've just identified this, and some said, hey.
I'd focus on this. I'd focus on that, which I totally get. But, hey. We all wanna help increase revenue for our businesses.
And so put in the chat, if you will, a project that you've identified already that you wanna focus on.
And this is what we're gonna use for the rest of the session. So, yeah, please put it in the chat. And it's again, it could be something you're already working on or something that you think might be a good idea. But, you know, what's something that you guys have identified? You know? Because whether you hit your goal in q two or not, ideally, you'd have something queued up for, for q three.
Increase MQL through an outbound test. Okay. I like that. Similar to me.
Control discounting via CPQ and deal hub. Interesting.
Increasing middle of funnel conversion rate, forecasting template, quote to cash vendor, educational content with CTAs, product integration, a sales enablement tool adding a new product. Sergio is gonna diversify this product offering. Ricky is going to rework net new and recurring revenue pipelines, SQL attribution model, increase bottom of funnel leads, revamp sales knowledge base.
Jennifer, r b, r b to b. We're actually using that tool. So look at all the stuff. We're doing all amazing things in these groups.
And so what I wanna do in the next, you know, hour is walk you through how I'd approach some of these projects to set them up for success. Because all of these are cross functional. All of these are big bets. All of these are aimed at, increasing revenue.
How do you align the entire team to make sure you're doing things correctly? So I appreciate that. Keep those projects in mind. So in my mind, there are five phases to a rev ops project.
Right? You could disagree on some of these, but the way that I think about projects, whether it's rev ops or internal or change management or tech based, whatever it is, five phases. There's a discovery phase, a build phase, a deliver phase, a measure phase, and an adopt or an adoption phase.
Each project must go through all five of these phases. Most projects just kinda focus on the build and definitely don't really focus on the measure and adopt. And so that's why the the length of these projects might increase, but the value and the impact will also increase as well.
Each project also has timeline expectations. The most important thing you do, whether you're internal or external, is, create proper expectations for timeline. So what is the go live date? Right?
We learned last week or two weeks ago. Nothing in the CRM is ever done. It's a product, and so there's a go live date. It's not a done date.
What is the adoption period? We talked about that again last last time.
What are we setting aside for an adoption period for this project to actually have some success and not just focus on the next thing the next day? And what are our data measurement techniques or tools?
So within each of these five phases, there's some, you know, key things that go on. Within discovery, you're defining the problem statement, you're gathering the key stakeholders, and you're answering the discovery questions that will influence what you do in the build.
In the build phase, you're turning those discovery answers into actionable next steps.
You're obviously building the assets, whether that's in your CRM, a different tool. If it's, like, internal process, maybe you're building documentation or Loom videos. It doesn't have to be in the CRM, but you're building some kind of assets.
Under deliver, hopefully, your QA testing, QA's quality assurance. And so are you going through and, testing exactly what you built?
Are you training the team? Are you gonna align the team on the adoption period?
Measure, we're gonna create the reporting. We're gonna define the goals of each metric, but we're gonna also establish a weekly check-in to begin looking at some of the data that's coming through. And then adoption, I know we talked about this a ton two weeks ago, but you wanna review the data inputs weekly on a micro level and then track data outputs monthly on a macro level.
So five phases, discovery, build, deliver, measure, adopt.
Let's go into each one of these. So phase one discovery. What's the overview of this?
Laura, I would add iterate.
I I think that's a really good point. And so iterate could be added in here. You could also you could have, like, the iteration, I kind of think, is almost like a combination of deliver, measure, and adopt, and it's just how long you extend it. But, iteration throughout these, I think, is very smart as well. Okay. Discovery.
This is the most important phase of a rev ops project, and, most people spend way too little time on this. They just immediately run to build because that's what they they're comfortable with. During this time, you have to align on the problem statement, what are you solving for. You need to gather key stakeholders, get them on a Zoom call together, and you need to run a full discovery session to make sure you have a clear path forward.
I I don't know who, quoted this, but, they said, you know, one one hour of planning saves ten hours of execution. And I do kind of agree with that because discovery should be a huge part of setting this project up for success, and a lot of people glance over this.
So what are some key milestones within discovery phase? Right? So we've got some a couple initial discovery sessions. You can have a couple depending on, like, the the length of your project or the, all the people involved.
But there's inputs. Right? Who are the stakeholders? What are the what is the timing of this?
Who are the effective teams?
And then we have the outputs. What problem are we solving for? What is the root cause of this problem? What are some potential risks or costs? And then what are some decisions that we've made?
What is maybe the tech stack needed?
And then, for the build phase, what are the input requirements?
Right? If someone says, hey. I need to do an outbound motion. I say, great. We need to create email templates.
Who's gonna create those? Right? What are the requirements on some of the things that I have to go build? So let's break down the discovery phase a bit more because it is so key and important.
I'm not gonna go through all these questions. I just wanted to add them here as an additional resource. As you're looking through and you're trying to set up, like, these discovery sessions internally, these are some good questions to think about. So what's your current state?
Who are the stakeholders, the needs, and the resources? What are risks and barriers? And and what does planning and implementation look like? So these are just things that you can kind of look at, for reference.
Alright.
So let's go into the session inputs. And so, for this class, I'm gonna be going through a real world scenario of something that we're gonna launch in q three. We're calling it an outbound or allbound play. And what this is gonna do is going to activate some of the relationships we have with HubSpot reps, VC, and PE firms, and our customer referral network.
That's kind of the allbound play. Those are kind of the warm ones. And we're also gonna do traditional outbound based on LinkedIn and our ICP.
So our goal here is to increase deal volume, and we're gonna be calling it the outbound or all bound plan. So the key stakeholders are the leadership team because this is gonna take a lot of internal resources to go ahead and execute, but we also have what we call a demand capture team, which is kind of a subset of our marketing team. The demand capture team is going to be, running this play because they're the ones that are actually gonna be capturing this demand and hopefully turning it into, you know, sales qualified opportunities.
The timing is q three. So in July, we want two plays launched.
In August, we want five all five plays live. And by September, we wanna do a, an an after action review or an AAR of the impact of it.
The priority is high because deal volume is some was one of our biggest risks. And so our sales goal is increased. We need increased deal volume. It's gonna be high priority. The primary KPIs in our data model, again, align all the stakeholders back in the data model, are v four, which is deals created, and then c r one, which is the lead to MQL conversion rate.
And then the affected teams are marketing, sales, and partnerships.
And so now I know I'm affecting three different teams internally. I need the volume of the entire leadership team, and we've got key objectives for each month of the quarter and KPIs that I that I I know the current state. Right? Because I just ran the analysis for q two, and so I'm gonna be able to easily compare that to q three q, q three and see what the impact is. So Correct.
Real quick. That's fine. Just real quick. You'll before that question, I'm gonna stop right there, and we're gonna go to our first workbook, which is, slide three.
So I told you to think about it in initiative. So go ahead and write that initiative that you have and begin filling out this with your key stakeholders, the timing, and all of these different, factors that this went over. So I would apply this to something that you guys are actually working on or something that you may want to work on. And so please fill this out.
This is an example that I did, something that actually, you'll work on within your own business.
And, obviously, make a copy of this or copy it over to your own copy. Alright, Gil. What you got?
Justin, it's fun. Why in outbound, you have marketing team and demand capture?
We are we are being really nice, and we're not requiring our sales team to run this play on their own.
So we're gonna we're gonna run it on their behalf. The sales team will be creating some of the assets, like the videos, and they'll obviously run the follow-up. But the initial outreach the marketing team is handling.
So you're talking about marketing automation like Clay or any other system will automatically Yes. We're using Clay.
Whoever responds then goes to an SDR or a BDR or whatever, and they will follow-up from there.
Yeah. It goes straight to our AEs if they respond. Yep. So, essentially, we're saying, hey.
Sales team, good news and bad news. Good news is we're gonna run this new plate for you to get you more qualified deals. Bad news is you're gonna have a lot more deals potentially qualify, and some of these in the beginning might be not very qualified, but it's part of the game. It's part of what we're doing.
And so good question, Gail.
A lot of times, this would be left to the sales team to kind of prospect on their own and do outbound.
We're kind of, doing a lot of the outreach on their behalf and then simply passing them the leads.
So it's it's a kind of a inbound motion.
Just not for, Dimangjin. Like, it's not not for awareness and indication based on you know, it's just about outreaching automatically using a tool and then moving it forward. Got it.
Yes. Yeah. And I just I think outbound is kind of the theme that I say because these people aren't going to our website necessarily and raising their hand.
But yeah.
Okay. Does anyone have an example of, does does anyone have an example of this pulled out that they wanna share? I know it's only been a couple minutes, but I'm just curious if someone has, it's something that's this is top of mind. They're thinking through this, and they've already kinda mapped out, at a high level how they're gonna execute this in.
I do like this. Lindsay is telling me how horrible my conversion approach is, and I think that's awesome. I love that you're very passionate about it. So, it's okay if you disagree with me. I really like how you've got, a ton of information on why I'm doing this incorrectly based on your opinion, which I think is great.
Alright. Jennifer's still working on hers. Does anyone have does anyone wanna share? Does anyone have something they're gonna work on with their company, or does everyone go to this course and, get a you know, not not actually take this to your to your day to day, business? Alright, Jennifer. Brian.
That's awesome. Alright. Why don't you share?
Yeah. Do you want me to share the deck or just go through the bullets? So, we're a really small team. We only have four people in our company. So the key stakeholders are the CEO and myself.
Well, first first, what's the initiative name?
Oh, oh, sorry. Yeah. That is the, creating outbound Okay. Leads through the our our b two b.
Okay.
So we don't do any outbound.
Yeah. We don't do any outbound right now.
Okay.
Key stakeholder, me and CEO. Timing is gonna be, I I don't know. I guess, within q three.
What's gonna be happening in July? We're already ten days in. Is that you're gonna be able to execute this in July or is it more of an August time frame?
Yeah. So right now, we have the, free trial already set up and running, and it's linked to our Slack. So, the next step is to create some outbound, like, email templates that we can use as automation for, reaching out to people that have visited the site. So I would say by July thirtieth, my plan is to have the templates created and then to test them hopefully by the first week of August.
Love it. Love it.
Priority. Is this like a low, medium, or high priority in terms of, like, the entire company?
I would it's, priorities are hard here. Everything's high priority right now, but, I'm gonna say high.
Okay. And then I I'm not sure exactly your data model, but what primary KPIs, is this gonna influence?
I would love to see, an increase in qualified leads.
Okay.
And then what teams will be affected? Well, I guess you said you only have four people. That's okay. It could be it could be everyone.
But so, it's just the CTO, the CEO, me, and an engineer. So Okay.
Are there any potential blockers?
Not really, actually. I'm doing everything. I already have the HTML script in our website and stuff.
I I would say that Is there maybe, like, a time, like, time commitment as potential blocker?
Because this probably just take more time than originally planned, or do you feel comfortable with pay? I can focus on this and deprioritize other things.
Yeah. I don't I don't see any blockers in time. I guess the blockers would be, like, what if our traffic is just we don't really have qualified traffic to test things on.
Great. No. I love this. I appreciate you sharing. And we're running a similar play. It looks like Kevin's running a similar play.
It looks like other people are, know about these tools. And so this is why we're doing this. Right? Maybe we can collaborate and help each other out.
Okay. So here here are the inputs, and it sounds like you've obviously met with these stakeholders, and you've kinda outlined the goals of this play. And you've already done a lot of the the groundwork, which which I think is great. Yeah. So the next is once you have that session, what are the outputs?
So what I always like to do is define the problem statement. Like, what problem are we trying to solve? And I'm saying that a a lack of an outbound or outbound motion is influencing the top of the funnel, which is causing us to miss our deal targets. We've missed our deal targets slightly for the last couple of quarters, and I think it's more due to not having this channel open it up than it is to really just hoping and praying that, you know, inbound, you know, increases overnight or over quarter. The root cause has been we haven't had dedicated resources on the marketing team to influence and own this play.
And so part of the reason we haven't really, you know, tried this outbound play is because we haven't had the internal resource to do so.
So we can we have options we can consider.
Right? We can do nothing, and maybe that's what Sergio would do and say, hey. Just just focus on inbound. And we could fully focus on inbound and HubSpot's worst deals.
Right? Those are our two main channels and make eighty percent of our deals. Maybe we do nothing and just double down on them. That's certainly an option.
The second is to really prioritize the marketing team's focus and have two team members make this their main quarter three initiative.
So there's a lot of risk in there. Right? This is the the main initiative for two full time team members. We don't know if this is gonna work, and we haven't done this before.
Right? The third is outsource. Can we contract, like, an outsource lead gen company that will essentially pass us leads? And so you wanna go through all the options considered and not just make the assumption that we're definitely going to do this.
Right? Obviously, we've chosen point two, but we at least have this conversation.
What are some potential risks? We can miss our targets. Right? So we could we could invest but continue to miss targets. And so if we invest a lot of real money and, you know, human capital into this and still miss our targets, that's really gonna hurt the business.
Non ICP. What if we generate a bunch of demand, but they're non ICP ideal customer profile prospects? And so we don't convert those into actual sales opportunities.
Right? Those are both big risks. And if those if both of those risks combine, that's gonna really hurt.
What's the pending decision? We gotta confirm this tech stack and the monthly cost. Clay dot, AI, r b two b, LA growth. I I kinda forget all the tools in it, but, I mean, there is an investment in the in the tool, the tech stack, and there's a monthly cost associated with it. So what are the decisions being made there?
And then decisions made are, what's the initial rollout look like? We're gonna announce this as a company priority so the entire company knows that we're focused on this and that we're gonna go with the phased rollout approach. Phase one is build out two plays as the proof of concept. That's gonna be people that, engage with our LinkedIn posts and, folks that, champions from our customers that have a dot job change.
Phase two, we standardize all or standardize our process for our LinkedIn creator support. And so we have a lot of people that post on LinkedIn. And so if this play works in a small segment on LinkedIn, can we actually, scale it to to work with a lot of our different people? Because there's a lot of folks that, don't maybe wanna engage with a salesperson's, but they might engage with mine, and they might be a good fit to pass off.
Right? There's a lot of different ways to engage here, so maybe we can scale that. And so we've defined in our discovery. We've designed our play and what we have.
We have our session inputs, and now we have our session outputs. And so I want you guys to do the same thing in your workbook is to really think about those outputs.
So that is the next slide, and I've got the example pulled up right here. But, again, you know, take two or three minutes just to think about something you're working on and go through this. Right? It might not be something you're executing today or tomorrow, might be something that you don't even own internally. But if you're not thinking of, problems you're trying to solve within your company and going through these different, these different exercises, it's gonna be really, really hard to really, you know, influence, you know, rev revenue operational you know, really influence your business performance through our rev ops function. Right?
So looks like Kevin and Kevin and Jennifer are talking through their approach, which I like.
Does anyone else besides Jennifer wanna maybe go through you don't have to, you know, go through all of these, but maybe talk through a problem statement or a root cause on some initiative you're working through, this quarter.
Sure.
Alright, Gil. What you got?
Well, I don't have the slides, but I can verbally say it. So, our main problem right now that we see is the customer service or customer success. We haven't focused on that side, no bow tie at all. We haven't with the notion. It's not connected to any of our databases, you know, HubSpot CRM or so we don't have visibility.
And so we have lack of overview of what's going on. We do see churn in enterprise clients recently, and, we're trying to, help them do a better job.
Okay.
And what what are some options you're you're considering there?
Options are, you know, just, so we're finding so just implementing the BowTie. So we're looking for a tech stack to help them do a better job while they automatically syncs with the CRM. So it's not Notion. We're looking for a plan ahead or, zero something. I forgot the the platform name.
Turn Zero.
Zero or, PlanHat. Yep. Which would help us automated this. What else?
So so what are some, what are some pending decisions just to thinking about about banking? It sounds like you haven't quite decided if you're to go with it.
So or so it's what we had a meeting. We made this discussion. We discussed about a few opportunities. I'm a CRO, so I have a few teams.
So my sales team's gonna focus on one thing. I'm focusing on on three angles. Marketing, when you fix all my marketing, sign in sales, sign in CS. So the biggest problem for me is the CS for now because we have zero visibility there.
And and the issue that we see is we do see leakage. So we see retention rate in in our dropping a bit.
And, Okay.
Okay. But but what's the next step here? You said, hey.
We're thinking about looking at churn zero or or plan hat, but, you know, we're gonna close.
So we'll talk about the MASA, but we're gonna close, the the the tech stack for the CS. Then we're gonna implement it with our BI team, our you know, with our rev ops team and start implementing all of it.
Just a process.
This is great. I mean, this is a huge undertaking. Right? Yo's a CRO. He's got three teams over him, and he's trying to implement a CS tool to help with the retention. I don't know why it says cousin causing.
I've implemented churn zero, and it was I mean, it was a big, big, undertaking.
You know? My CRO wanted it done in ninety days, and I said it it could be done correct in a hundred and twenty or four or five months, or it could be done improperly in three months. And because I didn't have this discovery session, because I didn't have project plan like I'm gonna show you, I was forced to get it done by March thirty first, and it was kind of a disaster. Right?
I didn't have these tools. I did not organize this at the time like this. And while it wasn't I didn't do a horrible job. It did not have the impact as needed because we accelerated the timeline based on this arbitrary deadline that didn't actually exist.
And implementing and adopting a new full tool that implements their CRM is very, very time consuming. So, great for you, Gil. It's a huge business decision, and I'm glad you got a team to to work on.
No. Good. On Another major problem statement was the, misalignment between the sales, the marketing. For sure. Yes. Right?
So if sales are closing deals and then there's misalignment between the head off to customer success and what's going on and when renewal times are coming or or upgrade with full sales, we really need we we really need to do a system to do this, Awesome.
Well, maybe, Gil, you can give your team some of these templates in this workbook and have them fill it out so that you guys are aligned on this stuff. I appreciate you sharing. You're welcome. Okay.
So, you know, do you guys have a standardized discovery process from your new company issues? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. You can certainly use this one if you think it's helpful. Alright.
So what's phase two? We just talked about discovery for a bunch. The build phase is what everyone tends to focus on during the build phase. You wanna map out your proposed process.
Right? We talked about, mapping on Miro and list all the assets you need to build within the CRM or applicable system. Maybe in this case, it's churn zero or play that whatever it is. You will also need to build any training content needed for the next phase.
So the timing of the build phase will depend on the complexity involved. Right? For something like a churn zero or, like, a plain hat rollout, this might be two or three months of building to customize it and get it ready. For a lot of other things, it might be two weeks to to a month.
It really depends on that. But the milestones of the build phase are map out the full process. You need to map out the process, especially if you're rolling out a new tool in your tech stack. You need to create the list of assets to be built.
Everyone just creates a random list now to start on the nomenclature for all these assets. Make sure they have a clear nomenclature. What is the folder structure so that when you put this into your CRM, it's actually organized. Right?
And sign it in assign these things out internally or build it yourself depending on, you know, if you have the skills to do so, and then determine automations or reporting needed. So a lot of these automations won't be running. The reporting will be blank, but determine what exactly you need to build. And don't just think about the specific assets maybe in your CRM or whatever it is.
Think about mapping it out so that you can align with exactly what you're solving for automation reporting all of these things.
So once you go to I'm not gonna focus on the build phase because it drastically changes based on the project you're looking at, but something that is pretty common is the deliver phase.
So the deliver phase, you'll present the build phase's assets to the key stakeholders of the project. And then once the stakeholders approve, train and roll out the new process to the effective teams.
Most of the time, maybe all of the time, you should deliver a mix of training materials to the team during this go live time. What I always see is that people just say it's done. We finally you created the last whatever and immediately train it train the team instead of building in time to actually build the training assets properly.
So you need to QA test the full build.
So many people just assume everything they do works. And as soon as they click the workflows, they do it. And people on my team, they say, hey. I've gotten this complete, and I'm saying, prove prove me you tested this. Right? There's a lot of things, especially complex builds that can go, haywire very quickly.
Schedule a proof of concept meeting with your key stakeholders. Don't immediately roll this out to the team. Take the key stakeholders and schedule a proof of concept. It doesn't have to be with all of them, but at least a couple of them. Show them what you're thinking so hope you missed anything.
You wanna gather and implement feedback. This is the iterate part of this. Right? Don't just throw something out if there's some glaring thing you're missing and didn't think about.
Then there's a go live training with the team. Use those adopt active adoption techniques that we talked about two weeks ago, and then define the adoption period and set expectations.
Right? So this is not done. There's just a go live training.
We're gonna use active adoption techniques and define the adoption period to say, hey. Over the next thirty days, we'll be monitoring this and ensuring everyone understands the process. If you forget it, here's who you reach out to, if you need assistance.
So the deliver phase, I think it's underutilized. People will send out a Slack message and assume that everything's immediately absorbed and no one will ever forget. Right? We talked about, active adoption techniques and really focus on the deliver phase because, it's been super important to make a good person impression.
So here are some best practices that I do for the deliver phase. You wanna q test QA test the full flow several times.
So things always seem to break when trying to recreate a scenario live. Place someone else in the chat. Tell me that you've presented something to your internal team or to a customer, and you've tried this on your own and you do it live on a Zoom and it just doesn't work. The automation doesn't fire. The report doesn't show up. Whatever it is, someone out there must this must have happened to them because this happened to me, like, five times when you've tried it once to seem to work two weeks ago, then you do it live on the call and it doesn't work. Test it several times.
Create a screen recording in a Loom video. This is part of having multiple training assets.
While you're doing one of the QA tests, record your screen and narrate the full process.
Why do you do that? Well, one, people are visual RevPartners. Having a video is super helpful. But as a bonus, you can export the transcript from a tool like Loom. You can upload it to chat GPT, and you can have it summarize a step by step process for internal documentation.
So in, like, ten or fifteen minutes, I've just QA tested my own flow. I've narrated it, and I've reported my screen, and I've created a step by step internal documentation.
Right? That's three things that to do. I'm gonna do it live. I'm gonna have a Loom video, and I'm gonna have internal documentation for it.
Go to the stakeholder QA or hold make sure a stakeholder also does quality assurance. So ask one or two stakeholders to watch your Loom video and recreate the process.
You know? Hey, Ricky. Just watch this five minute video and recreate it exactly in the CRM. Does that make sense to you? Did I miss anything? Is it confusing?
Create a simple report that confirms that they followed the process.
If you complete this properly, this report, this test report, whatever you wanna call it, is gonna have a record appear.
How does someone know they did this correctly if they just click save at the end and nothing happens? If they can actually validate that they did something correctly via a report, which is pretty easy to set up, they have instant, gratification that they did this correctly.
Have your live training. Right? During the live training, have one person recreate the scenario live on the call. Right? I just asked, Gil and Jennifer to recreate the scenario. It's a little bit different. But live on the call, tell me what you're walking, walking through.
Then have each attendee create a test contact and can and confirm completion based on the report. And so this might not apply to the initial that you're doing. But if I was Gil and I was implementing, like, the customer success platform, I would have them all create a test deal, market closed one, have it sync to the customer success platform, have them run through the full onboarding process, and then have a report in the customer success system that says, you know, onboarding is completed, and every single customer success person on my team will have a test record that confirms that they completed it.
Right? If you have ten people and only nine show up on that report, you know the exact person to go and say, hey. You might not have followed the instructions correctly. Right?
How can you create one asset that allows you to scale this for five people or fifty people?
CRM assets. Help your team out. Precreate CRM views, report, or a list that help keep the new process top of mind.
If you just send out a Slack message, we even have a live Zoom call, they're gonna go back to where they're comfortable in their CRM, but that's what they're using for this. If you don't prepopulate views and say, hey. This new report on your dashboard, check it once a day.
If there's, if there's records on it, you're doing something incorrectly.
Right? Help them out and and restructure so that they actually keep this top of mind. And then recaps. Send out a recap email. Send out another Slack message with all the relevant assets included. This would be the call recording, the Boom videos, any kind of reports, reviews, and internal documentation.
Right? This is a lot of work, guys. Right? I create a lot of internal documentation for our team, and people always say, why can't you guys get this done in two or three weeks? And I say it takes two or three months because everyone thinks the build phase is all it is.
This is only the second phase. I need to spend almost as much time delivering this properly so that I have a chance to actually measure this and get it adopted.
Malcolm, you got a question?
Yeah. Thanks.
I'm curious. You mentioned, like, obviously, how much effort and input it takes to build the documentation.
I'm not sure if it was here or somewhere else, but I heard a pretty troubling stat that most enablement material is never actually consumed. And you may get to this, but I'm curious if you have a process by which you're actually ensuring the documentation you create is being utilized.
And then, like, to some degree, measuring the effectiveness of the documentation itself, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it it is sad, but I I do agree with that statement.
So having this, like, report that confirms the process is being followed with, like, a record, that kinda helps that they actually know what they're doing. So having, like, a quiz or some kind of test or some kind of validation, I really like having that because it's very clear who has focused on it and who hasn't.
And part of the documentation process for me is ensuring that myself has, like, all my ducks in a row, and I'm thinking through things clearly. And so part of after creating the documentation is actually making sure I'm aligned and things are there. And so people don't read the documentation. I get it. People you guys are all on your you guys are probably all on your other screen looking at your own internal Slack, and I totally get it too. And so the best way that I've seen is that if I create some of these adoption reports, which I'm about to get into, and I just tell their manager and say, hey.
You know, Malcolm hasn't done any of this stuff. This report clearly shows he did not read the documentation, and he has not done it. You go he he works on your team. You go fix it.
And so I try to make it very clear and obvious if they have not read the documentation or following the process. And then as the manager's job or or even if it's the manager, escalate it above them and say, you go solve it because this is clearly showing they did not review the documentation to our standard. So, you know, that's why it's it sounds kinda dumb, but sending out a five or ten question, like, survey or task or even asking them to fill out a survey, giving feedback. Something that takes them five or ten minutes.
We'll at least kind of begin the accountability part on their side. But, you know, you're right, Malcolm. And it it is difficult, and you spend a lot of time on it. And it's sad.
And trust me, I've written a hundred thousand words, and I don't know how many people have have have read them. But the people that have read them and it's made an impact on them, it's it's kind of enough for me. You got a question.
I don't wanna derail the conversation. I'm just curious one more thing. Like, because I agree with a lot of what you said about the survey and kind of ensuring. Right? What are your thoughts on, like, a certification process as part of, like, a larger enablement project? Right?
Like, we're we're coming out with a new feature, so we wanna make sure everyone understands how to demo this, for example, and, like, we need you to record a video of you doing it, and then we're gonna create you doing it.
Is that valuable?
Yeah. Hundred percent. So for our sales team, I I I we make them record a video explaining how we operate as a company. Because if I'm not comfortable with their responses, then I don't want them talking to prospects about it.
Yeah. So we do that same thing. And if you can't record a three minute Loom video on this new feature, you you're not getting any leads. And so, yeah, I definitely do that.
Lee, you've got you've got something?
I I do. And this is a hot button for me because I've been in enablement for a long time.
I firmly believe that that, salespeople should be largely left alone and only given hints as to where to find stuff that might be useful to them. And then I coach them or we coach them or the organization coaches them. If you're going into a meeting with a customer that has this set of needs, this is a place where you can find this resource.
Personally, I find that certification is, not particularly useful because it you know, you you can't learn to ride a bicycle by watching a YouTube video and then taking a test. You learn to ride a bicycle by falling off and and and getting on and getting some coaching, getting some support. And so, and I've lived in large organizations where we've done a lot of certification, and it's a check off item. It is it is it does not create an enhanced ability to sell.
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. I think, the experience that I live in has been more about, like, process adoption in the CRM, updating certain records where you're talking about, like, selling different things. So I think depending on what you're focusing on, definitely different approaches, definitely take shape.
And so, you've got a lot more experience in, like, in that end. And so I would just you're probably the expert there. And so from my from my reference, it's more, you know, these are these are new properties on the deal record you need to update. Can I confirm that you know how to click the buttons?
Whereas you're getting into a little bit more of a nuance, which I agree. It's it's hard to certify and riding a bike by by having them fill out a survey. I totally agree.
Brian, from a from a selling process standpoint, absolutely.
You you you do wanna make sure that people follow the process. Otherwise, you're you're trying to manage chaos.
Hundred percent. Hundred percent.
Yeah. Appreciate that, comment, Lee. Okay. Phase four. Right? So we've got the we delivered it.
Now how are we gonna measure it? Right? This is where rev ops really comes into play. How do you guys how do we keep our jobs and actually say that we're impacting business performance?
So the measure phase helps align what success looks like for the project. What does success look like? It's not I'm not gonna initially create a hundred deals from this outbound motion, but connect create five. Would that be successful?
This will include key reports that show the before and after impact of this initiative. Everyone forgets to create the before. Everyone claims this is way better than it was before. No one documents the before.
I documented every quarter on my data model chart and my secondary KPIs.
Right? Nobody has any kind of confusion on what our our stuff was before. Right? And so if you wanted to do that, take a screenshot, whatever it is, look at the before and then look at the after.
This is also the time to confirm benchmarks and goals of the impacted metrics and the timing of tracking milestones. How long are we gonna wait before we feel like the data is, robust enough to give us some insights?
And finally, if the reporting hasn't been built yet, this is the time to do so. So the measure phase is another is another one that's, primarily overlooked, I feel like. And the reason is because there's a lot of things you can measure. These are all different things that you can define or measure within this phase. A lot of people look at primary KPIs influenced.
Right? Did our retention rate increase, or did we have new new deals, deals created?
But what were the secondary KPIs used to enhance this visibility?
What are the process specific KPIs that that fall that fall into this? That what that what is the stuff that makes up these primary and secondary KPIs? What are some adoption reporting to ensure that the process or the initiatives have been reporting? And then what are the benchmarks and goals? What are we going after? If if we have to make them up, just make them up and make your best guess, but we need to have some skin in the game and kind of a scoreboard in how we're tracking.
And so for my allbound motion or outbound motion, these are all the things that I wanna measure.
On the left hand side, we've got our primary KPIs, our secondary KPIs, our process specific KPIs, and our adoption reporting.
On the right hand side, we have a goal for every single one of these.
I know what I'm tracking. I know where I'm tracking it, and I know what I'm tracking it against.
So primary KPIs. How many MQLs do I wanna generate, and how many deals do I wanna create? So fifty MQLs, twenty deals to create.
What do I want my lead to MQL conversion rate?
Fifteen percent. What do I want my MQL to SQL conversion rate? Fifty percent. Right? We've already set up the tracking for volume and conversion metrics based on our data model, based on our primary KPIs.
All of this is already set up. I'm setting up specific goals. I'm gonna filter by this new deal source, the outbound source, or whatever, you know, campaign we wanna run with it, and then here are the new primary KPIs.
What are the secondary KPIs? Right now, we have no source tracking for this, and we don't have marketing campaigns set up because we haven't run this play before.
So what is my goal to do in the next ninety days? I just want ninety percent of new contacts generated to be associated to a campaign, and I want ninety percent of new contacts to have the correct source.
I am not going for a hundred percent. People might disagree and say, you know, you're dumb for not shooting for a hundred percent.
I'm just trying to get to ninety percent. That's gonna give me enough signal to see if I've done things correctly.
Getting from zero to ninety percent takes the same amount of effort as getting from ninety to a hundred percent in my opinion. So I aim for ninety. What's reasonable?
What are some process specific KPIs? We're sending out an outbound messaging.
What should our email open rate be? Twenty percent twenty two percent email open rate. And then what are adoption reporting?
How many MQLs do we have without a campaign or source? I just want less than five. I don't want zero. I just want less than five.
How many new MQLs without activity? I do want zero there. Right? They should have activity because these are, you know, warm leads that were being passed there.
And then how many MQLs do I want with an incorrect lead status? I just want less than five.
Right? And so all of this is aligned in the key stakeholders. What does the exec team care about?
These. What does my project team, my demand capture team care about? The red ops team, secondary KPIs. What does the demand capture team care about?
This email open rate. What does the sales manager that we're passing these new leads care about? These adoption ones. I'm taking all of the stakeholders that I've identified and have specific metrics for each.
I'm not tracking a hundred things, but I am tracking ten.
Right? And so what does process, adoption reporting look like? I use this all the time. I create tons of reports and dashboards and then just delete them, once once everything's adopted, whatever.
Create reporting that makes the job as a manager easier.
Right? Managers' jobs are tough. Sales users fail people. Everyone's job is difficult.
Help make that job easier. Do you wanna follow-up with every single sales rep that's not following the process, or would you rather the manager? If you'd rather the manager, make his or her job easier.
So all I say is if the report shows a result, part of the process is not being followed.
If it's blank, the process is being followed. So we have a hundred deals out there. If ten pop up on this report and we know the deal owner, I know exactly who's not following the process, and I can coach them on.
Right? If your name's on the list, you're doing a great job. Just keep doing what you're doing.
The goal of this is to create one organized place within the CRM each day or week to confirm a process adoption is happening.
It's way it's so easy to decipher who or what is not following the process so training can't infer. Right? These are example ones we have in our own CRM. Deals with no step, no next step.
We've got these are stage zero deals. No next step. I know exactly I'm not gonna show their names. I know exactly who these are, and it's very easy.
You know? Hey, Matt. Go out at the next steps here. Here are the two two deals.
Deals in current stage more than ten days. You know? Where are the deal stage here, and do we need to move those forward?
These reports are very easy, but tell the manager exactly what reports to look at and what action to do.
Tell each sales user or whatever it is what to look at and what action to do. If someone sees this report and they don't know exactly what to do, it's not gonna be helpful.
Tell them it's because you have no next steps.
Okay. Let's, let's talk about adoption reporting or not adoption reporting specifically, but reporting in general. I'm gonna go back to the workbook in a second. But, has anyone on the call ever built, adoption reporting?
People have called it, like, in your room reporting or bad behavior reporting that is more focused on process adherence than results. I've had mixed results on this. I've had people I've had I built out all these reports, and no one cares about that. The managers didn't care about it, and they just it's just a disaster.
I've seen this really, really, help with new processes here. So who's, who's built this out? And while we're doing that, let's go ahead and fill out slide eight in your workbook.
So this one is a little bit more robust, and so you might not have a ton of time to go through this. But here's my example. So, again, we're using the same initiative that you discussed from earlier on. We've defined the discovery, and let's go let's go through and think about what you're trying to measure.
Right?
And so up here where's my, work here?
Oh, here's my copy.
Alright. So Jennifer said the KPIs are increasing qualified leads, but I would challenge you to try to take qualified leads as maybe one of the primary KPI goals, but add in some of these secondary ones or process specific or adoption specific so that you can really track all of this and make sure it's success or not.
Okay.
Yeah. I'm not I'm not saying you specifically to call you out. I'm just saying all all all of you out there, if you thought about one, dive deeper. Something else that I think just makes sense is that if you just track one thing and you miss it, maybe I hit forty deals instead of fifty.
Kinda seems like I'm a failure. But if I've hit seven out of the ten types of goals, I could at least put a use case here. Like, hey. We didn't generate all the deals, but, man, our adoption was key or or we killed the adoption.
Our open right hit. We've got all the data within our CRM. At least we can make a decision now, and all the process stuff is correct. We we actually give it a good shot.
And so remember that tying yourself to revenue can be really, really difficult. Like, how do you know if these deals are gonna be creative? How do you know that Lee's doing a a good job at enablement and make sure these these sales reps know what they're selling and and actually converting these deals? Right?
That's that's a little bit harder to influence. But I can definitely influence all of this stuff and really, you know, share to my to my executive team that I've got a rock rock solid process in place.
Alright. Let's keep going because we're already past the the hour.
Okay. The final phase is the adoption phase. We just went through map measure. I'm not gonna focus here because we obviously had a whole session on it.
But the adoption phase is right up to the initial go live, and it's a set period where all key stakeholders are laser focused on the adoption of a new process. Obviously, I talked two weeks ago. Adoption is forever. We should treat it like adopting a a new puppy, But you still need an adoption period in the beginning to to figure out what you need to iterate on and what you need to change.
And if you're good to go to say that, you know, we've achieved an objective here. Obviously, this can't last for a year. You need to have a set period to see when you can kind of give it a thumbs up and say, hey. We had success here.
Each stakeholder has a role to play here. That's why in rev ops, set up your your, your sales managers, your enablement managers, your marketing folks. Set them up for success with some of these key places to look at so that they know exactly what their role is in in influencing this adoption.
And make sure that you're you're all aligned in achieving the outcome that you stated in the discovery process. Right? Don't get to the final stage and forget about all the stuff you did in discovery. Go back and and, look at that stuff to see if you've actually, achieved what you set up on.
And I I know we've all gotten midway through a project, and it totally changed midway through. It's really good to look back at the discovery to say, hey. Did we get it right? Or should we have planned a little bit differently for next time?
So the key milestones are about defining the adoption period, assigning the stakeholders ownership of items they can influence, scheduling weekly check ins. These don't have to be thirty minute meetings, but, at minimum, even like a a message just just to schedule a check-in and say, hey. Are you reviewing, you know, the dashboards? How are we tracking?
How many MQLs did we create? What was our open rate for the last email? You know, schedule these check ins. And, of course, practice, the active adoption techniques using a credit framework, which is celebrating, reminding, enforcing, defining, inspecting, and training.
So all the details for the credit framework are in the previous deck, but you really do wanna practice those active adoption techniques.
Nazin, he built a cleaner room dashboard, and and the executive leadership team loved it. Yeah. No. See, some of that stuff is really smart. You know? Getting buy in from the executives by saying, hey. If this if this dashboard is empty, then you can sleep well at night knowing all the stuff that we built out on the RevOps side is implemented correctly.
Alright. So what is the role of RevOps and project success? Not all of us, you know, create these projects or own the full part of it or really are the one driving it. But what can your what can your role be in every single one of these?
You can always assist in defining the problem statement and tie the objective back to the data model. If you can tie all your initiatives back to your data model and align the team, that's super, super important. If you can define the problem statement as it relates to your CRM specifically, you can really gain alignment there too.
You can also ensure all five phases of our project are completed and happen in an applicable work. Someone doesn't wanna wanna do the adoption phase, remind them the importance of it and remind them the role they wanna play. If someone has only thought of one metric they wanna measure, remind them of the importance of really having robust robust measurements to define the success of this.
You wanna build an initial project plan and keep it up to date in an easy to find location.
You might not be actually building the plan, but I think, hey. If some people aren't as good at building natural project plan, you can assist them with it.
Collaborate these weekly check ins. Be asked to be in these meetings even if you're just a fly on the wall. Highlight key data that you're seeing. You know, highlight progress, highlight setbacks, over communicate your progress and blockers to the leadership team, and then publicly celebrate the successes and achievements made.
Right? Like, you know, have fun. You know? I know process adoption isn't, you know, always the best, you know, part of your job sometimes.
But if things go well, publicly celebrate the success. Hey. Our first deal was generated from this new out all about play. Hey.
This email got a thirty percent open rate. You know, help celebrate the success publicly and be involved. Be an advocate of all these things you're working on.
And this outbound all bound play for my company internally, I'm not actually the main driver of it, but I will be doing all six of these things to support the success of it.
Okay. So we've got our project defined, and and we've got all the five phases. But let's talk about change management. This is a kind of a, I don't know, a buzzword or a a word that's used a bunch, and I just wanna walk through potentially what it means and how do we ensure the project has success. So a lot of people maybe aren't familiar with, you know, the five phases of Robtop projects that I defined, but a lot of people are familiar with change management and especially with executives. If they say, hey. You're good at change management.
That's certainly something that you can, be proud of. So what is change management?
Right? Thanks to Google, I got this definition, and it's kind of very vague and very robust at the same time. So it says it's a structured approach to transition individuals and teams from a current state to a desired future state. Right?
We talked about the measure phase. Current reporting, what's the future reporting look like? We talked about the discovery phase. What's the current problem statement?
What are the estimated decisions made?
It involves applying methods and strategies to manage the people side of change and achieve the required business outcomes. Managing the people side is very difficult. That's why we have a full adoption phase. That's why we spend so much on the deliver phase of it.
The goal of change management is to maximize the benefits and minimize the negative impacts of the change by addressing the human aspects and ensuring stakeholder buy in. How do we get stakeholder buy in and engagement?
Thread them into the discovery process.
Align with what success looks like, over communicate updates, celebrate wins, show them the reporting.
All of these change management pieces all relate to the five phases of rev ops. We just whatever. Rev ops projects.
So what are change management themes? And I do have a template for you guys, so don't worry. But we've got key stakeholders.
We've got a communication plan. We've got supporting resources.
We got implementation and monitoring. We've got evaluation and follow-up, and we got celebration and recognition. Right? There's six different themes just for change management because it's so difficult to get everyone aligned on a team working with humans. Right? So some of these require more than others. But if you look at all of these holistically, you will be successful in managing that change.
So what are some common mistakes made during change management initiatives? What have what have what have, either mistakes that you've seen or mistakes that you've done specifically where, the people side of things really got out of whack, and even though you thought you planned properly and built everything correctly, you just did not hit the intended goal because of, you know, some kind of the the people challenges.
Moving too quickly, not explaining why. Yes. Why why should I care? How does this impact me?
Why are we doing this? Having a clear vision. Yep. Moving too quickly. I totally agree.
There's a lot of internal pressure a lot of times to move too quickly. That's really, really hard to, like, not not getting enough leadership buy in, not communicating enough, acting before buy in, not scoping the project.
A lot of this stuff is on the discovery side. What about on the adoption side?
Right?
You know, adoption is not really around, you know, explaining the why or moving too fast or having the vision.
It's always worked my way. Yep. Not scoping it. So the the people side is really the discovery side, getting that stuff in there, but also delivery making that good first impression and then also the adoption phase there. Not following up enough after rollout, not devoting enough time for adoption. Yeah.
Yeah. A, people might not agree with me here, but something that I say is if you expect a salesperson to follow-up with the prospect five times, why shouldn't you expect yourself as a rep ops person to follow-up with with for five times to, for a new process? So if I want you to follow-up every lead I give you at least five times, but I wanna roll out a new process to you and only tell you once, Right? Shouldn't I veto on you five times?
It's kind of annoying, but that's kinda what I think about too. Here's a graphic that I thought was interesting. I I did not make it. I the source is down here if you wanna look at it. But how do you measure change success?
Right? Did you achieve what you intended?
Right? What is the adoption percentage? What is performance percentage? Right? Are we tracking more robust metrics on each side? What is the complete did you complete the implementation?
Right? What was the effectiveness of the change supports? And then, finally, are your stakeholders satisfied?
If you got the buy in, are they actually satisfied? Right? Are they satisfied? Was there agreement?
Is there trust in leadership? All of these things. I think this graphic really helps frame all the things you need to think. Alright.
Let's go through some template stuff.
So here is a change management template that I've used, And I think it's really interesting just to help kind of organize all of these things because, I mean, even in a small organization, there's you're affecting so many different people that at least thinking these things through really helps frame your kinda role in this. And so I've got the template that you guys can obviously I'll I'll just drop it in here. You can, certainly it's view only. You can certainly copy it, make yourself a copy, but each color defines a different part of the change management phase.
So we've got, like, our our primary stakeholders, and we have our communication plan. A lot of you said lack of communication. What's the key message you're delivering? What's the channel you're delivering at?
What's the frequency or the timing? And who are the responsible parties?
Right? People just say, hey. We're gonna over communicate. Well, be very clear about that here.
What are the support and resources you're giving people? Right? Is it an FAQ? Is it a user guide?
Is it a Loom video? Is it a live, Zoom call? Is it one on one coaching? What are the support restrictions?
What are the channels to ask for support? What are their roles and responsibilities for support staff? So, like, what is my role in supporting these people? Who do they escalate to if there's some issues?
And how do you evaluate the support effectiveness?
Right? So this gets really granular, but I really like it because a lot of times, I'll just say, hey. If you need me, just reach out for me. Reach out to me. Well, I didn't clearly articulate exactly what where the resources were as Lee said. Hey. Let's just point them in the right direction.
I didn't tell them my preferred channel for support.
I didn't have someone I could escalate to. I didn't have any idea how to see if I was effective or not. Initially forces you to kinda think through this at a little deeper level. Talking through implementation and training, what's the training objective?
What's the content and materials? What are the methods? What's the schedule? Who is the trainer? And what are the monitoring tools and techniques? So, again, this might not apply to every project you have, but you'd rather have more inputs here that you could use, than not enough.
There's gonna be an evaluation of follow-up. Is there a feedback mechanism? So this is certainly, you know, metrics within your CRM. How do I know that my outbound play work while more deals were created?
But also surveys. Does the sales team feel like, they were supported enough? They feel like the messaging was good. They feel like the lead quality was good.
What was their engagement like?
Of course, reporting and analysis. And then what are some continuous improvement actions? How do we continue this? Right? This is a big initiative in q three. What are we gonna do to follow-up in q four?
And then, finally, celebration and recognition. This one I think is, again, underutilized, but I think it's so, so important. What's our user adoption rate?
What's our usage rate over time? What are some post implementation successes?
What's some user feedback or test testimonials? What's some customer impact internal or external?
And so all of these things really go into effective change management.
And if you look at my example here, I've got two scenarios that I've showed for you guys that you can look, when you guys want, but I've got my allbound or outbound plan.
So right now, we're in the build phase of that. I've got, you know, who's responsible. I I filled all of this out so you guys can see kind of what how I think about this stuff and really think think through it. So this is all specific to my team.
So if something goes wrong, we're gonna escalate to our CEO because this is a big play that he wants to do. Who's who's the main channel for support? That's my team, the Playbooks team. What are the support resources?
We have a Miro board. We have a user guide. We have a creative cohort resources.
What are some of the tools? We've got Play dot, you know, AI, some of the other tools that people said they're familiar with, plus the trading schedule. So I'm not gonna go through all of this stuff, but you can see some of these examples. And in the workbook, you'll see that I've got the template right here.
You can just click on it and, duplicate. And if you want to kind of follow the workbook, you can just drop a screenshot in here to go through it. So I know I've only got ten minutes left. I know I just kind of briefly went on this.
I think a lot of it's self explanatory, especially with the example here. You guys should be able to apply this to whatever you're working on. Now that I'm looking at this, I might have messed this up and deleted a column. So if you need to if you need to edit your own, you can certainly do that there.
Do you see Christina's got a question. Do you see this template as more useful for seeing change management across all initiatives in a certain period or set a project by project basis?
Yeah. I mean, if you've if you've a lot of things that roll up into a larger initiative, I certainly think you can combine them together. These both of these projects or epics are, like, three to four month from beginning to end just to kinda get the initial results, and so I thought they could have their own. But if you have, a lot of smaller things that are adding up to something that's a little bit bigger, I would definitely combine them. If I'm building, like, a couple of reports, I'm not gonna do a whole change management plan, but these two things, affect at least forty percent of our company. And so I felt like it would it made sense.
Okay.
So let's continue on and figure out we've got the five phases of our project. We've got our change management template to think through how we're gonna get change management.
Sorry. This is the wrong.
And so let's look at the synergies between the two. Right? We talked about the discovery phase that aligns to the outline in project, the key stakeholders, and the execution strategy of the change management template.
The build phase is ensuring all the assets required in the subsequent phases. Deliver, measure, adopt are included in the bills phase.
Delivery is all about confirming your communication plan and training implementation schedule, which are two big sections of the change management strategy.
The measure phase is obviously determining the evaluation, but also the follow-up plan to collect qualitative and quantitative information.
In the adoption phase, a big part of it is obviously communicating the support resources and celebrating and recognizing the plan. And so I think these actually play together really, really well. Change management is really about the human element, whereas these five phases are kinda about the end to end project management.
Okay. So we've got the five phases. We've got the change management thing filled out. How do we actually execute it?
So how do we tie it together with a project plan? So here's how I think about creating a project plan timeline because this is kind of the hardest part to make sure you're delivering things on time.
You wanna highlight each phase with specific tasks within it. If you're gonna complete all five phases, you need to have tasks within each all all five phases. Each task has to have an owner and a due date. Doesn't have an owner, it's not gonna get done and certainly not on time if it doesn't have a due date.
Just add an owner and a due date. One person needs to be the owner of this or accountable for it. They can collaborate, but they need to be the owner of it. The way that I build up my project plans is that I choose an initial go live date or estimate it.
So let's just say the first first outbound plan will be July thirty first or whatever it is. I plan the discovery in the build phases backwards from there. So I start with the go live date, figure out, you know, how long it might build or build and then figure out how long the discoveries.
Right? So I need two weeks for discovery and four weeks for build. I need to make sure that the go live dates at least six weeks from now.
The the full deliver phase is right around the go live date. Maybe this is a week ish because you're gonna have training on Thursday, but you gotta prepare for it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So we've got a go live date in here. Then you've got the adoption phase starts right after the go live date, and then the measure phase happens slightly afterwards to see, you know, because you need data to collect before you go into that. So I start with the go live date estimated one, then I do my build in discovery, and then I start with the go live date and plan four for my adoption period and my measure phases.
So let's just use this as an example and say the go live July thirty first. Adoption's gonna be August and September, and I'm gonna begin measuring on September first. I'm gonna give it thirty days of pure adoption to get enough data to feel like I can measure something and make an impact. Now I can start measuring the process type things to make sure the data is coming in correctly, But some of those primary or secondary KPIs, I'm gonna give it at least thirty days before I measure those and begin to look at insights to those.
And so that's kinda how I think about, you know, building out the project plan. And what that looks like is this. And so I could could've fit it all in one screenshot, but I've got six tasks in my discovery phase. Got five tasks in my build phase, and a couple of these have subtasks.
I've got four in my measure phase. This particular one's really about QA unit. I've got my deliver. So I've got pre go live, go live, and post go live.
This is a really big process change. And then I've got the adoption period. What are the processes, the integration, whatever the whatever it is? Like, what's the final thing that we can do?
Right?
So if you think about each each phase and you start mapping out each of these and all of these will have an owner and a due date, now you can finally align your team on exactly what you're doing. So that this is kind of the end. We we use ClickUp internally on what we use, but what tools do you guys use? Because this to me is kind of the end, phase of project scoping. Doesn't matter how much discovery you did if you haven't been able to outline the entire project plan in a way that makes sense to this. And now everyone can see the progress on this and is aligned to this.
Jira, Monday dot com, Asana, Notion, Notion. So no one uses ClickUp. I like ClickUp. I think it's pretty robust. But, yeah, all of those tools, I think, are great.
Look. Like, our CEO doesn't really look at ClickUp very often. That's fine. I send them screenshots.
You know? It's not a big deal. I tell him the progress, and he knows that if a lot of these are blue and green, it means we're halfway through this phase, and we're working towards it. And so, over communicating those updates, if you have this, especially if you've got cross functional people that need to own different different things, that is that is super important.
So I'm sure all of you. Right?
You have you started q three. You're thinking about some projects you're working on. If you just start mapping them out through the five phases, you've got you've got them right there in the deck. If you map out exactly what you have, define your KPIs, and fill out these these project, change management templates and project plans, I promise you're gonna be more successful at it because all of these things that we say around lack of communication, no stakeholder buy in, no alignment, this really does clear all of it up.
How can you present a plan this robust and have people say, I don't know what's going on? Right? You've covered every single angle. You've got visual learners.
You've got metrics people. You've got people people, and you've got project management people. Right? We've colored all of these boxes, and if you start executing and over communicating, you will be successful.
So I can take some questions out if you guys have questions. That's all I got for session five around project management and change and change, project scoping and change management. I know it's kind of a nebulous topic. Next week, we're gonna dive into more metrics and data driven things and kinda how we take these projects and actually look at their impact and how we actually, look at how we're driving business performance.
But I hope this at least gives you a framework and structure to really think through some of these templates and see how it applies to the things that you guys are all working on. Because even if you're not in rev ops, you definitely are working on different, internal, you know, initiative and projects that are truly important to the business. So once again, thanks everyone for joining. And if anyone has any questions, I do have a couple more minutes.
Yeah. We can open the floor. If you'd like to come off of mute, please feel free at this time.
For those of you that are jumping off, thank you for being here. I did share the feedback link in the chat, so please take a moment, share your thoughts. It's very beneficial for us at Pavilion and I know also for Brian for his future iterations of this course. But in the meantime, for those of you, I will see you next week, but we'll stick around to see if anyone has any thoughts. Hey, Nat.
Hi.
Thank you so much, Brian, as always.
This is a really tactical question, but I noticed that you, when you're doing this outbound play, you have, everyone in your email tool until a deal is created, and then you push them into HubSpot. And so I just wanted to confirm that, these folks are not in HubSpot beforehand and also check what email tool you use.
I don't I don't quite know.
I don't know exactly. So I think this is the play. I mean, we're using our b two b Clay, SendSpark, and log growth machine. And I believe for especially, like, website visitors, they will not be in HubSpot until they reply to something because then we know kinda who they are. So it looks like if they're interested, we push them to HubSpot. If they're not interested, we just end with no further action.
Okay.
So all of the tracking around engagements with, website visits and engagement with the emails are going to be tracked in your email tool instead of HubSpot?
I think it will to start out with, but I would prefer to get this in HubSpot as quickly as possible. And so I'd probably as soon as we identify who the person is, I'd probably push them into HubSpot and tag them appropriately just to have that, like, extra layer of attribution up funnel. But, rather than derail them with this right now, I'm gonna let them do a couple pilots and then figure out how to reverse engineer it back in HubSpot.
Okay.
That's a good example of this is a good example of something that I'm not really owning, and I'm nervous that we're gonna do it in a spreadsheet and not in HubSpot.
And so I'm not setting the alarm right now, but it will definitely be in HubSpot because I'm already thinking about how to think through attribution and success of it.
But my approach at times is these people are working really hard setting this up. Let's let let's let a couple pilot groups go out and then reverse engineer that the CRM part. So maybe not the best idea, but it is what I'm doing this time.
Yeah. That makes sense. Thank you so much. Could I ask one more quick one, please?
Yep. For sure.
You have your deal source tracking. And I was wondering whether that is like a a a property that you've created on a deal object and people are just, you you're, like, putting those values in manually and people are manually updating it or, yeah, those exactly.
Or are those, kind of happening automatically because the lead was automatically tagged with some source based on something else, like, as they went through their Yeah.
So the way that we have it set up is, so HubSpot will automatically tag a couple of things, and then we have workflows that will bucket them into the correct grouping because we don't want, like, a bunch of different sources there. And then we will pass that information to the deal. So, essentially, we've got four layers of attribution, and we take the source. We put them into this bucket, and then we say inbound is marketing generated, outbound sales generated. So we go up a level, and then we also go below level to see if inbound was from a certain conversion page or a certain campaign that we've done.
VC and, VC and customer referrals, these are these are fairly manual. But if you do select this as a, source, you need to tell me which customer or which BCPE it was.
So, obviously, like, these people are, like, already contacts in our network, and so they're not gonna be tagged as the correct original source because they could have come through, like, a list upload or something a couple years ago. But once they kind of highlight a new deal for us, we'll tag them as this, and then we'll relate it back there.
Okay. That makes sense. And so where where is that manual tagging happening on which object?
The deal object.
The deal. Okay. Thank you. Yep.
Yeah. So it depends how you do it. But for us, we've got, like, a stage zero on our deal, which is kind of our qualification stage. And so a lot of people have that on the contact record as, like, a sales qualified. We we put it at the deal record because our volume isn't high where we can't manage it. And so that's why it's a little bit easier to track some of these these deals that come in that might not be super engaged or super warm and still have that attribution there.
And so that that's what we've chosen to do, because our team usually qualifies or disqualifies a deal within, like, seven days. And so we don't have this very, inflated, like, stage zero kind of, like, you know, these deals getting stale.
So if I I've set this up for some of my customers that are much bigger companies without ten more volume, and we do the complete opposite approach and put everything on the contact and not move things to the deal until much further down the line. So I think I I think it depends on volume, your team, and the resources you have in the, individually.
Basically, I start with I start with adoption. What can I what what what do I know I can get adoption of? And then I work from there sometimes. So not everything I do for my customers do I do for our own internal team because our businesses are very different, which I think makes sense.
Thanks for the question, Matt.
I know we're a couple minutes over. I really appreciate you guys staying on. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me in Slack.
And I'm really look looking forward to the first person that completes their workbook. I know one of you out there will get it done by July thirty first, and I can't wait to see who it is.
Thanks, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday, and we'll catch up next week.
Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thanks, Brian. See you next week.
Yep. See you.
Bye, everyone.