Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: Is your Sales Ops team feeling the strain of manual processes? Learn to discuss with leadership what you should automate, why, and how to prepare for automation.

Why organizations don’t automate: Sales ops teams rely on manual processes for various reasons. Automation might not be a priority in small or scaling businesses where teams are still developing their tech stacks and systems. Teams in larger organizations might use legacy systems customized to the business’s specific needs and aren’t designed to scale. In either case, there tends to be a shortage of people who understand the tools and mechanisms to accelerate work.

The problem with manual processes: Business that don’t prioritize automation can suffer issues from manual processes that compromise revenue, including:

❌ Inaccuracies
❌ Inefficiencies
❌ Limited forecast and analytical potential

And while companies might be mature in their commercial offerings and field of expertise, a lack of alignment prevents teams around the business (e.g. Sales and Technology, Sales and Operations, Sales Ops and Marketing Ops) from coming together to discuss and address these issues.

What’s in this article for you? If your business is feeling the strain of manual processes — and your teams aren’t talking about it — this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. We’ll help you have a strategic discussion about automation with your CRO and COO, covering what to automate in Sales Ops and why, and how to examine your processes and communication channels so your business can reap the benefits.

Benefits of automation

Your CRO and COO want to understand how automation can translate into increased revenue. To that end, there are a few important benefits that automating your lead and opportunity management can create:

✅ Efficiency: Automating the likes of lead capture and routing will simplify and reduce the overhead of your operations, freeing up your sales and sales ops teams to focus on higher-impact initiatives.

✅ Accuracy: Automation reduces the risk of costly errors that can occur. For example, manually creating contracts and quotes or entering data into your CRM.

✅ Data enrichment: Automation tools can enrich your lead data with publicly available information and activity metrics, helping Sales to better segment leads and prioritize the best matches to the business.

✅ Forecasting: Tools with forecasting capabilities can also lead to more accurate predictions (e.g. how Sales is performing vs. quotas) and more comprehensive analyses of various metrics. For instance, understanding how Sales is set to perform against quotas, how seasonality impacts lead behavior, or which channels to optimize your spending on, will fuel greater strategic decision-making that makes it easier to captivate leads and win business.

“Become more productive, predictive and responsive
to customer needs.”

 
Automation can help your Sales Ops function become more productive, predictive, and responsive to customer needs and preferences. In theory, these improvements should translate into growth, but there are several logistical and financial complexities with implementing automation.

Prepare to discuss the following points with leadership to show you’ve thought through what it takes to make automation successful:

👉 Recruitment and training: Implementing any technology entails having the knowledge and skills to use it. You’ll want at least one dedicated person or team to manage your workflows, with the know-how to maintain processes in good order and fix things. This might require a headcount budget, agency support, or upskilling people in your business who can progress into this role.

👉 Change management: What existing tools and integrations could be impacted by our implementation of automation? Given the available time that our team members have, what other projects and initiatives are we willing to put on hold in order to prioritize this?

👉 Data quality: Between tools, you might have disparate methods of categorizing the same data points. To make integrations between tools work correctly, and for your reporting to be accurate, you’ll need IT to help with data normalization as you implement and connect tools.

👉 Awareness: How will leadership educate people on the benefits and risks of automation? If Sales isn’t aware of how new processes and tools can improve their workflow, or if people aren’t encouraged to embrace the changes in how you do things, you risk wasting the investment of time and money.

Implementing automation

To address these challenges, your CRO and COO play important roles in the process of implementing automation:

🎯 Direction: Your CRO and COO can position themselves as sources of guidance and authority on data initiatives, offering mentorship and incentives to encourage a greater understanding and adoption of new processes and tools. Being able to answer questions and assure people of the logic behind what they’re doing will be crucial to the ongoing success of automation.

🎯 Communication: Your leaders should encourage communication between Sales, Marketing, Operations, and IT to encourage collaboration and alignment as automation impacts the business. This will be crucial to ensure that your uptake of automation in Sales Ops compliments the tools, processes, and workflows in other departments.

🎯 Resources and development: Leadership can allocate the budget for software purchases, training, hiring, and agency support towards the initiative. This can involve working with Sales Enablement to come up with a training plan, and devising a plan for hiring and skill development to ensure that automated processes are well understood and integrated into the team.

🎯 Measurement: Based on what your CRO and COO want to achieve with automation, they can establish success metrics for the initiative—KPIs and other points of reporting for Sales Ops to track in order to gauge the success of automation. Monthly or quarterly meetings between Sales Ops and leadership, discussing these data points and talking about how to further optimize things, can aid the ongoing success of the project.

“Automation is equally about
making changes to your communication structure.”

Implementing automation is equally about making changes to your communication structure as it is about adopting new tools and processes.

If you can explain clearly to your CRO and COO the kinds of preparation that are required to realize the benefits of automation, your leaders can use their time to guide and align stakeholders around the business and incentivize people to adopt new ways of doing business to achieve a strategic vision.

Treating the interpersonal elements of change management with care puts you in a good place to enjoy the strengthened efficiency, accuracy, forecasting potential, and growth that automation offers.

Get in touch for more guidance on change management and automation in Sales Ops.

TLDR: Is your CRM heaving with old records? Time to clean up your data. Learn how to advocate for good data hygiene to your Sales leaders.

The problem with data hygiene in sales ops: Sales ops teams struggle to succeed without clean, well-organized data. To work efficiently and make the right decisions, people at every level and in every function of your sales team need easy access to accurate, relevant information.

Why data hygiene is hard to maintain: Sales Ops handles troves of information from different avenues, which are often difficult to standardize including contact forms, data enrichment tools and research from sales reps.

The cost of poor data hygiene: Sales and revenue leaders can be reluctant to part with data, even when a prospect’s interest and engagement have long cooled. As a result, CRMs bloat with duplicate and incomplete records that only become less viable as time goes on—and this bloat costs in many ways.

What’s in this article for you: If your CRM’s heaving with records and difficult to segment, or your reporting doesn’t match the reality of your team’s performance, it’s time to clean up your data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to:

➡️ Illustrate the impacts of poor data hygiene with your CRO/COO

➡️ Raise awareness of practices that will keep your data clean and your Sales team on track

➡️ Save money for your organization

Why data hygiene matters

Bad data encroaches on everything your Sales team does.

❌ Leads to inaccurate analyses of opportunities in the pipeline.

❌ Slows progress on deals as Sales reps chase prospects who are no longer relevant to your business.

❌ Creates a lack of clarity on the accounts, industries, and regions you should target and how to target them.

❌ Results in technical debt, smaller pipelines, leads being routed to the wrong places, and hours burned cleaning up and correcting messy databases.

Why do these problems arise?

A lack of clean, consistent practices around how your organization handles data. Often, this is due to business culture. For example, your sales leaders might oppose deleting data because they’ve paid for the methods to acquire this information that could yield business at some point.

“It pays to know when
to part ways with your data.”

But it pays to know when to part ways with your data. Records that have been sitting cold in your CRM for years, with no signs of engagement, cost more than they’re worth.

Insights expire, industries evolve, and peoples’ interests and roles change.

After a few years of inactivity, you’re more likely to reengage a prospect inbound, in response to a different product or service line, than what you’ve previously been sending them. And at that point, as far as their potential as a customer goes, they’re an entirely new prospect whose old data is no longer relevant.

Your head of sales, CRO, and COO should all understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.

Before renewing your CRM instance, follow these steps:

👉 See what your capacity costs annually.

👉 Scope out the data that you don’t need, such as duplicates, outdated and irrelevant information, and metrics that your reps don’t use.

👉 Then, present leadership with the savings you can make by getting rid of old records.

Important: This isn’t a one-time clear-out. Data hygiene has a systemic impact on the productivity of your Sales team and requires a continuous, purposeful effort to maintain. To increase revenue, Sales reps need easy access to accurate information that will allow them to focus on the most viable leads. Leadership can help Sales to achieve this by enshrining data hygiene into the culture and practices of your business.

Data standardization

Data should enter your system according to standardized methods of collection and categorization, following a central repository of business definitions that your sales and RevOps teams universally agree upon.

You also want to standardize the fields across channels people can use to enter information. Discrepancies between, say, United States vs. USA vs. US will bloat your database and compromise the accuracy of your reporting.

Sales Ops can take the lead with regularly auditing the CRM and other databases for data quality. Things like merging duplicates, flagging records with missing data, and removing data that are no longer correct or relevant.

Chat with your CRO and Head of Sales about the conditions that make data meaningful for the team:

• Do we use it in reporting?
• Do our Sales reps use it in their work?
• Does it concern prospects who are reasonably engaged given the norms of our industry?
• Does collecting and storing it drive our desired outcomes?

If the answer is ‘no,’ chances are you can safely delete a record. To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your data cleanups, encourage leadership to invest in a data preparation tool to automate parts of the audit.

Helping Sales win

In Sales, data hygiene and quality will make or break your capacity to strike deals and achieve growth.

Adopt clear and consistent practices for collecting and categorizing data, with regular audits to streamline your databases to only include accurate and relevant information, and it’s likely your pipeline will prosper.

Get in touch for more guidance on maintaining good data hygiene practices.

TLDR: Are manual CPQ processes eating up your time? Learn how to discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of CPQ solutions with your leadership team.

What is CPQ? Configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions allow Sales teams to automate the production of quotes and contracts.

The problem with current CPQ processes: Manually creating quotes results in time spent correcting mistakes, bloated approval processes, and delayed starts to projects that can leave negative impressions on customers.

How CPQ solutions help: CPQ solutions can improve the speed, accuracy, and scalability of quote and contract creation. Before adding another tool to your stack, you’ll want to establish whether or not the investment makes sense.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you have a purposeful discussion with your CRO and COO about CPQ solutions. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Position the benefits

➡️ Voice important strategic and logistical considerations

➡️ Impact ROI

➡️ Get the support you need to evaluate and implement a potential new solution

CPQ ins and outs

Your C-level execs want to know how investing in a CPQ solution will contribute towards the organization’s goals and needs.

Start by identifying where your CPQ processes are straining and what your leaders want to achieve. Then frame your arguments around the impact a CPQ solution can create to meet their priorities.

👉 Productivity: How many hours per week do your Salespeople spend on quotes? Automation can free up this time and allow Sales to focus on higher-impact initiatives. Do your teams struggle to produce contracts in a timely manner or end up spending way too much time on the approval process? You can issue contracts and get them over to QA, Legal and your customers quicker, and begin working with customers sooner.

👉 Accuracy: Do errors or ambiguities cause approval delays and extend contract execution time? CPQ solutions can ensure consistent pricing and service terms, including standardization and controls for customizations such as discounts and tiers.

👉 Scalability: Does leadership aim to grow the RevOps, Sales or Retention teams? The more people involved, the more complicated pricing and approvals can become. CPQ software enables efficiencies for scaling teams by reducing error-prone manual processes. CPQ solutions offer multi-currency support, which is beneficial for organizations working internationally.

CPQ solutions can help
refine pricing models.

👉 Insights: Tracking recurring revenue streams and establishing a trailing twelve months can highlight key insights to help make intelligent pricing decisions and better understand your client base. Dynamic pricing capabilities can also suggest effective price points for your services based on customer behavior and market conditions to enable better forecasting.

👉 CX: Automating renewals reduces friction during the contracting process. By streamlining work with your organization, CPQs can help improve customer relationships and have a downstream effect on churn reduction.

Your bottom line: How might the above factors translate into costs saved, revenue gained, and losses avoided?

Make your case for CPQ

These are all salient points to get your CRO and COO interested in a CPQ platform, but as with any tool adoption, there are trade-offs and planning elements to assess. Before you approach leadership, think through and prepare to discuss the following factors:

✅ Appeal to your customer journey: At what points in the customer journey can you integrate a CPQ solution to close contracts more effectively, boost customer satisfaction, and improve retention? How will using this tool achieve the aims of your organizational strategy?

✅ Immediate and future needs: What does leadership want a CPQ solution to address in the short- and long-term? For the investment to pay off, people need to know that using the tool will make their lives easier. Does the tool have the potential to continue meeting your organization’s evolving needs?

✅ Alignment with existing tools and processes: Any CPQ tool should fit smoothly with your tech stack and business processes—if it doesn’t, teams may resist adopting the tool. CPQ processes often impact teams in charge of renewals in addition to Finance, Legal and Procurement. Getting the perspectives of key stakeholders can help you to identify whether a new piece of tech can complement your current finance, payment, and audit processes and align with the needs of your business.

✅ Highly integrated vs. siloed products: What is the projected future state of your tech stack? You might opt for a CPQ solution that seamlessly integrates with a core piece of technology (e.g. your CRM), but what happens if you remove or change that piece? Alternatively, the autonomy of a siloed product may be more suitable than the high performance offered by a solution that integrates more deeply with your tech stack.

✅ Power vs. lift: A more sophisticated solution will likely have a heavier lift, demanding more time and expertise to implement and manage, but will result in a more comprehensive solution. Consider who will be in charge of setting up and managing the solution? You may need to recruit a contractor or bring on a new hire to get the job done. Consider if your needs justify the cost of a more powerful, intensive tool over a lighter solution that is easier to implement.

“Leadership can help people
see CPQ as an investment.”

Raising these points will help your leaders gain a clearer sense of the total cost of implementing a CPQ solution and whether the ROI justifies the lift.

If your CRO and COO want you to explore this further, there are various ways they can offer guidance to support the process of evaluation and implementation:

💰 Parameters: What does the minimum viable solution look like—the capabilities and traits that have to be present to support your goals and needs? What is the maximum budget your leadership is willing to allocate—will this cover the purchase price and any hiring and training needs?

🎯 Choice factors: Based on C-Suite’s top-level goals (e.g. increase revenue by 10%), what performance factors make sense to prioritize? For example, can you best achieve these with a solution that’s optimal for speeding up quote creation, freeing people from admin, or deepening analytics?

🌱 Roadmap for growth: Where does a CPQ solution fit within the planned growth of teams within the organization? Will a new CPQ tool impact the requirements of the personnel within your team?

📈 Impact measurement: Which analytics and reporting points are crucial for understanding how the solution meets your organization’s KPIs, such as enabling growth, saving time, and cutting costs?

🧭 Alignment and direction: Your CRO and COO can be huge allies with this endeavor, using their pull to capture thoughts and encourage buy-in from people and teams involved and impacted. Crucially, this involves managing expectations since, for the first few months, the benefits of using the solution may not yet be apparent.

As you establish a baseline, leadership can help people see the tool as an investment that reveals its value over time and showing how riding out the bumps of implementation and onboarding is worthwhile. This understanding is key to internal adoption, which is how you fully realize the long-term benefits.

As you begin using the tool, leaders can stress its long-term value as an investment and inspire employees with their vision during difficult stages of implementation and onboarding. Leadership’s enthusiasm plays a vital role in achieving internal adoption, which is necessary to gain long-term benefits.

The bottom line

As you explore the pricing and specs of options on the market, you might find a piece of tech that responds perfectly to your needs, or you might decide that adopting a new tool isn’t the right move.

In any case, voicing the opportunities and realities of taking on a CPQ solution will help leaders make a decision that best meets the needs of the business.

Get in touch for more strategic Sales Ops guidance.

TLDR: Wondering how to prevent your budget from being cut? Learn how to make a strong case to your marketing leaders, speaking the language of risk reduction.

Marketing Operations teams are facing pressure to do more with less:

📈 more platforms to own
📈 more processes to optimize, and
📈 more revenue and productivity to generate.

All with stagnant or reduced budgets available as we enter a more cautious spending environment. Funds are spread thin, expectations are high, and you’re wondering how to prevent your budget from being cut or even how to gain additional investment to create growth and efficiency.

Periods of recession amplify the importance of two related skills in business:

1. Understanding what drives your leaders’ financial and strategic decisions.
2. Using that insight to speak up and make your case from a position of outcome orientation.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll explore these ideas in more depth so you can make a convincing argument for your Marketing leaders to preserve or increase your budget.

The risk mindset

When it’s time to make a spending decision, two considerations come top of mind for your executives: ROI and risk mitigation. During an economic downturn, leaders naturally veer towards the latter—making only the necessary investments to avoid losing a competitive edge.

Risk reduction is one approach to this, where leaders strategize to reduce the business’ vulnerability to risk or decrease the severity of its consequences. You can empathize with this easily, seeing as the implementation of controls is a significant priority in Marketing Ops and RevOps.

Examples of the initiatives you regularly work on that contribute towards risk reduction include:

✅ optimization of user roles and permissions in Marketing and Sales apps
✅ market and competitive intelligence research
✅ evaluation of the Marketing and Sales tech stacks
✅ identifying areas for skill development, and
✅ safeguarding data privacy compliance and security.

With tighter budgets, it’s harder for these projects to achieve what your leaders intend

Wherever economic hardship looks to compromise financial investment in your work, the argument for keeping or increasing your budget looks like this: we have an opportunity to maintain or gain market share by pursuing a certain course of action—if we don’t, we’ll lose ground instead.

Consider the particular disposition of your leaders and organizational culture to decide which side of that equation to emphasize. In a recessionary environment where new business is particularly challenging to sign, highlighting the threat of lost competitive advantage over the prospect of benefits gained will likely resonate stronger.

Because underinvestment in Marketing Operations exposes your business to a wealth of risks:

⚠️ security vulnerabilities
⚠️ financial and reputational damage
⚠️ customer churn without replacement
⚠️ staff churn and burnout
⚠️ technical debt, and
⚠️ obsolescence.

Many of these risks can coincide in response to, say, a data breach arising from security weaknesses or a violation of data privacy laws from a lack of compliance knowledge.

The consequences of these things occurring will cost your business significantly more than had your leaders initially made the relevant investments to help your team get these risks under control.

‘Lean and mean’ as a strategy only works when cuts are properly controlled and calculated, nourishing the initiatives that help you contribute to revenue growth, efficiency, and harm reduction. Of course, your leaders at C- and VP level can only know and respect your needs if you speak up effectively.

“Assert to leadership why
your budget is necessary.”

Understand the impact each aspect of your work delivers (the creation of positives and the prevention of negatives), the resources you need to perform to a high standard, and the risks incurred should those resources diminish. With this insight, you can assert to leadership why keeping or increasing your budget for particular initiatives is necessary for the business to grow or avert loss.

Tough love

Speaking up to get your desired results is part of doing your job well. Facing recession, your leaders need tough love from Marketing Operations to help maintain and grow market share.

Making the case to keep or increase your budget, highlighting the risks incurred by disinvestment, can steer your business away from crippling damage and help your team gain the necessary resources to accomplish what it needs in the challenging year ahead.

Get in touch for more guidance on risk mitigation in Marketing Operations.

TLDR: Marketing Operations and Sales Operations work better together. People in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have knowledge that mutually enriches each others’ work. For a successful RevOps function, leadership should express this clearly through culture and processes. Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights.

Marketing Operations and Sales Operations share many common goals and competencies. Both define processes to:

• capture meaningful engagement data
• measure the impact of Marketing and Sales activities, and
• surface actionable micro and macro insights to help marketing and sales understand their performance and progress towards goals.

 
In a perfect world: Marketing Ops and Sales Ops are tied closely together. And they have a clear understanding of each team’s responsibilities and contributions.

In the real world: Issues will arise that hinder the productivity and revenue intake of your business—poor data hygiene, inter-team friction, and fragmented customer experiences.

Sound familiar? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain to leadership why MOPs and Sales Ops alignment matters—and how to bring both teams together. This conversation will help leadership spend their time and money wisely and create team harmony.

How alignment breaks down

Often, the day-to-day projects of MOPs and SOPs teams don’t directly intersect, even as they both frequently use the CRM.

This lack of visibility can encourage a misconception that SOPs teams exclusively manage the CRM and have authority over all actions in the system. For comparison, while MOPs uses a CRM for things like attribution, lead lifecycles, and reporting, SOPs people typically don’t need to access a marketing automation platform.

In environments where SOPs and MOPs are siloed away from each other, the inevitable result is territorialism. Suppose Sales and Marketing leaders haven’t created a culture where SOPs and MOPs know each others’ accountabilities and haven’t incentivized regular communication. In that case, people become protective over “their” tools and systems and reluctant to share information.

In other words: Culture makes or breaks your Sales-Marketing alignment.

When SOPs and MOPs are at odds over who owns what in the CRM, both teams get things done slower and at a greater risk of creating problems with data hygiene.

With bad or outdated data, Sales and Marketing teams waste time acting on dead ends. If discrepancies build between the data in your CRM and marketing automation platform, Sales and Marketing leaders lose a single source of truth to support their decisions.

Sales and Marketing efforts become splintered as fractures emerge between Marketing content and comms versus Sales outreach. Lead gen falters without effective targeting, which causes your ROI to diminish.

The consequences are sweeping—paralysis, hostility, and stagnant growth. Fortunately, there’s a lot your leaders can do to correct course.

Uniting MOPs and SOPs

There are two initiatives your leadership should pursue:

1. Aligning MOPs and SOPs on goals, and
2. Encouraging them to work closer together.

First, leadership should punctuate just how much Marketing ops and Sales ops have in common. Both teams:

• capture accurate lifecycle data
• design effective lead-scoring models
• create reports that surface key insights for Sales and Marketing
• define processes to measure the impact of Sales and Marketing activities
• protect systems from data loss due to technical limitations/errors
• facilitate Sales and Marketing to review and share feedback on each others’ processes
• set Sales and Marketing funnel goals in the CRM, and
• enable cohesive customer experiences between Sales and Marketing efforts.

 
For each goal, leadership should establish which components MOPs and SOPs own. Responsibility Assignment Matrices are helpful structures to define and communicate who is responsible, accountable, informed, and controlled for each goal.

To make this work, your CRO should meet with SOPs, MOPs, and their leaders to identify the smaller processes that contribute towards achieving each goal.

For example: what’s the division of labor and impact on the lead lifecycle before and after the handover of MQLs? Use these accountabilities as a basis for joint ownership of the CRM, getting MOPs and SOPs to agree on features, dashboards, and processes that each leads.

The value of sharing information

Beyond assigning responsibilities, leadership should impart the value of sharing information on a regular basis.

Just as access to the CRM helps MOPs, MOPs people can share insights and reports from their marketing automation platform that SOPs might otherwise lack.

This deepens how SOPs people understand the customer journey and enriches the strategies and tactics they can recommend to sales.

Encouraging MOPs and SOPs to meet quarterly (at minimum) to share their opportunities and challenges—things that worked, things that didn’t, ongoing goals—also helps both teams be visible, accountable, and collaborative with each other.

Natural collaborators

MOPs and SOPs are natural collaborators—people in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have access to information that mutually enriches each others’ work.

For a successful RevOps function, your CRO should express this clearly through your culture and processes.

Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights. The closer you align MOPs and SOPs, the more productive and profitable your business can be.

Get in touch for more guidance on making your RevOps team a success.