AMA: Intercom VP, Sales Operations, Tyler Will on Stakeholder Management

There are many dimensions at play in approaching this problem that I don't have a singular template, but here are a few things to think about. 1. What is the nature of the decision / project? 1. If it's something small, in your area of (genuine) expertise, has limited impact or downside, and so on then you probably don't need to bother to gather input in the first place. 2. If it's a major decision that will commit substantial resources, is a "one-way door" so you can't reverse the decision, or requires other teams to do things for you, then you will need to gather input and incorporate it into your plans. 2. When you go out to gather input, be clear on why you NEED it. You can then give context as to why you want their input, are clear yourself in the goal, and get more valuable information. 1. Do they have expertise you lack that will give you important information to make the decision / plan? 2. Do they have resources you will need to get the work done (e.g., talking to engineers to build an idea you have) 3. Something else? 3. Are you getting input for "political" purposes? This is the "I'll ask you because I think I need to" but probably dismiss everything you say is a place to be careful. You'll need to understand your own organizational dynamics, but it's often better to just say "you're not included" than make them feel included and then reject all their ideas, especially if it happens over and over. Two potentially useful frameworks for gathering input and making decisions. First, I strongly recommend using the RAPID framework (RACI/DACI exist too but I remain a Bain loyalist on this one in particular for reasons I won't get into) for major decisions and projects. You can read more about that in this article and plenty of other writing about RAPID if you are not familiar with it. Second, Ray Dalio in his book Principles lays out a series of principles for making the right decisions which includes a lot on how to gather input. Outline is here and he posts regularly on LinkedIn too.

Revenue Operations roles can be hard to quantify performance (especially compared to sales or demand gen marketing roles we work closely with which are highly quantified). There are four things I typically look back on as part of my self-assessment/reflection at the end of a year. 1. Business performance. Even though I don't have a quota, my team and I play a crucial role in helping our company grow. As a senior leader, I feel responsibility for hitting our financial plan (revenue and cost), growing at a target rate, and other performance-metrics (varying by company) that I think my team and I influence. 2. Employee Satisfaction. I want to know if the people I lead are engaged in their work and finding their employment experience rewarding. To do that, I look at results of the annual/semi-annual employee engagement or satisfaction surveys. It's helpful to see how my team compare to the company overall and any qualitative feedback is really valuable too. This can be harder on smaller teams where anonymity isn't possible, but you should still be able to informally gauge how your team feels (regrettable attrition the most front and center indicator). 3. Sense of accomplishment / delivery of key initiatives. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve in a period. I have my own vision for the team, org, and company and we set goals as a leadership team. We also are involved in company-wide initiatives, often being responsible for delivering entire programs or large parts of them. With this, I do an honest assessment of the work and a post-mortem exercise to learn from our mistakes. 4. General sense of professional well-being. It's also important to do a bigger picture temperature check on your job and life as a whole. At work, I want to know that I am learning new things and working on challenging problems, that I like the people I work with, that I feel I have a "seat at the table" for topics that matter to me. I also want to have time and energy for my family and personal interests and health. If those aren't in a good enough place, then no amount of 1-3 will make me feel fully successful in a year. The weighting of those changes over time, but is always present.

First and foremost you have to remember that it's a human relationship at it's core. That means getting to know the person and not just doing work. Assuming that is happening to a sufficient degree then three things that may be useful are: 1. Make sure you understanding what matters to your cross-functional partners. If you do not understand their part of the business, the mechanics of it, the metrics they care about, it's going to be hard to have a partnership. In other words, it cannot just be your own agenda. However, that does NOT mean you do whatever they want. As a leader, prioritization is essential and saying "no" and explaining why with confidence will serve you very well. But, the more you understand them, their team, their priorities, the better the partnership will be. 2. One 2x2 framework from my consulting days I have drawn for people many times is about why you prioritize in an interaction with a stakeholder (or client/customer). [I tried to attach a photo of the diagram but failed...sorry!] * The y-axis asks if you improved the relationship (Y/N) --> this is about building trust, connecting, understanding each other better (see also #3) * The x-axis asks if you got what you wanted (Y/N) --> this is about some outcome you planned for the meeting such as a commitment to do something, a decision made, etc. * Ideally all stakeholder interactions end with Y+Y, where you got what you wanted AND improved the relationship. For obvious reasons N+N is bad. But what if you have to pick between Y/N and N/Y? Being clear about the tradeoff you'll make in an interaction can make you more thoughtful about how you approach a conversation. 3. One of my all-time favorites is the Trust Equation (https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation). It's not helpful to re-write all their content here, but I strongly encourage you to review this if you aren't familiar and consider ways to bring it to work. I have even done exercises with my team where we scored our relationships with key partners on these and developed plans to make improvements.

I'm pretty flexible (loved ones may disagree) about how I work and communicate so it's never been a major problem but I think two principles can help guide everyone through this situation: 1) Be true to yourself. If you aren't upholding your own values, needs (personal and professional), and communication preferences at all, the relationship will ultimate crash and burn. 2) You have to expect them to do the same. That means finding ways that can be made to work for everyone. It's often really helpful to talk to the person explicitly about the perceived gap, even if they're senior to you. Several organizations I have worked at made a big deal out of this with a lot of transparency. We've shared your MBTI and other "personality" test results, done a working styles preferences exercise, and talked about what we want to do. Then you both at least know more about each other and are more likely to empathize. I think this can go a long way. From there, you can then develop some version of a "communication contract" about how you will handle different things: * When do you write vs. meet in person, when do you provide a pre-read vs. not, etc.? * Will you have time in meetings to read a document or is everything presented verbally or read beforehand? * Agree to have an agenda and set clear objectives for your interactions. It won't ever be perfect if the styles are that far apart but I believe you can learn to work with just about anyone.

We're about 30 people now, aligned to four major areas covered by my direct reports. We have specialists (i.e., operations team and planning team) but others choose generalists (e.g., ops + planning). This is an important decision to make consciously because it will affect everything you do day to day, who you hire, what happens when someone is out of seat, etc. I think as teams get bigger they tend to specialize more but that creates silos and puts more pressure on the leader to be able to synthesize and see across areas that is hard or impossible for anyone else to do. 1. Core Sales Ops: ops team (daily sales management partnership, forecasting, territory management, some ticket handling) and deal desk 2. Strategy & Planning: partner with Finance, set targets and quotas, design comp plans, headcount investments, strategic projects 3. Analytics: marketing and sales analytics experts building dashboards, models, reports and running ad hoc analysis 4. GTM Ops: partly a systems team (3rd party data, marketing tech stack, sales tools) and partly process improvement (ROE, sales processes, etc.) I also have a single IC direct report who helps me on projects, ad hoc analysis, organizing team offsites and meetings, etc. Having this role helps me synthesize across the various expert areas too. Success is about having good relationships with key stakeholders, creating value for them and serving as an advisor and part of their leadership team. We have OKRs or big projects that we also assess ourselves against, and of course overall business performance and success is also a reflection upon us. More formally, within each level we have a job ladder that HR helped create so we have an evaluation rubric.

If there is a historically tense relationship between functions, you have to do something very different to try to reset the situation. This will be much harder if the respective leaders have been in seat for some time, but whether new or old, it's great you want to take action. I would have a multi-day offsite with the leadership team of both functions. I think it's really important that this happen out of the office and away from the day to day. You won't fix anything in the same environment where things are broken and there are too many distractions from doing the hard work of starting over. You're all humans, trying to do something meaningful at work and make your company successful (if not, different conversation). State up front that the offsite is about rebuilding the relationship. You need to get to know each other, understand your areas of work, and start to build trust. Do ice breakers. Do not do trust falls. Share your priorities, roadmaps, working styles, team charter, org structure. Eat dinner together. Get drinks. Have some fun. At some point, you need to talk explicitly about what's working and what's not. Find ways to be open and honest with each other. I believe a start/stop/continue exercise can be very helpful. I personally like having people write their answers on post-its and place those on a wall or flip chart. Then have people read them all, discuss in groups, and present the themes to the larger group. That gets people mingling. I am sure your HRBP could also help design some useful exercises.

I do not base my approach so much on the team I'm talking to, rather it's more about individual personalities, their stylistic preferences and how they fit with mine. Things like how often we meet, how well we know each other, what the nature of the work is all matter. With some people, we're serious about work but have fun. For example, our SVP of Sales told me I should have a reality tv show and that he'd even invest in it. That's not a conversation I would have with someone in the product org I know but don't talk to daily. When I present to product/eng teams I am probably more buttoned-up just because we spend less time with each other. But those are just choices I am making as to what feels comfortable to me, how much established trust we have (yet another plug in this AMA for the Trust Equation: https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation), and how serious the topic is.

Aligning internal stakeholders is crucial in just about any organization. To do that, you need clear rules about work and decision ownership. As I mentioned in a different answer, teams with good ideas fail to execute because they can't make decisions effectively (i.e., they cannot get aligned on what to do). Here are three tools I learned, use, and now regularly teach to my team and co-workers that can significantly improve the clarity of who, how, and when you will make decisions in your organization and get you better aligned. * RAPID framework (HBR article among others) -- this assigns roles to people regarding a decision including who will make it. I STRONGLY prefer this to the RACI framework which is about getting work done and processes, not who makes a recommendation and who gets to decide. * Five day alignment (LinkedIn post) -- when you're stuck, this process is about making a commitment to get unstuck * Clean escalation (LinkedIn post among others) -- and when that commitment to getting unstuck doesn't work, rather than being un-collaborative or continuing on fruitlessly, this approach helps move decisions along.

Decision-making is a crucial organizational skill for successful companies. Plenty of teams with good ideas fail to execute because they can't make decisions effectively. In this question, I presume there is some disagreement over who should make a particular decision but without that context it's hard to evaluate further. Here are three tools I recommend that can significantly improve the clarity of who, how, and when you will make decisions in your organization. * RAPID framework (HBR article among others) -- this assigns roles to people regarding a decision including who will make it. I STRONGLY prefer this to the RACI framework which is about getting work done and processes, not who makes a recommendation and who gets to decide. * Five day alignment (LinkedIn post) -- when you're stuck, this process is about making a commitment to get unstuck * Clean escalation (LinkedIn post among others) -- and when that commitment to getting unstuck doesn't work, rather than being un-collaborative or continuing on fruitlessly, this approach helps move decisions along.

I don't think Demand Gen is any different from building a relationship with other stakeholders. In another answer, I talked about the Trust Equation (https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation) which is a great framework to use for anyone. It's also crucial to understand what Demand Gen needs from RevOps/Marketing Analytics and Marketing Ops. You want to make sure you are delivering on that and advising them on best practices, new opportunities, challenges you see in the business performance. So think about how you and your team can you deliver that. * What's your POV (always have a POV!)? * Be an advisor, not just a doer. * Deliver high quality work / data / analysis / reports. Iterate. DG is no different from anyone else, just different set of questions to work on together.