AMA: LinkedIn Director of Sales Strategy and Operations (EMEA & LATAM), Eduardo Moreira on Revenue Strategy Execution

The short answer: one quarter for the first actions to be making measurable impact. Anything longer can lead to demotivation and immobilization. Anything shorter and you risk blunders and blind spots, a launch with poor buy-in or asking for unrealistic resources / behaviours from the business. The not-so-short answer: in my journey I’ve encountered enough strategy programs (and C Suites) to know the answer above can and should be pressure-tested. A few tips: * Understand your C Suite’s sense of urgency: analyse how they articulate time horizons for similarly critical programs (e.g. large product releases, organization redesigns); * Understand your company’s culture relative to bias to action vs. status quo magnetism. Identify and double down on change champions that will help clear your path; * Lead with impact, even if small: pricing, payment terms or sales comp tweaks can create a quick lift, getting you execution credibility for deeper action (e.g. funnel overhaul, marketing reset). Starting from existential topics can be (and is often) met with incapacitating resistance; * Be clear and aggressive with timelines: It is better to reprogram/re-partition execution later upon meeting acute constraints than to embrace a “let’s see how it evolves” mentality; * Share merit and redirect the spotlight often, a strategy’s success is measured by its results and authorship will be established in the long run, not by stage minutes.

Balancing short- and long-term health is essential, it defines the pace at which the company makes its inroads, even if it already achieved some "financial independence" through a healthy LTV/CAC ratio. When thinking about the long term, I’d think mostly of productivity ($/HC), NRR, profitability and vintaged data. Zooming in: * Productivity: Analyze sales HC productivity by product/service, sales approach (acquisition, renewal, upsell, etc.), and market/segment. Comparability is key to appropriately set swim lanes, sales territories, and set internal benchmarks. * NRR potential (customer value headroom): Utilize past sales data, client firmographics, product usage, and post-sales CRM signals to identify the features that best predict NRR potential. This allows for refining segmentation, resource deployment, and target setting. * Profitability: The effectiveness of your 3 examples vary depending on whether margin is measured by function or by segment x product line. Work closely with your finance function to allocate direct and indirect costs, to pin down what really makes you money. Be prepared for surprises here. * Vintages: Evaluate customer NRR (Net Revenue Retention) by vintage to differentiate micro and macro trends and create ROI conviction (sales and CS resourcing, marketing budget) for new & old logos alike. A final thought on metrics: one key aspect is to drive clarity in the roles of RevOps vs. Sales in metric selection. While only a subset of sales leaders find value in digging deeply into metrics, all of them drive better outcomes when equipped with a crystal-clear narrative to drive their teams. Ruthlessly prioritize your external-facing KPIs and desired outcomes, even if in the background you are working hard to correlate short-term and long-term metrics. In summary, don’t shy away from strategy discovery but simplify execution by reducing the number of dimensions articulated to and by Sales.

This applies to most new LT relationships in some way. I usually think of situation this as having 3 necessary steps: establishing a positive dialogue, problem solving together and rigorously agreeing on roles and responsibilities – as well as the path forward. For some more color: Positive dialogue: it is easy for a “change bias” vs. “status quo bias” game to emerge in this setup, so first acknowledge this and be radically transparent. Sounds obvious but your success in role is now intertwined with theirs and your combined experiences should lead to a synthesis. So, take time to listen, understand how they think, highlight agreement areas, and invest in a language and principles you will collaborate upon. This is the key step. Problem-solve: in your specific case I’d facilitate a time-boxed exercise to (a) assess the state of your tech stack / revenue strategy with input from senior LT, and (b) enumerate, quantify and prioritize initiatives based on size of prize, likelihood of success, and ROI. On the latter, do not shy away from estimating costs like focus costs ("analysis paralysis") and change costs: process disruptions, dependencies, morale hits, all of these can and should be estimated as P&L line adjustments. Agree on R&Rs + path forward: Remove ambiguity by clarifying roles and responsibilities in the organization. Map who needs to recommend, give input, decide, perform and sign-off on each change. Where consensus is not met, establish a fast escalation and compromise mechanism. By the end of this, you will have a charter in which some initiatives will be slated for piloting, some for implementation, some for a later revisit. Exhaustive clarity on which goes where, and an approach of "disagree but commit", “commit to revisit”, “adjust if needed” will set your relationship for a good start, preventing delays, and ultimately keeping the business going forward.

In a short sentence, in a fast-moving, complex, and inter-dependent revenue engine, whatever is not in the CRM does not exist. Creating an aligned case around this notion and building reinforcement via incentives and accountability is key. A few tactical tips and examples: * Strengthen the case: First, do you have full conviction on why are you doing it? Understand your pipeline and if your percentages properly predict commercial outcomes (i.e. is ex-ante pipeline by percentage a robust predictor for ex-post closed won?). Invest time on discussing the "why" with key sales leaders. * Drive Alignment: Communicate importance of updates to sales (in uncertain times, leaders fully appreciate how key revenue visibility is to make the right trade-offs). Familiarize yourself with the rep journey, provide visual guides and aim for simplicity: minimizing time spent not selling is also one of your goals. * Create Positive Reinforcement: Create programs supporting and incentivizing CRM freshness. Procure pre-sales support and executive deal sponsorship for key prospects, tying those to an accurate representation in the CRM. This encourages accuracy and timeliness. Emphasize a strong understanding of analytics is often essential for sales career progression, especially into management roles. * Create Accountability: Establish a hygiene score that considers update frequency and ex-post accuracy compared to commercial outcomes. Work with HR/People to tie some dimension of sales performance measurement to CRM accuracy to drive the desired behavior. 

In most documentation efforts, internal and cross-functional alike, RevOps objective is typically to simultaneously achieve widespread adoption, relevance and freshness. For a data dictionary, various options are possible: from a static PDF, to a live collaborative piece (Word, Wiki, GDoc, spreadsheet - enabling comments, revisions, use cases/queries/code logging); all the way to a data governance platform - typical for large orgs with complex schemas. There are many choices here: long-form vs. spreadsheet, collaborative vs. static, systematic vs. 3P app-supported. To lock an answer, consider your tech stack and org complexity and balance those with end users' experience and desired outcomes. For widespread adoption, ensure buy-in from users, and give them sufficient airtime and opportunity to provide input - success here means all teams in the revenue engine should have this tool in their bookmarks (and ideally you track their usage). For relevance, make sure it tackles the key go-to-market model dimension (at a high, top-down level) while also dissecting the most used tables and fields/variables in clear language (for consultation). For freshness, assign ownership and drive accountability: either you or an appointee must periodically review, gather feedback, update, and re-publish regularly. Finally -- make a call fast, you can always adjust later. Added alignment benefits are company-wide and often beat rebuild costs by a wide margin. 

Similar to another question (see "I am in the first phase..."), in my view the main issue is your marketing leader seeing your proposed path more as your (singular) strategy, than as your (plural) strategy, even if she helped you craft it earlier. As these are process redesigns, more discrete in nature, you should consider a more step-wise implementation sequence, A/B testing or piloting as alternative routes to regain sponsorship. Also remember that as tricky as data overhauls, process redesigns and systems and tools migrations can be, behaviour change is always the toughest chapter in the RevOps book. It requires true openness - from both vantage points - to the possibility that whatever made one successful in the past will not work now, at least not optimally. Because of that, do your best to assure them you are committed to a joint learning curve and to mitigating any incoming disruption to existing processes that this change may cause. This signals credible investment in their success and hopefully course-corrects your collaboration, a key ingredient for your strategy to fly as-is.

RevOps is the glue that bonds revenue teams together, and to minimize pain points you'll have to drive monolithic Marketing and Sales (M&S) buy-in around ambition, motivation and execution. For ambition and motivation, assemble a crisp fact base that promotes your plan from desirable to essential, demonstrating and estimating funnel dollar leakage, showcasing what good looks like and estimating upside for higher conversion scenarios. For execution I would go for an agile-inspired war room (physical or not – what matters most is commitment to a high-frequency and high-resolution cadence). This is a necessary step for strong alignment, especially if outside challenges (e.g. Finance) are to be expected. Without much insight to the specifics, and assuming company is in the early days, lead source fields (standardizing taxonomy and linkages to your M&S engine) and restructuring routing (matching demand with your M&S resources) seem like good points to start. I would add initiatives related to lead capture and handling: For capture, partner with your engineering/R&D function to embrace a fast-moving channel experimentation practice: even in well-established businesses, tweaks to lead-gen campaign parameters (beyond messaging) can lead to tectonic shifts in lead volumes -- and the same is true of landing pages and even form layouts. For handling, closely monitor lead conversion effectiveness across SD/Sales, enabling, diffusing and rewarding demonstrated best practices. Exciting times, best of luck!