The first phase of my revenue plan involves overhauling the handling of all inbound leads. This will take at least 2 months to implement. What’s the best place to start with this to minimize the pain that the sales and marketing teams will feel?

The best place to start will be with lead scoring or prioritization so the team has direction in how they handle different types of leads. Next I would work on your routing rules and getting alignment with the sales organization. This is usually the hardest thing to build if you want it to be automated.

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!

The hardest thing to do in this type of transition is to force the sales and marketing teams to pivot twice. What I would recommend focusing your energy on is how you can make the current process as stable as possible until you are ready to "flip the switch" on the overhauled version. Even if the current way of doing things is less than ideal, it is what the teams are familiar with and (hopefully) functions to some extent. Forcing a temporary change will likely slow down the lead gen and qualification process and have a negative impact on revenue.

As far as technical areas of focus, lead routing automation is likely going to give you the biggest bang for the buck. Most organizations will put higher value on leads making it through the system faster to a point of sale than having perfect visibility into lead sources or attribution metrics.

For your project to overhaul the handling of all inbound leads, I would think through all the different aspects of the change that might cause pain. That would let you develop a plan to mitigate the pain for sales and marketing. There are a few questions in the AMA about sequencing and timing of revenue strategy changes and implementation. I wrote a long answer to which you should look at for a general framework to use (see "How do I decide which tactical piece to implement first in our strategy for revenue engine?") as I think that can help you.

In this case, you probably need to address a series of technical changes (lead source fields and routing you mentioned), enablement changes (i.e., what skills do the various teams need to handle the leads the way you want?), target and performance changes (quotas, productivity expectations, etc.), rules of engagement updates (depends on the specifics of the changes), KPI/measurement changes (SLAs, handoff expectations) and any other aspect of the process that gets altered. You also need to keep the existing business running as smoothly as possible while preparing for the change. Given all that, I think your inclination to start with the "plumbing" is probably right since you can set all that up before pushing it to production and it needs to be right to launch. From there, I would get through as much of the "behind the scenes" work so you have ironed out the details, made any changes needed, and know exactly how everything will work. That then gets reflected in your quotas/targets, KPIs, ROE, etc. And once that's ready, you build the enablement content to have really comprehensive sessions that anticipate all the questions and ease the transition.