What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first revenue operations manager at a company establishing the function?

I view projects and priorities as "Big Rocks" and "Small Projects." The big rocks are foundational work streams for the business and will help drive the business forward. The small projects are also important but will be more of a "one and done" type of work. Big rocks should have one driver, and one person should be driving at most two big rocks a quarter. Big rocks also should not be rushed. I have seen many mistakes where if a big rock is not done well, the members need to go back and rip/replace it, which takes much more time and resources. Make sure you have the right stakeholders involved and timelines built for these. I also recommend you have experienced members driving big rocks.

• Big Rock projects can be: setting up SFDC to measure bookings, territory planning, sales methodology, forecasting, standard metrics dashboards, annual planning, sales comp design, account hierarchies, etc.
• Small Projects can be: deal approval matrix, ROE (rules of engagement) updates, SPIFF design, QBR templates, Sales playbooks, etc. Most of these can be quickly revised and updated as the business evolves. You should have a running list of small projects and prioritize every quarter. 

My framework for prioritizing is pretty simple, I like to use a quadrant style prioritization framework and allocate requests into the following format and ensure that I have X% of time allocated to each quadrant:

• Top Left: Do Now
• High importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 50% of time allocated to this category)
• Bottom Left: Delegate
• Low importance, High urgency (generally like to keep around 10% of time allocated to this category) - these are typically the distractions that comes up and delay strategic initiatives - sometimes they just need done, but really focus on how you streamline, reduce and delegate these items
• Top Right: Do Next
• High importance, low urgency (generally like to keep around 40% of time to this category)
• These are the items that if you do not schedule and focus on getting these done, they will become high urgency and typically turn into fire drills, so trying to get ahead of scheduling these into workload
• Bottom Right: Delete
• Low importance, low urgency (0% allocation)
• If the request does not align with strategy, needs deprioritized (these are your say no, or not right now)

If you’re the first revenue operations manager, I recommend identifying key revenue operations initiatives the company needs, prioritizing them, and then organizing projects and measuring tasks against that. Here’s how I did it:

1. Create a set of questions to ask the heads of all go-to-market teams focused on pain points, challenges, current goals, and which parts of the funnel they own
2. Shadow employees across go-to-market functions to find inefficiencies and take notes
3. Pattern match across your notes to identify key areas for development and list potential projects that would fall within each
4. Prioritize these areas for development as initiatives based on their potential impact to revenue
5. Circulate these initiatives across the company, making sure to highlight which are the current top initiatives vs which are noted for the future
6. Tag all requests with which initiatives they fall into, including leaving blanks where requests don’t fall into any
7. Additionally, tag requests with an impact score of 1-10 and a resource consumption score of 1-10
8. Every quarter, choose 1-2 initiatives to focus on and go through the backlog of requests to find high-impact tasks to focus on or to string into a wider more impactful project.
9. Schedule at least half of your time dedicated to the quarterly initiatives. I use Wednesday as a no-meeting day as well as Friday mornings to set aside a minimum amount of time.
10. For the unscheduled time, evaluate requests based on impact, resource consumption, and urgency to see if there are tasks more high impact than dedicating more time to your current project
11. Revisit initiatives at least quarterly and remove those which are no longer relevant as well as add new initiatives based on patterns seen in requests, notes taken from cross-functional meetings, and notes taken from shadowing those in go-to-market roles
12. When requests fall outside of initiatives, it's often a sign it is not a high priority.
13. Don’t be afraid to leave tickets unaddressed. Set an SLA to review tickets and add initiatives, impact, and resource consumption scores, but not to complete the tasks.

P0: it starts with how Performance Evaluation or Yearly Performance review is done at the org. I'd prioritize based on whatever goal I am going to be rated against in my annual review.

P1: What my Line Manager expects from this role and team? "Making my boss successful" is everyone's primary job. If every person in the organization works towards making their boss/line manager successful, the entire organization thrives. It is a simple yet effective way to align for success.  

P2: Northstar metrics for the Org. That is one main business goals that execs speak about in their board meetings. I'd definitely want to contribute to that goal in every way possible. 

Interestingly, the framework for prioritizing needs and deliverables as the inaugural Revenue Operations Manager revolves around the very essence of the job title. Your primary objective should be to identify and address the deliverables that empower your stakeholders in their mission to generate pipeline and revenue for the company.

Start by immersing yourself in the company's sales methodology, marketing strategy, gain a deep understanding of the forecasting process, and dissecting the factors driving customer retention and expansion. Collaborate closely with your stakeholders to pinpoint the roadblocks hindering their ability to consistently meet go-to-market strategy objectives.

In this process, you'll likely discover common themes where your efforts can make a significant impact. Here are some key areas to consider:

1. Health of the Business: Assess if there is common language and accessible data to calculate critical metrics like CAC, CAC Payback, LTV/CAC, Rule of 40, and the SaaS Magic Number.

2. Pipeline Coverage: Assess whether the organization has a clear understanding of pipeline coverage requirements to meet revenue targets consistently on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Evaluate the channels that generate pipeline, their volumes, conversion rates.

3. Customer Satisfaction and Retention: Determine if there are defined leading and lagging indicators for measuring customer satisfaction and retention rates. Subjective health scores can still be very telling and a solid foundation for data driven approaches later.

4. ICP and Target Audience Framework: Assess if the organization has a clear understanding of its Total Addressable Market (TAM), Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and a framework to prioritize personas for both inbound and outbound marketing programs effectively (TAF). Determine if these definitions are aligned between Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and Product.

As the first RevOps leader in the company, you'll likely be the driving force behind cross-functional initiatives aimed at providing strategic insights and clear direction in these areas.

During your onboarding process, you might encounter a multitude of challenges, including data inconsistencies, technical debt, and process inefficiencies. Navigating this sea of work can be daunting, but it's crucial to prioritize effectively. Remember your most valuable resource to invest is your time. When faced with a new challenge, ask yourself whether it aligns with one of the fundamental themes mentioned above.

If you can categorize the task under one of those critical themes, you can be confident that addressing it will deliver significant value to the company.

In essence, the framework centers on aligning your efforts with the overarching goal of enabling revenue growth and focusing on areas that have the most substantial impact on your stakeholders' success.

To set yourself up for success when establishing a Revenue Operations function, I recommend starting with an exercise to map out and benchmark the revenue process. You can use this to create a roadmap and then prioritize tasks using a framework such as the Value vs Effort Matrix.

When RevOps is new at a company, a good way to determine the value of different tasks is to map out the revenue process and begin to benchmark conversion rates at different stages. This is a good way to familiarize yourself with the customer journey and how it maps to internal processes for your sales, marketing and customer success teams. For example, you may notice that the conversion rate from lead to opportunity is low, which might mean you need to improve product-market fit. If your sales team is taking too long to close deals, you should probably focus on sales process efficiency. And if your win rate is low, you may want to prioritize sales enablement. 

As I mentioned in a previous question, having a roadmap tied to business outcomes is extremely important, and I like to group roadmap items by both value and effort. 

The prioritization framework that I've found works well for RevOps teams is the Value vs Effort Matrix: This matrix helps you prioritize work based on the value it delivers and the effort required to complete it. Work that delivers high value with low effort is given the highest priority, while work that delivers low value with high effort is given the lowest priority.

Any Rev Ops team's responsibilities include a mix of "run" work (e.g. quota audits to ensure Reps will be paid correctly) and "build" work aimed at accelerating growth or increasing productivity.

"Run" work is table stakes. If not executed on a timely and effectively manner, things literally break with impact in revenue, customer experience and team morale. The most common pitfall in this category is, because "run" work is so critical, teams tend to spend the majority of their time here, and not enough time doing "build" work. Successful Rev Ops teams will focus on process optimization, automation and/ or outsourcing of the "run" work, so it can be done better AND with less resources over time, so the team can focus on "build".

On "build" work, the challenge is there are always multiple areas the team can have a meaningful impact on; from evaluating how to enter a new market to re-defining the customer segmentation strategy. Since Rev Ops resources are scarce, prioritization and focus are key. At LinkedIn, we use the Prioritization Matrix (PMAT) to evaluate opportunities along 2 axes: Size of Prize and Likelihood of Success. By doing so, we can orient the team towards "Home Run" initiatives (high Size of Prize, high Likelihood of Success) and kill "Junk" initiatives (low Size of Prize, low Likelihood of Success).

My framework for prioritizing is a bit qualitative in that it is something I have gotten a feel for over time. In general I will try to allocate:

• 25%-30% of my time on long-term strategic priorities (eg: Optimizing territories for improved rep performance, improving attach rates for future products, future org design for RevOps and Sales, tech stack consolidation etc). This includes meetings to understand current state, discuss potential ideas as well as time to simply sit and think.

• ~40% - 50% of my time on short to mid-term tactical priorities i.e. keep the business running type of things (eg: building SFDC and Tableau dashboards, providing tactical insights on business performance, ROE maintenance, automation to reduce friction etc) and

• ~10%-20% of my time for urgent/unplanned fire drill type of activities that tend to pop over time.

What I have also come to realize is that anytime these percentages are out of sync with the above guidelines it is a good indicator of potential issues that need addressing. As an example, spending more than 20% of your time on fire drills is an indicator of issues within your systems, tools and/or processes. On the other hand, spending too little time on strategic priorities is a harbinger for significant issues down the line such as lower growth, higher attrition for both sales and RevOps, lower participation rate etc.

I usually go through the following flow...

1. Current State: Know the current state. Identify the gaps, pain points, and areas for improvement. Use the data where you can here. You need to gain both qualitative and quantitative feedback on the current systems/processes/tools/etc for a holistic picture.

2. Align with Business Goals: Understand the company's overall business goals and objectives. Collaborate with key stakeholders to align revenue operations with these goals, ensuring its relevance and impact.

3. Prioritize: Based on the prior two, you should be able to start narrowing down. From there look at level of effort to impact. What metric would each priority be going after? Stack rank with those, then get some feedback from stakeholders.

4. Critical Needs: Somethings are just obvious. They are so broken they are causing a massive "bleed" in the business OR knowing you can only get so far if you don't have some fundamentals established. Identify those critical needs such as implementing a CRM system if it doesn't exit, establishing ROEs, funnel reporting, etc.

I would check out my answer to 30/60/90 day plans too (haven't figured out how to link it). But that may also be helpful here

In my role at LinkedIn, we use a prioritization matrix with size of prize on one axis and likelihood of success on the other. Size of prize is meant to show the total value of spending time on this deliverable and the impact it will have on the business.  The likelihood of success considers the level of effort to make it happen and resourcing and time needed.  If something has a low value and a high level of effort, it is not worth spending time on and should come off your list, consider it “junk”. If something is high value/impact and high likelihood of success, consider it a home run and add it to your list.  There’s a great post on LinkedIn about this framework here:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/priority-matrix-pmat-alvin-kan/