If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. If you plan to execute 10 strategic revenue operations initiatives in one quarter with a team that's already busy with the day-to-day of their job? You're setting yourself up for failure again... and potential attrition on your overwhelmed RevOps team. So, how do you align on priorities, create a data-driven plan, and ensure you execute on critical projects without burning out your team? Enter: The RevOps Roadmap.
The Essence of a RevOps Roadmap
A RevOps roadmap is a strategic document outlining key initiatives, projects, and milestones necessary for achieving the company's revenue goals. Serving both as a plan and a communication tool, it provides a clear vision of required actions, timelines, and responsibilities.
Asking your team for a RevOps roadmap will allow you to:
- Build a data-driven plan
- If you should know anything about Lean Layer, it's that we love data. So of course our recommendation for creating a roadmap it's as data-driven as possible. It's a great opportunity to have your team run all sorts of analyses to pull out trends and areas for optimization that can help inform the roadmap. Example:
- If your qualified pipeline >> win conversion rate is 1%, you should NOT prioritize a project to increase the top of funnel volume instead of taking on a project to increase the win rate.
- A good example of a project to take on in this instead would be to identify a sub-segment of the pipeline that converts at a higher rate. You can, then, increase the top of funnel volume for that subsegment - i.e. companies who have a marketing team of at least 4 people.
- Drive alignment on priorities
- By having an outline of your RevOps team's plan, it gives you the opportunity to reprioritize initiatives as needed and drive alignment on the overall strategy of the business. It'll also mean you can ensure your team doesn't get caught up with optimization bias or planning fallacy (more on this below).
- Uncover reasons the plan will fail early (so you can mitigate this)
- Once you have your priorities on the most important projects and initiatives that need to happen, the roadmap allows you to proactively uncover any gaps in your team's skills or capacity to execute on the plan and reach your goals.
Understanding Cognitive Biases in Planning
Before we dive into the components and creation of the RevOps roadmap, it's crucial to acknowledge the common cognitive biases that can hinder our planning efforts: optimism bias and the planning fallacy. These biases can lead us to underestimate challenges and overestimate our capacity to execute plans within given timelines, often resulting in overly ambitious plans that fall short of realization.
Optimism bias makes us believe that we are less likely to face negative outcomes, influencing us to set goals without fully considering the hurdles. The planning fallacy, on the other hand, lulls us into assuming tasks will take less time than they actually will. Recognizing these biases is the first step toward realistic and effective planning, ensuring our roadmap is both ambitious and achievable. More on this here.
Key Components of a RevOps Roadmap
A comprehensive RevOps roadmap should encompass several key elements. When you ask your team for this, ensure the roadmap includes:
- Strategic Objectives: High-level goals that align with the company’s overall vision and revenue targets.
- Key Results: Specific, measurable outcomes that indicate success for each objective.
- Initiatives: Major projects or actions that need to be undertaken to achieve the key results. These should be backed by your internal data or industry trends as much as possible.
- Tasks: Detailed steps or activities required to complete each initiative.
- Timelines: Estimated durations and deadlines for completing tasks and initiatives.
- Owners: Designated team members responsible for executing each task and initiative.
What Format Should the Roadmap be in?
A RevOps roadmap should be visualized in a way that makes it easy to understand and follow. It can be structured as a timeline, a Gantt chart, or our personal favorite - in project management tool like Asana. Strategic objectives should be at the top, cascading down into initiatives and tasks, each associated with timelines and ownership. This visualization ensures that everyone involved has a clear understanding of the roadmap, ownership, due dates, and how their work contributes to the larger goals.
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Crafting Your RevOps Roadmap: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Align with Company Goals: Start by ensuring you create a roadmap that aligns with the overarching goals of your company. This alignment is crucial for ensuring that your revenue operations efforts are contributing directly to the company's growth. If needed, hold a meeting to get everyone on the same page.
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Do the Research: Run an analysis on your conversion rates, TAM, ICP, pipeline, wins, losses - any component of the funnel that could be optimized. Identify the biggest areas of opportunity for improvement. Having each member of your team do a "Stop/Start/Continue" is one way to guide and format the analysis so you can see what's working, what's not, and surface new initiatives to try in a data-driven way.
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Identify Strategic Objectives: Define clear, actionable objectives based on the company’s goals. These should be ambitious yet achievable, with a focus on driving significant impact on revenue.
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Set Key Results: For each objective, identify key results that will serve as indicators of success. These should be quantifiable and time-bound to enable clear tracking and assessment. Ensure you have metrics for the current state, and tracking set up so you can evaluate the progress and impact of your initiatives.
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Outline Initiatives and Tasks: Break down each objective into initiatives and further into specific tasks. This breakdown will provide a clear action plan for your team, detailing what needs to be accomplished to achieve each key result.
- Review & Align with Leadership: Set up a time to review a draft of the roadmap with leadership. This is your opportunity as a revenue leader to provide feedback, reprioritize initiatives, and ensure you RevOps team has the skills (check out our skillsmap to identify gaps in your team) and capacity required to execute on the plan. If you don't have the headcount or the technical skills to execute - this is where bringing an agency to help on a short term basis can be an effective solution to proactively mitigate against missed deadlines or incomplete projects.
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Assign Ownership and Deadlines: Clearly assign team members responsible for each task and initiative, along with deadlines. This clarity helps ensure accountability and keeps the roadmap on track.
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Visualize the Roadmap: Create a visual representation of your roadmap to share with your team and stakeholders. This could be in the form of a Gantt chart, Asana board, or any other format that best suits your team's needs and preferences.
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Review and Adapt: Regularly review the roadmap with your team and stakeholders, adapting as necessary based on progress, challenges, and changes in the business environment. This flexibility is key to maintaining relevance and effectiveness.
A RevOps roadmap is more than a strategic plan; it's a blueprint for operational excellence and revenue growth. By clearly defining objectives, key results, and the steps required to achieve them, and by visualizing this plan in an accessible format, you empower your team to execute with precision and purpose. As a revenue leader, asking your team to develop and adhere to a strategic RevOps roadmap is a critical step towards achieving your company's ambitious goals.
Questions? Don't have a team to build a roadmap? Need help executing the roadmap? Let's chat!
