Chapter 4: RevOps Principle #2: Process -- Quotes
To answer the question: What roles do process strategy and documentation play in RevOps?
Hilary Headlee said, “It's literally my job to share information, to influence, to move, to act. Because my whole job, if you actually go back to, ‘how do I define RevOps,’ for where I'm at in the leadership role, I'm really just trying to get people to do more or less of something, do it better, and do it faster. So it's just change management and communication on steroids at times, all wrapped around the sales ops pie piece. It only gets done through documentation so I can go and communicate it simply, easily, and help drive to that if that's needed.”
Mallory Lee said, “I do think this should be part of RevOps, specifically for the departments that the team is supporting. For example, we do not support DevOps, so I would not expect our team to document their work. I like to partner tightly with enablement on these projects.”
Mike Ewing said, “We all create all these different workarounds, which ultimately create friction. You can remove that friction by having data sharing and process collaboration between those departments. And when you add people collaboration on top of that, you have those the people aligned and you have to data share and process collaboration, that's called revenue operations…If you skip that bit and you say, ‘oh my systems are all messed up, just help me fix my systems,’ you're ultimately not going to be successful.”
Rosalyn Santa Elena said, “As an operations person, you are always thinking about the strategy and being involved in the strategy. Ideally, you're leading it, but even if you're not, you've got to be involved in the strategy because you're the one who has to go and execute on it. That's why I think strategy also belongs with RevOps because the ops people are the closest to what's actually happening in the business.”
Briana Yarborough said, “A lot of time with operations, you get in the weeds a lot, and the true value of an operations individual is actually their strategic input on the organization as a whole. And so I think that's arguably one of the most important parts of that role.”
Alana Zimmer said, “You can build something beautiful or optimize something, but if it's not well documented, it can't be iterated and improved upon, [so] it's for nothing. Or if individuals don't know that it's been developed, [then] it doesn't serve its function. Likewise with process strategy, if there's no vision, if there isn't a clear alignment between stakeholders, if there isn't a proper assessment for the context or implications of what you're building for, [then] it’s not configured in a holistic manner.”
Sylvain Giuliani said, “Documentation is huge. There are so many best practices that RevOps needs to steal from Engineering teams like Documentation, Changelog / change communication, Customer Request triage/backlog, CI/CD, Multi environment (Test, staging, Prod), Alerting & monitoring.”
Nicole Pereira said, “The foundation of RevOps is process strategy, the documentation and adoption [of it], figuring out how the processes need to work, documenting how those work, and then making sure people use them ...People rely heavily on the tools and a lot less than the fact that it's how we use the tools, when we use the tools, who uses the tools, that matter. And that's where RevOps become successful, when that's in place.”
Lorena Morales said, “It’s funny that you said that because nobody focuses on it. Everyone's [talking about] tech stack...one of the reasons I was put in this role is because an employee satisfaction survey from all of our marketing teams specifically came back saying we can't see and don't know where any of our projects are with the services, and there's no documentation so when new people come on board, we have no idea how to train them to do anything.”
Crissy Saunders said, “The process strategy, everything should have a strategy behind it. And that's hard when there are a lot of small things that come up, especially if you're in a startup you're working fast and breaking things. But if you get to a certain point, you shouldn't be doing that. Building a great foundation from the start is better, really thinking through the strategy and whether it will scale with the business. Yes, you might not have everything all at once, and it's not super sophisticated. But always think about, ‘Are we going to grow out of this process, or the strategy, or are we going to maybe even grow into it?’ And stick to something that is going to scale but is also simple enough to maintain.”
Melissa McCready said, “For every organization that I go into... I come in and audit. And if you don't see documentation there, it's kind of like, ‘Oh, great, I have a labyrinth in front of me. I'm going to have to spend months figuring this out.’ So it absolutely stifles growth.
Alison Elworthy said, “Documentation, for example, is such a rich word: it can be a history of changes, or a detailed log of how something works. And when you have reliable documentation, alignment usually follows. And this helps teams to move quickly, make informed decisions, and remain in lockstep on complex projects and large-scale concepts.”
Alison continued, “Process strategy is just as important, but in a different way. As a RevOps team, we need to constantly evaluate the processes we use to support our GTM teams, seeking ways to reduce friction and unlock efficiency in the name of delivering a seamless customer experience.”
