The Value of a Business Operations Team

Funny how many startup SaaS companies don’t think about how to build an effective operational model to maximize efficiencies and effectiveness early on. Start ups are generally using their higher cost employees to spend 50-60% of their time on administrative processes and technology support tasks instead of hiring lower cost operation specialists to take on these time consuming tasks?

Not to mention that the higher cost roles have experience and expertise specifically for their roles. They are not experienced in how to build state of the art processes and automate these processes, ensure data standardization and correctness and build the effective reporting the business needs to answer the simple questions of

85% of the highest paid roles in start up and early stage SaaS companies are spending 40-50% of their time on administrative and operational tasks and activities making them less effective.

By hiring one Business Operations person, you will enable your leadership team to be 50% more effective and more productive to drive results faster.

Let’s dig into each of the areas where business operations or revenue operations roles can make a business impact and discuss when to hire?

The Impact of the Business/Revenue Operations role

As you think about how to support your Customer Lifecycle Management Model from Strategic Corporate Planning and GTM Planning to your executable Operational plan, there are many moving parts that have to be coordinated to ensure a smooth customer experience and the ability to execute with quality and excellence in a repeatable manner.

Quality Stage

As prospects come to know your company and more about what you offer, Marketing is owning the experience and then handing it off to Sales as inquiring prospects turn into interested prospects.

Breaking this down further there are various operational aspects to consider to manage the quality and consistency in;

• Brand Management

• Demand Gen

• Managing TOFU, MOFU funnel

• Sales Enablement

Within Brand Management the Marketing team is managing PR, Analysts, Press Releases, Customer Events, the company image, reputation and voice. Each of these activities requires many operational tasks and management to ensure the content quality, logistical coordination, travel, team member and attendee communication and the timeliness of delivery.

For Demand Gen, the operations team ensures that the GTM plan and Territory plan is the bases for the definition and configuration of the lead flows from TOFU through to BOFU to ensure no lead goes unworked.

The Operations team is responsible for designing and configuring the automatic workflows from every lead type through the funnels, assigned appropriately through the sales teams and tracking all funnel metrics to determine what is working and not working.

The last element is the management off all the Sales Enablement materials and training required to ensure the Sales team is fully equipped to deliver on their quotas every quarter.

Acquire Stage

Transitioning to the next stage in the lifecycle, the Acquire stage, the Sales team becomes the quarter back taking over the customer experience from the Marketing team. It is here where Sales needs to turn as many prospects into customers. The Sales team is having to manage equipping and training the sales team, qualifying each lead, managing the sales cycle for each qualified lead through to close, managing their outbound lead generation and the transition to the CS team for every new customer and co-managing customer expansion opportunities. Within each of these activities are so many tasks, processes, standards, policies, procedures, cross functional team members and compliance regulations for the sales team members to manage. This is why an operations team is critical to support these operational elements, generating the most efficient and effective support system for the Sales team to be successful while providing the most accurate data and reporting for the leadership team to have a pulse on what is working and not working.

Implement Stage

Once Sales closes a new customer, they will transition the customer to the Customer Success and Professional Services team. The CS and PS teams are responsible for managing every customer implementation, following a best practice methodology, scoping prospects services, SOWs, scope of work delivered, educating customers, supporting customers, managing customer roadmap plans, and providing services on a global basis in multiple time zones and languages.

Imagine the quantity of processes, policies and procedures to support this stage of the lifecycle. There are hundreds of moving parts to manage to ensure a customer has a standardized, high quality and consistent experience to ensure the CS and PS teams deliver on the high quality outcomes and ROI. The coordination required across all the departments is key to ensuring these teams can deliver on the customer’s goals and objectives.

The Operations team is the stealth function enabling the teams to follow a set of best practice standards; and manage, monitor, track, report, document, guide, and coordinate all processes; and train all team members to adhere to the playbooks they create and maintain.

Value and Renew and Expand Stages

With customers in production use of the solution, the operations team supports reporting a 360 view of the customer with a dashboard that tracks the KPIs for the Customer base;

• NPS, CSAT, CES

• Testimonies, Reference status, Customer Success stories

• Time to Launch, Time to Value, Customer ROI stats

• Average hours per customer implementation by target market

• Average education hours

• SLA attainment

• etc.

The Operations Framework that Supports GTM Plan

Notice that within each stage of the CLM model there is a designated quarter back and a set of supporting roles to ensure the customer experience within that stage is standardized and optimized for quality delivery in a repeatable manner.

This is how the Operational requirements are defined that set the standards, policies, and procedures to support each process required to support the ultimate customer experience within that stage.

Here is an example of an Operational SOP to support the CS Organization for the Implementation and Value stages.

80% of these activities can be managed by a Revenue/Business Operations role and is more cost effective to have an Operations team manage and execute these tasks allowing your higher paid roles to be more effective.

The purpose of a Revenue or Business Operations team is to;

1. Maximize Revenue Generation capabilities to drive results to revenue targets.

2. Optimize consistent adherence to processes, standards, policies and procedures to drive efficient and effective business practices.

3. Maximize the effective use of technologies to drive innovation, scalability and cost savings.

4. Enhance the customer experience throughout the Customer Lifecycle Management business approach.

5. Improve collaboration across all departments and organizations

6. Manage compliance and data security standards

Many companies have dysfunctional operations even though the product they deliver is state of the art. You almost wonder how they get such a great product out the door with such a dysfunctional operational process.

In order to grow 10X, SaaS companies may have a Corporate Strategy and Financial plan, but they do not have an Operational plan that defines the details of how they are going to deliver on their strategic plan. This type of plan is what defines all the operational tactics, activities, projects and processes that have to be developed, managed and executed in order for the company to meet their end of year goals.

Managing Performance across the company

Due to the various moving parts within each organization, it is very important for the Operations team to bring all the KPI performance data together into one view for all executives to review and understand. The leadership team should have a culture that allows for open conversation regarding areas of under or over performance to have clarity on “What is Working?” and “Not Working” in the GTM strategic plan and more specifically the operational plan.

Here is an example of an executive dashboard that can be reviewed weekly in the leadership meeting with a red, yellow, green color coding to help highlight quickly the areas that are doing well and not doing well.

When should you hire a Business/Revenue Operations role?

The real answer is as soon as you can. Most SaaS companies actually have the budget to hire these roles earlier than they think. The common mistake is that they hire too many high paid roles too soon that eat up their budget dollars. If they build into their headcount plan the doer roles with mid level management first, they can hire the operations team early on. This approach will enable the higher paid roles to have the support they need to execute on their strategy and plan quicker and more effectively when they do come on board.

The other common approach you see is that the SaaS companies hire the senior level roles first and allow them to build their own teams as they see fit. This option is good as long as the budget can support the organizational roles the senior level management team is requesting. If the business or revenue operations roles are not part of their plan, they should be or they will suffer early on with slow execution and a lack of results.

The mission of a good operations team is to help equip each team member with what is needed to do their job effectively and deliver results. That is the end game; to build a team that can be collaborative across departments and has what they need to do their job to the highest level without excuses. This team is the secret to executing on any GTM plan and roll changes more effectively and faster.

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