As an organization grows, it is vital to regularly assess the quality of RevOps that align sales, marketing, and customer success practices to maximize revenue. Though this can seem daunting at first, the importance of implementing a seamless, transparent framework will create an environment that works well together towards one goal—measurable revenue growth.
Trust and Transparency
Communication, system monitoring, and capacity management are all components of strategic RevOps that rely on transparency to be successful. Transparency has been recognized in studies as a staple of trust, which makes a difference in the way teams operate and effectively get work done. Transparency should include how your company processes work, where you’re thriving, where you’re struggling—without it, even projects that end on time and on budget will be riddled with a lack of faith.
Like any new addition to company procedure, there are ways to practice transparency that can be gradually added as you grow. The baseline for any organization, big or small, is being open about where you are in the process. Being candid in the assessment of the current state of your company means everyone starts on the same page and can move forward together with trust that they have the complete picture. Even with a more desired future state in mind, if the current reality does not meet expectations, the key is to accept and persevere through any shortcomings to improve sustainably.
Set Your Team Up for Success, Not Failure
Taking steps towards nurturing a transparent environment will ensure that every individual knows their colleagues, systems, and company dynamics. Documenting your tech stack and how it connects to revenue generation and client relationships goes a long way in maintaining a unified and transparent awareness of what’s going on in daily interactions. A tech stack diagram serves to jumpstart discussions between departments and how various components help the overall initiative, from overarching long-term goals to menial everyday tasks.
Without visibility and open discussions, it’s easy for individuals to lose sight—and then trust—of what everyone is working on, which leads to chronic misalignment between colleagues and teams. It also creates unrealistic expectations of the organization’s current capacity, which causes teams to commit to more than they can accomplish and invites recurring issues down the line. If your goal is to have a salesperson reach out to new leads within five minutes, but your tech stack takes eight hours to sync the data, then everyone is set up to fail. This latency trickles down to individuals and prevents assurance that their own work is reaching its full potential. Transparency about the realistic capabilities for each step in a process allows individuals to meet expectations for their own work.
The Importance of SLA Transparency
Publishing your service-level agreements (SLAs) to be accessible by everyone helps foster a transparent and open culture. It’s as good for individuals as it is for the whole and eliminates conflicts that arise from a lack of information or awareness about the process and timeline. Transparent SLAs establish a concrete commitment that can be used to gauge team and process performance. When you fall short of a deadline or goal, it opens up the door for everyone to communicate and understand what went wrong. It highlights strengths that the organization is displaying and guides the company forward as it progresses towards success.
Your Demand Central is the single place where all published values, stated processes, and SLAs are paired with goals and metrics. Developing a single source of truth for everyone to see pulls together all critical information that your team needs to know to succeed. It simplifies the process of finding the materials individuals need to accomplish their best work, including how-to’s and rules for systems, agreements on roles and responsibilities, and outage notifications. It helps each team member feel included and gives them the ability to see what’s going on within the organization at any particular time. The foundation is visible to everyone, so there’s always a clear sense of where the organization is headed.
Transparency When Mistakes Happen
When projects end in a less-than-desirable way, a transparent post-mortem process creates a blameless culture to ensure problems don’t reoccur. Failing is never the goal in mind, but it can be a highly impactful step in the process of succeeding. If teams cultivate an environment where employees are afraid to make mistakes, it stunts the entire organization’s growth and makes for a poor work culture. Transparent and blameless postmortems give companies the chance to learn from past experiences and take away actionable lessons to preserve the trust that they’ve worked so hard to build.
Trust the Process to Succeed
At the end of the day, you’ve got to start wherever you are to move forward. Transparency is a must for any happy and successful organization, and it ultimately boils down to direct, honest, and consistent communication. Begin with that, and you’ll be able to scale up and incorporate more ways to continue on the path towards success. Transparency will give your company a strong foundation that can support other elements of mature revenue operations and strengthen it from the granular level to the bigger picture.
