Revenue Operations presents the best commercial model to achieve sustainable and scalable growth, and organic growth creates the most firm value. Thus, Revenue Operations provides the best approach to create firm value.

In Part I, we learned that Revenue Operations comprises two component systems. The first, the management system, aligns the people in your revenue teams. The second, the operating system, combines technology, processes, and data assets to help your revenue teams generate consistent and scalable growth.

In Part II we walked through the management system for Revenue Operations and its 18 elements designed in detail. Coming out of that section, you should decide what the best leadership model is for your business.

In Part III, we reviewed the operating system and broke it down into nine building blocks that connect your growth assets, commercial insights, and value drivers. After that section, you should be thinking about what your Revenue Operating System looks like and how to improve each building block.

Now it's time to put those all together in your business to create value.

Most important, we want to show you how to take effective action and how to link individual actions together to amplify the overall result. Revenue Operations will work for any business, large or small. It will help every player in your organization understand their role on the revenue team and what is needed from them to create firm value through growth. It will create value by establishing the structure for continuous, radical, and even transformative process improvement in marketing, sales, and service performance.

With an understanding of the management and operating systems in hand, the question you are probably asking yourself now is: “How do I get started?” Welcome to the concept of Smart Actions.

Deliver Growth with Smart Actions

Smart Actions are a set of related activities that meet four criteria: they are practical to execute, interconnect multiple building blocks of your operating system, are accretive financially, and link together with other Smart Actions toward a longer-term objective.

1. Actionable: They must be effectively achievable with existing assets, skills, capital budgets, and management bandwidth.
2. Connected: They should unite multiple building blocks of the operating system together to create more leverage, simplify the selling process, and eliminate key points of failure in your core selling processes.
3. Accretive: They will generate short-term financial gains by reducing leakage, improving sales performance, and eliminating waste. They also stack together to generate higher long-term returns on your technology, data, and selling infrastructure assets.
4. Scalable: They create the foundation for consistent nonlinear growth that more predictably creates value and margin at lower cost. Smart Actions link together in chains whose effects stack on top of and amplify one another.

Although Smart Actions must be achievable within the current limits of your organization today, they usually serve as incremental steps toward a larger commercial transformation.

Transformation means change, and many people and organizations don't like change. Fear of change threatens business innovation, including the successful deployment of Revenue Operations. Many transformation initiatives have failed because they were too ambitious and required too many cultural shifts. Long-term investments, even good ones, sometimes distract good, effective short-term management. Micro-disruptions like Smart Actions offer a more reliable path to balanced success.

The CEOs, executives, and operational managers interviewed in our research voiced common concerns about the perceived amount of change involved and the time and commitment it will take to realize benefit from a Revenue Operations model. The leaders who succeeded in transforming their go-to-market models, however, came away with three important learnings:

• Commercial transformation is a process of continuous incremental improvements. The comprehensive and integrated nature of Revenue Operations may create the perception that these changes must happen all at once to work. Seasoned executives understand that adoption of the Revenue Operations model in the front office can be executed in stages, similar to applying the principles of Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and Total Quality Management in back-office processes.
• Transformation starts at the top. Delegating change management too far down in the organization will inhibit or even stall efforts to align marketing, sales, and service. Organizations that have successfully moved the needle, such as Avaya, Cisco, Honeywell, GHX, Splunk, and Pentair, have CEO support for transformation and have put in place the leadership models outlined in chapter 5 to better manage commercial assets, operations, and infrastructure across the enterprise.
• The cost of not changing is greater than the pain of change. Maintaining the status quo will often lead to diminished competitive differentiation, unrealized opportunities in the market, higher selling costs, seller attribution, and account churn.

The executives running GHX, iconectiv, Inmar Intelligence, Fortive, and Honeywell have all used Smart Actions to achieve commercial transformation. They are instilling a culture of continuous learning and improvement and are stair-stepping their way through a series of high-impact changes to their selling models.

For example, Peter Ford, VP of Global Sales at iconectiv, improved the performance of his revenue team by taking inspiration from Dave Brailsford, who led the British cycling team to Olympic gold. When Brailsford took over the team in 2002, Britain had won a single medal in its history of competing. Brailsford transformed that team by breaking down each element of their performance and striving for just a 1% improvement rate for each. He utilized marginal transformation processes and, seven years later, the team took seven of ten gold medals.¹⁵⁶

Six Proven Smart Actions That Work

To get you started, we provide six examples of Smart Actions successfully used by other leading companies. Use them in your business as-is, or with a little customization. Individually, these bite-sized and financially viable stairsteps can be piloted, sequenced, and measured to transform your organization in ways that are politically, practically, and financially achievable across the organization.

They also can serve as templates for you to author your own Smart Actions (keeping in mind the four criteria). Such a template will help you position tactical initiatives against strategic rationale and to communicate expectations and responsibilities. This provides a way to compare, contrast, and challenge even the activities of your own teams and your partners (consultancies, agencies, integrators, etc.). If those groups come back with recommendations better or more tailored to your business, articulating them as a Smart Action should make them understandable and digestible.

As we discussed in Part III, this approach also sets up a common vocabulary around what your operating system has and how it can best be assembled to deliver growth. Models, systems, building blocks, Smart Actions – we used deliberate language in describing Revenue Operations, and you should, too. Even if you call them something else, a common vocabulary across your teams and your partners will dramatically improve communication, collaboration, and commitment across all corners of your business. In our conversations with hundreds of growth executives, six Smart Actions continually came up. Ideally, you can see how one or more of these could help your business start building a more scalable, sustainable selling system today:

1. Get better visibility into the revenue cycle
2. Simplify the selling workflow
3. Share marketing insights with frontline sellers
4. Develop and retain high performing selling talent
5. Make selling channels more effective
6. Streamline and personalize the selling content supply chain

Get Better Visibility into the Revenue Cycle

Our first Smart Action aggregates, analyzes, and transforms your customer engagement data into commercial insights that give you better visibility into the entire revenue cycle. Such insights include opportunity potential, account health, seller performance, and pipeline activity, regarded as the four most important insights managers need to better manage their selling system.

• Visibility is actionable because the seller activity data, customer engagement statistics, product usage data, and financial transaction data required to assemble and create these metrics already exists in your organization. The analytic tools and skills to get better visibility have become democratized and available.
• Better visibility through data is connected because it requires you to link four parts of your Revenue Operating System together to create value. It combines customer activity data from your customer-facing technology with seller activity data from your revenue operations stack in an engagement hub to provide revenue intelligence.
• It's accretive because it will allow you to better measure and manage seller resources, allocate them to the best opportunities, stop wasting time on accounts and opportunities that are not worth it, and actively manage customer lifetime value.
• It is scalable because the systems in your business will continue to generate more and more customer, product, and seller insights that can provide you facts. Advances in analytics tools and your own acumen allow your team to create ever-increasing improvements in performance by more accurately managing sellers, balancing their quota assignments, penetrating top accounts, and tightening revenue forecasts.
• You can align your metrics and incentives with the activities and behaviors that lead to profitable commercial outcomes – things like selling more to customers, at higher prices, and keeping them around longer. You can use advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create customer engagement metrics. These metrics create performance measurements based on real-time information about sales engagement, deal attractiveness, content usage, and persona-based interactions. This provides you a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality.

Figure 11.1 outlines the requirements to execute revenue lifecycle insights. It is based on the successful experiences of metrics-focused businesses, such as Fortive, Ciena, AT&T, and Pentair, which we profiled in chapter 8. Don't think of these templates as a wiring diagram or instruction manual. Think of them more like a chemistry set. If you combine two elements (hydrogen and oxygen) in the right mixture you create something useful and life sustaining – water. In this case, combine your first-party data generated by your technology to create something valuable and useful: a fact-based dashboard.

The key element here is the first-party data generated by your email, websites, calendars, and recorded conversations when customers engage with you. This data will provide a foundation for customer engagement, and seller activity data and will likely reveal a great deal about how your revenue teams are performing across the entire revenue cycle in essential areas like engagement, transaction, cross-selling, and retention.

Simplify the Selling Workflow

Our second Smart Action connects the dots across your revenue enablement technology portfolio to create more value to simplify and streamline the selling workflow. How this qualifies as a Smart Action:

• Simplification is actionable. Organizations have many key assets and capabilities necessary to support the seller workflow, including CRM, digital asset management, and sales enablement tools. Though desirable, you don't need all these tools to make selling simpler for frontline sellers. Nor do they have to be fully connected. Simplifying auditing and codifying the workflow and enforcing it using digital adoption tools will generate significant improvements and returns.
• It is connected. Simplifying selling workflow requires weaving your CRM, sales enablement, sales readiness, and digital asset management solutions to eliminate key points of failure, friction, and manual labor in day-to-day seller workflow. These solutions are largely managed in different functional silos in most B2B organizations.
• It's accretive. Simplifying the selling workflow allows you to eliminate waste, redundancy, and underutilized technology assets in your revenue enablement portfolio, yielding immediate cost savings. It will also improve your return on assets because it increases the utilization of those tools. Better adoption of the selling process and tools can dramatically improve the productivity and experience of sales reps, which builds the confidence, performance, and loyalty of sellers. Seller stress is a major contributor to attrition.
• It is scalable. The more seamless the seller experience and the more sellers adopt technology, then the more technology will serve as a force multiplier that elevates the performance of your entire revenue team.

Figure 11.2 shows a how simplification can be achieved with the creation of a digital selling platform, based on the successful experiences of Hitachi Vantara we profiled in chapter 7.

The key elements here include your core CRM and sales enablement platforms. It's important to incorporate all systems that support the selling process with content: digital asset management, competitive intelligence, “configure, price, quote” (CQP) tools, and dynamic pricing software solutions. Ideally, you can incorporate learning and development and readiness solutions that give you the capability to deliver training in context during the sales process.

Here are four steps you might take to execute this Smart Action:

• First, establish centralized stewardship and reconfigure your commercial technology portfolio across functions.
• Next, conduct a formal assessment of your technology portfolio architecture and road map to reduce duplication, disconnected apps, and underutilized assets. Also, identify ways to improve value, impact, and the seller experience.

  

• In parallel, audit the revenue technology portfolio to ID ways to improve utilization, productivity, return on assets, and the seller experience.
• Finally, take advantage of obvious opportunities to improve rep speed, engagement, and time focused on the customer while reconfiguring the commercial technology infrastructure.

Share Marketing Insights with Frontline Sellers

The third Smart Action monetizes the digital selling infrastructure with Account-Based Marketing. Synthesizing the marketing signals from inside and outside your business with your CRM will help execute Account-Based Marketing programs that optimize account coverage and maximize the return on sales and marketing technology

This is smart because:

• This is actionable. Every organization spends a big chunk of their marketing budgets on owned, earned, and paid digital marketing and the systems necessary to deliver that information to frontline sales and service teams.
• It is connected. It requires you to link customer-facing systems and programs across your technology systems that support customer-facing employees and to create a much better picture of activity and opportunity in key accounts.
• It is accretive. It will allow you to maximize the financial return on your large investment in owned, earned, and paid digital marketing media programs and technology systems that support them to help account teams optimize account coverage and penetration.
• It is scalable. It creates a closed-loop learning system that allows your organization to continuously improve and enhance account coverage and converge resources faster in order to realize opportunities in those accounts. The more layers of information an account leader has and the more feedback they get on actions and plays to develop accounts, the more effective key account selling teams will be.

Figure 11.3 lays out how to build an ABM program based on the best practices we profiled in chapter 7.

There are three key elements to this Smart Action: your first-party data; specialized software to transform, orchestrate, and map those data streams to existing account structures; and contact profiles that reside in your CRM or other system of record. Once you attach marketing signals to the account profiles, you can use a variety of platforms (CRM, sales enablement, or sales engagement solutions) to share that information to sales reps via alerts, account priorities, recommendations for the best content; and recommended next-best actions to pursue. Such push notifications can also trigger coordinated marketing campaigns that engage stakeholders in the accounts.

The progression of steps to deliver this outcome are:

• Inventory the first- and third-party data streams in your business that might inform a program like this.
• Find gaps in the way your organization aggregates, transforms, orchestrates, and maps anonymous engagement data (people who engage digitally but don't fully identify their affiliation to you) to account profiles and structures in CRM.
• Identify software solutions that can fill those gaps. NOTE: Finding possible solutions here can be confusing because vendors call themselves a variety of names ranging from Account Orchestration, Account Engagement Platforms (like 6sense), and even Revenue Operations platforms.
• Start the process of converting and feeding signals of activity, intent, churn, or propensity to buy to account teams. This does not have to be perfect at first. Any effort to create a closed-loop approach will create real impact and pave the way to future improvements. For example, you can use the data to refine customer targets based on more precise data-driven signals of intent, win probability, fit, and potential. You can also use the data to enable measures that trigger actions to improve the customer experience at every stage of the cross-functional customer journey.

  

• Continually work toward providing your revenue teams real-time guidance based on core customer engagement and seller activity data sets.

Develop and Retain High-Performing Selling Talent

Our fourth Smart Action integrates the learning and development processes. It unites your sales enablement and readiness platforms to create a closed-loop system for sales rep education, coaching, and reinforcement and measurement.

• This is smart because it will help you better develop and retain high-performing selling talent.
• This is actionable because most organizations already have the sales training, playbooks, learning, development, enablement, and analytics technology to put this connected solution together. Until now, they have lived in different functional silos.
• It is connected. It requires you to link your training and development systems with your sales enablement systems to your analytics teams to better support the rep development and retention process.
• It is accretive and will allow you to shrink the time it takes to develop and ramp productive sellers. It will also help you augment selling interactions by improving value selling skills and applying best practices – a major opportunity we reviewed in chapter 9. Most sellers will stay with their current employer if they receive good coaching to help them succeed and develop skills.
• It is scalable. A closed-loop system that connects training, behavior, and performance allows you to measure how well sellers absorb and adopt training. It uses actual sales interactions and customer responses to check the real-world impact of training. Managers and sellers become much more precise about which skills a rep needs to work on, and about what gaps exist in their playbooks and value-selling approaches.

Figure 11.4 pulls together an integrated learning and development process based on the best practices we profiled in chapter 9.

The key elements of this Smart Action include many of the solutions and assets in your revenue enablement systems, including sales enablement and learning management systems and the selling content libraries that support them. They also include selling methodologies, selling playbooks, and development program assets that are generally curated by the training and development organization.

To reconfigure your technology infrastructure and better support readiness, training, and development, you can follow this series of steps:

• Audit your learning and development technology portfolio to improve visibility, speed to ramp, skills, coaching and reinforcement, and to identify gaps in the readiness, enablement, and reporting workflow.
• Integrate the learning and development technology portfolio into an integrated and closed-loop process. This process will provide feedback, reinforcement, and visibly into seller activity and compliance. Changes in the vendor landscape should make this easier, as several sales enablement providers are building or buying training capabilities to bolster their solutions.
• Create measures that close the loop between seller performance, training effectiveness, and customer outcomes. These will lay the foundation for AI to evaluate selling skills and performance more precisely and quickly.
• Integrate sales readiness, enablement, and engagement where possible today while creating a consensus road map to direct future investments to improve seller ramp, readiness, skills, and accountability.

Make Selling Channels More Effective

The fifth sample Smart Action automates direct sales and service channels with real-time, data-driven selling. Connecting your sales enablement, CRM, conversational intelligence, and digital marketing systems will make your selling channels more effective.

• This is smart because it will allow you to maximize the potential of customer-facing resources during the limited 18% of the customer journeys where buyers actually engage with humans.
• This is actionable. Organizations already have the fundamental customer engagement and seller activity data they need – recorded conversations, content consumption by clients, CRM, and exchange data from email and calendars – to pilot real-time guidance and coaching at scale. You just need the executive mandate to access and use it. Using advanced analytics and sales AI tools, you can already get an 80% good-enough picture of buyer engagement and seller activity. Even that can provide real-time guidance to reps about the right response, content, action, or sales play that improves interactions during the moments that matter in the customer journey.
• It is connected. It requires you to link recorded conversations from the call center, marketing signals, and insights about customers and ensures that CRM profiles are enriched and up to date with the actual results of calls in real time. This approach connects and aligns CRM, sales enablement, conversational intelligence, and sales engagement systems into one selling motion to create more value.
• It is accretive. Better knowledge sharing will improve selling performance, which will show up in conversion rates on sales and service conversations. Sharing information across the company will generate greater returns on your investments in CRM, marketing data, sales enablement, selling content, sales training methodologies, and conversational intelligence. It will also save reps time in planning for calls and inputting call notes into CRM. Importantly, continuous, real-time, one-to-one coaching allows overworked sales managers to actively manage and coach more reps, keeping a tighter connection with the field and accelerating how quickly new reps ramp to full productivity.
• It is scalable. It allows sales managers to help more sellers in real time. It enforces the selling motions, playbooks, and methods that document the best practices of your customer-facing employees. To keep up with rapidly changing customer behavior, sales leaders tell us they need to increase the speed at which they deliver selling guidance, coaching, signals of intent, and content recommendations to their frontline sellers.
• The speed of communication internally accelerates to keep pace with the rapidly changing customer behavior. It helps frontline sellers respond immediately and completely to new school buyers while also better reacting to verbal cues in selling interactions.

Figure 11.5 shows what is required to execute real-time, data-driven selling based on the successful experiences of HPE and ChowNow that we profiled in chapter 7.

The key element of this Smart Action includes a sales engagement solution capable of aggregating engagement data from many sources, including recorded conversations, CRM, sales enablement, and marketing signals. That solution must record sales conversations and compare them to selling outcomes and best practices. It does so by integrating with CRM, training, and enablement systems to create a real-time, closed-loop information flow. This eliminates latency throughout the selling process.

The steps you might take to achieve this outcome might follow this progression:

• Find practical ways to get control of the four core sources of customer engagement and seller activity data that already exists: content, email, calendar, and conversational commerce systems. Look to fully leveraging your first-party data that resides within CRM, marketing automation, and digital marketing platforms for business decision making.
• Inventory and map out the different sales enablement, conversational intelligence, and sales readiness solutions and capabilities you already have. Visualize what it will take to support data-driven guided selling and prescriptive insights in real time.
• Pilot real-time seller guidance and coaching where you can. But don't let a quest for perfection get in the way of progress.
• Establish more data-driven measurements, priorities, and pipeline reviews based on actual facts about customer engagement. These will help you to prioritize follow-up on opportunities based on data about probability, potential, engagement, and response.

Streamline and Personalize the Selling Content Supply Chain

Our sixth Smart Action uses advanced analytics and selling solutions to evolve from content management to Intelligent Response Management. This streamlines processes, generating and delivering highly contextual selling content to customers at scale.

Intelligent Response Management is an advanced concept that uses AI and ML to create a knowledge base of content built on actual question-and-answer exchanges between customers and sales reps. The software makes this aggregate knowledge available to entire revenue teams, on demand, with no wait times. A simple query provides the answer your salesperson needs to deliver their best answer, with immediate results – whether a rep is writing a text, email, proposal, presentation, or an RFP.

This notion goes beyond the prevailing content management practices of writing content to spec, creating top-down information hierarchies to organize it, and establishing a single source of truth as the control point of all content. It helps sellers meet buyer expectations for faster, more complete and relevant content as they engage with frontline sales, marketing, and service employees across direct, virtual, and digital touchpoints. Plus it's a lot faster and simpler than having sales reps use many different digital asset management, content management, CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), and sales enablement systems to find, tailor, and deliver the content they need in live selling situations.

Intelligent Response Management is fundamental to Revenue Operations as it turns expensive selling assets – selling content, customer data, and engagement technologies – into customer conversations and selling outcomes that grow revenues, profits, and enterprise value. This effectively blurs the lines between many traditional software categories such as digital asset management, content management, configure, CPQ, and training and development.

• This is actionable because most of the solutions needed to generate selling content already exist—they just need to be connected. The best approach here is to treat the content supply chain like a cross-functional process. That process stems from customer questions and will yield big improvements in performance, throughput, and clarity for future content investments.
• It is connected because it makes important selling content available to the sales engagement, enablement, and readiness platform that can deliver to sellers in time to meet buyer expectations for faster, more complete, and relevant material as they engage with frontline sales, marketing, and service employees across direct, virtual, and digital touchpoints.
• It is accretive because it dramatically increases utilization of your selling content assets and eliminates waste, redundancy, and underperforming content assets. The dollars add up quickly along this process, such that owned digital selling channels and related content represent a large, growing percentage of your total operating and capital budget. For marketing, 80% of organizations are increasing their investment in content to feed critical selling systems like recommendation engines, sales enablement, and automated chatbots.
• It is scalable because it leverages content in more channels and customer interactions and provides an intelligent basis for creating and planning new, more effective content. The more content creation and curation is dictated by direct customer Q&A sequences, the more efficient and effective your content operations will be.

Figure 11.6 represents requirements to keep in mind as you move from content management to intelligent response management using the best practices and client examples we profiled in chapter 8.

There are a wide variety of elements that factor into Intelligent Response Management. They include many of the assets and capabilities that span the cross-functional content supply chain from creation to customer. These include the solutions that generate and store content such as proposal, digital asset management, and competitive intelligence systems, as well as the people (subject matter experts), external agencies, and contractors who create content.

A hub glues this all together and centralizes the management of all content – from organization (taxonomy) to quality control. Central to this hub is having an AI-enabled recommender engine (e.g. RFPIO) to make intelligent recommendations of the best content, conversation, and actions that will advance the sale in a given situation.

This contextual and compliant content should be available to reps and delivered to the customer through any system that reps use to engage with the customer. Internally this would consist of CPQ systems, sales enablement systems, and sales training and readiness systems – but also email, chat, and direct-to-the-customer channels such as chatbots or ecommerce websites that answer questions and suggest content.

Ultimately, in a mature system, end-to-end response management is enabled across the enterprise, delivering contextually correct and up-to-date content through a mix of touch points and channels.

The steps you would take to achieve this outcome might follow this progression:

• First, establish operational ownership, organization, and deployment of selling content and IP across functions.
• Then, organize all cross-functional readiness, validation, playbook, through-leadership, and product content using a common architecture and taxonomy.
• Create a single source of truth for content based on a common taxonomy and architecture to support enablement, readiness, and response management.
• Make content available to support selling action recommendations and plays through a wider variety of enablement, readiness, and revenue enhancement systems.

There are many other Smart Actions you can take to generate more sustainable and scalable growth with your existing commercial resources. The executives we interviewed were taking a wide variety of steps to build out Revenue Operating Systems. We will make these recipes for success available on the website associated with this book over time.

In the next two chapters we will give you examples and financial tools to help you zero in on which of these Smart Actions are the most relevant to your unique business, based on the biggest challenges your organization faces.