“Operations” is broad, but it can be easily defined as all the processes and paths that take place behind-the-scenes.
To discover more about the operations role, I listened to four episodes from the Operations podcast hosted by Sean Lane, the director of operations at Drift. Here’s what I learned about creating a well-oiled operations machine.
“Everything is math,” says Auvik’s CMO Jacqui Murphy. Everything in their marketing ops team is built off of it. And everything they do has one goal: treating the business development representatives as their customer. Because of this mindset, her team prioritizes passing off the best leads possible.
While her team does track metrics like website traffic and click heatmaps, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is the number of actual meetings booked for the sales team. This is what helps the business grow, everything else is window dressing.
And since ‘everything is math,’ one of the most important tools at Auvik has been a ‘work of art spreadsheet’ built by one of her teammates that inputs conversion rates, over-the-lines for meetings booked, etc., and reverse-engineers those numbers to tell them “Here’s how many leads you need from all your sources to hit revenue targets.”
In Jacqui’s words, thinking a spreadsheet is a work of art is “something only an ops person can say.”
Jacqui also believes that giving her team face-to-face time is vital. “The math gives you the data, but the magic comes from the people.” Without that caring and compassion between team members, without being friends and knowing each other’s struggles, it all falls apart.
The answer to dichotomies is usually “Both.” Math and people. You can’t have one and not the other.
FunnelCake’s Marko Savic says that scaling up operations can be just as much a revenue-driver as a marketing campaign. The only way to make this happen is by bridging the divide between marketing and sales.
Marko embodies the mindset that an operations employee must have: dig through the data and find the problem. He did this for two months, trudging through every lead and every deal in Salesforce to find out what was happening between marketing getting a lead and that lead being presumed lost by sales. He found that most of the problems happened in the handoff between marketing and sales, so he built a framework that spanned the entire customer journey to ensure this didn’t happen anymore.
One of his clients had a couple of standout SDRs, but when they looked at their leads, none of them closed. Looking at the people with the most leads that closed revealed SDRs with a lower number of total leads, but the leads were developed and tailored. The leads that closed were more diligently qualified before being passed on.
Operations’ goal is to create scaleability and repeatability in the process. Doing so can generate revenue more than simply throwing money at the problem. If your process is smooth, then the money you do throw at your problems will have a greater return on investment.
Brett Queener mastered the idea of specialization. In his time as EVP and GM of Salesforce, he led the charge in making sure that they kept their efforts laser-focused. A one-size-fits-all approach does not yield good results! Market fit is paramount!
When you’re starting out, the easiest mistake to make is to stretch yourself too far. Don’t focus on more than you can handle. Scale your operations team at the same rate. If you don’t scale operations and the number of reps at a relatively similar rate, you’re going to either underperform or you’re going to need more reps.
Finally, Sean Lane talks about the biggest mistake operations teams can make:
Forgetting who your customer is.
Operations, at its heart, has salespeople as its customers. Everything you do, every process you create is something a salesperson has to use and it is incumbent upon ops to not make it a burden.
“Ops teams have to be the psychologists for their organizations: see problems, predict obstacles, and prescribe fixes.” Every new process risks upsetting the balance, especially in a fast-growing company. But potentially upsetting balance is better than allowing leads to stagnate or fall through the cracks between departments.