You just raised a Round: 5 RevOps moves to ensure growth success
Congrats on your recent raise. As the wise Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In this case, with great funding comes great expectations.
Each funding round comes with its own set of expectations and priorities based on the size and strategic goals of the investment. Your round may have funded any number of initiatives including:
M&A
New product development
Expanded GTM team
Geographic expansion
RevOps plays a critical role in the execution of the plan and optimizing the opportunity before you. So, what do you need to be doing internally now that the round is closed and it’s time to deliver? Let’s go.
Align on objectives
Senior leadership has strategic goals tied to the raise. Collaborate with your leadership team to define the projects and actions required to fulfill those goals. Do you have new goals for ARR? Do you need to evaluate potential territory redesign to account for additional headcount? Are there new data requirements, such as cleaning or enriching account and contact data for international markets?
Confirming this new roadmap and timing will be key to make sure everyone is on the same page before effort is spent on the wrong initiatives.
Review capacity plans
If the raise comes with additional growth goals (assume it does), what changes to segmentation and coverage models need to be taken? Companies typically plan for some growth in sales headcount in growth phases, but adding a handful of new territories in a fiscal year is different than a 50% increase in headcount.
Understand that any large scale differences than your initial plan should have assumptions validated across teams. Ramp schedules, for example, may be even longer in new markets. New sellers in remote markets may not meet the same quotas or productivity levels as your HQ-based reps. Be prepared for different ramp-up schedules and possible cultural or market differences. Take all of this into consideration so your plans remain achievable for the company and the reps.
Confirm the supporting headcount needed with the increases in sales targets (BDR, Mktg, SE, CS).
Analyze your processes for scale
With additional headcount and or lead flow, are your systems set up to handle it? I’ve come across a number of companies that manually assign MQLs to their SDRs. Speed to lead matters and you can’t have un-needed delays such as this slowing your process down. Review all of the key handoffs to make sure your funnel is as efficient as possible or start working on ways to deliver improvements. It only gets harder when you kick the can on these types of issues. Don’t let inefficient processes reduce conversion rates through your funnel inhibit your performance. This may be the time to pull the trigger on that tool you need but were never able to get funded previously.
Uplevel your forecasting and reporting
If this is your first raise, get ready for data requests. Make sure your infrastructure is set up to be able to handle the asks coming from the firm. Expect to be asked to slice your data by any number of key dimensions and see how it changes over time. Your pipeline data will be the biggest part of this so if you aren’t getting snapshots yet, start yesterday. Be prepared to answer questions like weekly pipeline coverage and quarter-over-quarter pipeline growth, broken down by new vs expansion.
If you haven’t had a strong performance management system in place, it’s time to get that in order as well. You can’t let underperforming reps sit on the roster for too long. You need productive heads to achieve the increased targets. Don’t have a barbell attainment chart (where you have many low performers in the 0-25% attainment bucket and then a bunch of reps in the 75%+ that are achieving productivity expectations and not many in between).
Your Board meetings will be extremely data-driven going forward (if they weren’t already). Organizing your reporting and analytics infrastructure early is essential. It will save time and reduce stress during Board prep.
Measure RevOps impact
Finally, with all of the effort going on, be sure to measure the impact of your projects. Establish baseline metrics before making changes to track the impact on conversion rates, activity times, and other key metrics. This is always an area that RevOps leaves to the side while moving from project to project. Taking a pause allows you to feel the momentum you generate as well as give your team the appreciation they deserve, but rarely see. The tangible measurements are always more impactful than just hearing “You guys are the best!”
Wrapping things up
It’s an exciting time to be at a company during a funding round. There will be celebrations and swag and press releases… but once that dies down, it puts a lot of pressure on RevOps to help the GTM machine deliver on the expectations. Getting as much done in advance will elevate your organization in the eye of the firm quickly. Be the example of what good looks like in their portfolio by being able to deliver on all of the reporting requests and deliver on the growth targets.
Buckle up and get ready to grow… effectively and efficiently.