The RevOps Playbook: Owner.com CRO’s Secrets to Scaling

Kyle Norton, CRO of Owner.com, presents a Revenue Operating System: four pillars (measuring, managing, planning, communicating) that turn chaotic startups into predictable revenue machines. He covers weekly written updates, monthly business reviews, growth-model spreadsheets, and a clarity-context-consistency framework for rolling out the system.
Chapters
What the heck is a revenue operating system? It's just sort of a term I made up to conceptualize this system. A revenue operating system is the interface between me as the user, the revenue leader, or you as the founder, and the resources and people around you to get those resources to do what you want them to do, which is grow revenue predictably in a cost-effective manner over time. And so this is the system. By which you can engage with your organization. So you can think of it, and an analogy I'll come back to, this is like your Iron Man suit. These are the tools that you put around you to give you superpowers, to turn you from a normal mere human into a revenue-generating machine. And the components that I'm going to talk about today, there's 4 big ones: measuring, managing, Planning and communicating. Please welcome Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com. What's up, everybody? Nice to meet y'all. My name is Kyle Norton. I am the CRO at Owner.com. And today we're going to talk about operating a revenue team with excellence. And so just before I dive in, I'd love it if we could all give a big hand to the folks at SaaStr, organizers, volunteers, staff. It's been an awesome couple of days. All right. So we're going to talk about operating today, a little bit about Owner, we are a vertical SaaS software company. We— you can think of us like HubSpot plus Shopify for mom-and-pop restaurants. So the little pizza place that you order from on Friday nights, and we do everything that they need to succeed online. I've been in sales leadership, sales and revenue leadership for about 15 years, the last 10 in software. This is my second head of sales, head of revenue gig at Owner. And previous to this, I ran a quarter billion dollar business unit at Shopify across sales, post-sales, partnerships, a whole bunch of stuff. So, uh, that's where I'm coming from. Over the next 40 minutes, I'm going to give you my operating system. This is how I operate my teams day to day, week to week. And the intention is that you can build more predictability in how you grow revenue, which we all want a lot. So in terms of an agenda, we're going to talk about what— defining what an operating system is. What is a revenue operating system? We'll talk about why you need one, in my opinion. We'll get into some key principles of how you can build this for your organization. And then I'm going to break it down, the core components of this revenue operating system, some tools and things you can start to implement right away in your business and some keys to making it all work. Like, where do I get started? So the first big question, like, what the heck is a revenue operating system? It's just sort of a term I made up to conceptualize this system. And this group knows well what a computer operating system is. It's, it's the interface between a user, you, and the software and hardware in your computer to make it do the stuff you want it to do. And much like that, a revenue operating system is the interface between me as the user, the revenue leader, or you as the founder, and the resources and people around you to get those resources to to do what you want it to do, which is grow revenue predictably in a cost-effective manner over time. And so this is the system by which you can engage with your organization. So you can think of it— and an analogy I'll come back to— this is like your Iron Man suit. These are the tools that you put around you to give you superpowers, to turn you from a normal mere human into a revenue-generating machine. And the components that I'm going to talk about today, there's 4 big ones: measuring, managing, planning, and communicating. These are the 4 main pillars of your revenue operating system. And when this is done right, it's going to accelerate your ability to grow very rapidly. And we'll talk about how these things are structured and interrelated. So keep these 4 pillars in mind as we go through it. So just a quick bit of framing first, like, where does this fit into my company building stack? So if you think about what are we trying to do as leaders, both founders, executives, and revenue leaders, uh, you're trying to translate your company mission into something tangible. And so this is how I think about company building. So you have your mission, you have your company values, you translate those into a company vision and specific team visions that you can act upon. That becomes more tactical with a specific strategy by department, the principles by which you operate, and then your organizational design. This is who is in what seats, what is the shape of your org, what resources do you need? And then finally, this is where your operating system— how do you get those resources to do the things that you want it to do in a, in a predictable manner? And then finally, under your operating system, you're going to build the tools and playbooks and guides and training that your team needs. And so this is the layer of the stack that I'm going to spend time on today. This, this operating system, which is arguably one of the most critical things you need to be able to win in your market. So why do we need this thing? Because I know what a lot of you guys are thinking. Doesn't sound very exciting. This sounds pretty bland. Kyle, you sound like the business school douchebag that Paul Graham told me to be wary of and This doesn't sound like founder mode. Au contraire. This revenue operating system is designed to help you turn the complete chaos, which building a startup is, into something that is much more orderly. And so it's, it's useful to frame like, what does it feel like when we don't have a system to do these things? When we've hired a bunch of reps and we're scaling and there's some productive things happening. But you don't have a very good system in place, I call it being in the vortex. Things are just happening around you. You're constantly getting surprised by things. It feels like a new fire crops up every single day, every single week, because there's no control happening around you. You don't have a way to systematically move your organization forward. And we say that being in the vortex, you're just being spun around in circles. And I'm sure everybody in this room has been there at one point in their career. And this revenue operating system is meant to bring some order to that chaos. We'll never get rid of that chaos. That's, I think, why we do what we do. But this is about bringing some order. And one of the key components here is about being able to see things before it's too late. And to give you a couple tangible examples, this is about seeing win rates slipping in a team or a segment or a channel. And not seeing that fast enough, and all of a sudden 6 weeks has gone by and your inbound win rates have slipped 9% and you're about to miss your number. Well, you didn't have a system or a rhythm in place to catch that in time. Or you don't have enough headcount in place to hit your next quarter. And you go, oh, my growth model tells me I need 12 ramped reps. I have 6 and I can't hire and ramp and get people to productivity in time to meet the model. You're in the vortex. That's, that's you being in the vortex. And so this, this system is in— is designed to help you control some of that. So let's talk about some key principles. These are important framing concepts as you build the components: measuring, managing, planning, communicating. So it's about using the minimum effective dosage, about measuring the stuff you want to manage and matching the system to the state of your business, the maturity of the market, all of that. So let's get into the key principle number 1. So minimum effective dosage. This is one of the most critical things because it's really, really easy to over-engineer this stuff. You're going to hear my talk. I'm going to give you all my templates and assets, and it's going to be really exciting, and you're going to cram a bunch of it into your org, and it's not going to help, and it's going to make a bunch of work. It's really easy to over-engineer this stuff and then end up spending more time talking about the business than actually building the business. This is what we want to avoid because every single rhythm that you introduce, every update, every team meeting, every Project Connect has a cost. It has a time cost. And more importantly, it has a cognitive load cost. It's difficult to balance all of these things while we're also trying to build a business. So use the, the least number of things I give you today to move the business forward in a tangible manner, minimum effective dosage. And also build things that are legitimately helpful for your team, because one of the things you're going to, you're, you're going to take away from this is these tools are really helpful for me as a leader. That's exciting. That's great. I understand the business, but we also need to make sure that the tools we're building are not an encumbrance on our teams, our individual contributors, our managers. And so we want to try to build and design these rhythms in a way that is also helpful for the individual contributor and helpful for the people on the ground. Not just helpful for us. So minimum effective dosage. The next key principle here is we need to measure what we actually want managed. We want to measure the things that we're trying to move. And so we, of course, we want to know the output metrics. What is the top line revenue growth? What's the Close One number? That, that's important, but you can't manage that. I can't manage day-to-day deals closing. I can only manage the inputs of, of my team. And that's where I want to spend time. So what do I need to know today that is going to tell me I'm going to have a problem tomorrow? And what are the specific behaviors that I need to shape in order to translate my strategy and plans into real outcomes? So focus your measurement on behaviors, inputs, as well as your, your output metrics, and then offer that visibility to your team. And I'm going to talk about the difference between dashboards and scoreboards So we'll come back to that. The last thing here is don't measure way too many things. We want to measure the stuff that's most critical to manage, most critical to move. So measure those things and just be diligent. Again, every rhythm has a cost. So be, be diligent about what we're trying to measure and manage too, because again, cognitive load, people can only remember and do so much with so many things. All right. Our third key principle here: match the state of your— the operating system to the state of your business. We're SMB. We have a 4-day sales cycle, highly transactional. We sell to mom-and-pops. What I've designed for our business may not— may not match if you're trying to sell to the biggest companies in the world and you've got a 12 to 18 month sales cycle. We are a Series B business. My team's about 100 people. That may be way smaller than your team or way bigger than your team. And so you're going to have to adapt what you hear today. And I'm going to talk about this, what we built first, and try to give you some starting points. But take what I share and make it work for the maturity and stage of your business. There's no, there's no silver bullet here. The other thing that's important to understand here is not only will your system evolve, but how you are involved with that system will change over time. As the founder, as the revenue leader, as the founder, you're, you're sales rep number one, you're sales manager number one, you're VP of sales number one, and then eventually you hire somebody for that. And then the VP of sales is now filling in as the manager. And so the rhythms that they operate by will be very frontline-facing rhythms. And then eventually, as you grow your team and you have more, more second-line leadership in place, you can get involved in different levels of abstraction of those rhythms. So the system will change and how you engage in that system will change over time. So these are the 3 key BUILD principles: minimum effective dosage, matching the state of your business, and measuring what you want managed. These are your, these are your important swing thoughts. Okay, let's get into what the heck this thing actually is. So the core components: measuring, managing, planning, communicating. So the first pillar here is your measurement rhythm. And so we'll go back to our Ironman analogy. This is your heads-up display. This is how you understand what's happening in your business at any given time. At the snap of your fingers. This should be quite easy. You shouldn't need BizOps or data to request to understand what's happening. This is the set of rules and rhythms and tools that you put around you to understand what's happening. And so it's, it's the tools and it's the cadence. When am I, when am I reviewing this information and what am I doing with it? And this is how I know what next I need to go manage. What I need to shape in terms of, of the business. And so here are some critical tools. These are the basics that you can go get started with. So number 1 is control towers. So there's a laddering of control, control towers. This is the top one is your executive control tower, revenue growth runway, all of your CS metrics. These are the highest level metrics that you need to understand as leaders in your business. And then you've got functional dashboards, functional control towers for your sales function, for your launch function, for CS, and then management manager dashboards. So each manager can understand their specific part of that puzzle. The other side of that coin of dashboards is scoreboards. So this is what faces the rep and what faces the rep is telling them, are they doing well? Are they not doing well? Why or why aren't they? Are they on track to get to the outcomes that they want and then the business needs? And so just as much as we have control towers for us as leaders to understand the business, we need to equip our individual contributors, our frontline teams with a similar level of understanding, but framed a little bit differently. Stack ranks and, and pacing, all that stuff's in here. The next important measurement tool is a rhythm to review these metrics and do something about it. So we run a monthly business review. You can run a quarterly version of it. Depends on the scale and segmentation, but your monthly business review is a place to stop and take stock where everybody stops what they're doing. And for one day, you spend half a day or some set of hours in inspecting all these metrics soup to nuts. And again, I'll give you my templates that I use for our MBR. You can use that for something else. You can start small, but you need a rhythm. So you've got the tools and now you need some sort of cadence to ensure that you're all sitting down and reviewing those things and adapting what's next, which is your plans, your planning pillar. And the last really important measurement tool is target setting. Like, unless you have half-decent targets, you don't really know where you're going. You don't know, uh, if you're on track to meet your growth objectives unless you have a relatively rigorous target setting process. Doesn't have to be perfect at the beginning, but you need a process by which You're scaling up your quotas, you're rolling it up. You understand if you've got the pipeline to, to hit so that it tells you if you are on or off track. So these are the 4 critical tools that you can go build. And again, at the beginning, keep it simple. All right. The next pillar here, now that we can measure and understand the business, now we can manage it. And I say this is like Tony Stark's arc reactor. This is his power source. Your ability to manage is your ability to make things happen on the day-to-day basis. So this, this is the heartbeat and the energy of your entire team. And so it's the rhythms and tools you use to manage day-to-day. And we'll talk about some specifics here. It could be written updates, it could be team meetings, and this is how you translate plans into action. So I write a plan at the beginning of the month, and then I check in on some sort of a cadence to make sure that those things are happening. And having tools there is really critical. So some of the tools. We're remote, and so we're quite asynchronous in our communication style. I believe even for an in-person experience, people should be a lot more asynchronous in their communication than they are. I believe heavily in being able to write and document to drive rigor in your organization. And so some of these are, are written rhythms, and some of these are actual meetings. And so the big one, which I'll get into in the next slide, is our weekly Maple. This is the written update that everybody that manages people or has some strategic scope writes on a weekly basis to explain to the person up and beside them what's happening in their business. What were their key metrics? What did they advance that week? What are you planning to do next week? Your learnings and any emergencies that need to be flagged. And I'll show you the template on the next slide. Then we need a coaching rhythm separate from one-on-ones with some structure. I could do a whole other 40-minute talk on that, but there needs to be some sort of a coaching rhythm that you establish so that your managers are, are doing that with your team. And then finally, you need a meeting rhythm. So we can't be completely written. So where do I use that very valuable synchronous time together? This is your one-on-one and team meetings. And, and we err to the side of much fewer meetings than, uh, most organizations. And I'll, and I'll talk about why. So this is our weekly Maple template and I'm going to share all of these assets with you guys after so you can use this right away in your business. But this is a screenshot from our Notion and you'll notice that I explain exactly what we do on a weekly basis and why we do it. Then I explain the structure That's, that's the guide on the left-hand side of the screen. And then on the right-hand side of the screen, that's the actual doc— the document template. So every week, every leader, you click add new notes and then you're going to fill in your section. So the metrics that you're accountable for could be the forecast, it could be the run rate, whatever metrics that individual needs to own. What did they work on that week and what did they move forward? Again, because Part of it is me being able to manage that and make sure it's happening. Part of it is for that information to flow broadly across the organization. And that's why we do it in writing. That's why we do it in— we don't do it in one-on-ones or in team meetings because then it's not captured. It's hard to disseminate. This will, this will make information flow more smoothly in the organization. In emergencies, it's not really emergencies. It's just like important stuff that you want to make sure is flagged, but Maple needed an E, so emergencies it is. That's that MAPLE structure. So out of the MAPLE structure, we can now get into our one-on-one and team meeting structure. So as a leader, I review that MAPLE Sunday nights at 8. That's when I expect it to be due from my teams. And now based on what I see in MAPLE, we can populate our— we'll start with one-on-ones. We can populate our one-on-one agenda. And so I keep the, the, my direct reports' top 3 priorities at the top of this meeting docket. So it's, it's in front of us every single time we meet. We're being— we're looking at the top things we're working on. We can discuss them if need be. And then the next section there is the notes that we take on a weekly basis. So I start every one-on-one meeting asking people, scale of 1 to 10, how you doing? Why? And it seems sort of superficial, but it's a great way to start a meeting. You learn a lot. I borrowed this from an awesome operator who I worked with named Lynette Pistorius, and I experimented with it and I love it. So that's how I kick off my one-on-one meetings. Then I populate and the rep populates, or my direct, their discussion topics. Like, what did I see in their Maple that I want to talk about? What do they need to talk to me about? And again, we use this synchronous time for discussion, problem solving, brainstorming. We don't use synchronous time for updates. Don't, don't show up and like tell me what's happening. I will already know what's happening because you will have written it and I will have read it. But what do we need to problem solve together? Because that's expensive time, especially in team meetings. And then action items from the week before and moving forward. So then in team meetings, similar structure. What are our top priorities? So I like to have, we call them Kyle's Metrics, like what are the 5 most important things that we're trying to move in our business today? So it's SDR to opportunity conversion rates, or it's the, the lead quality score. Like what are the things that you're trying to actively move? And I want to see those every single week and get an update. I also want to understand what's happening with critical projects. A lot of this can be copy-paste from a Maple update, but this is the things that we're pushing to the RSLT that are most critical for people to have visual of. People can put FYIs that we don't talk about that again, you want to make sure doesn't get missed in a Maple update because not everybody's going to read every single line. So you're pushing the most important things. And then again, discussion topics. What do we need to spend our synchronous time problem solving? And then action items. So you can use these two templates and you drive now that predictability of everybody knowing how the organization is going to run. All right. So that's my management rhythm, how I manage my team and them getting their jobs done. Next is our planning rhythm. And so we can have concepts of a plan in our head and ideas of where things are going to go. But until you write that down, you're just juggling things and this is, I think, where people often go wrong is just a lack of documentation. Unless you can write well, this is an Oscar Wilde quote, unless you can write well, you can't really think well. And so this planning process is you getting ideas out of your head, putting it on page. And so for that page to now serve as your copilot, it serves as the copilot to guide others, for you to have as a reminder. So that's why we call it Jarvis in Ironman terms. And so it's how I pause, evaluate the business, take stock, and figure out what I need to do for the next period. So for us, it's monthly. Sometimes it can be quarterly with a monthly check-in depending on, again, business maturity. But this is my planning rhythm. And so the critical tools here, it has to start with a growth plan. This is your spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet of how you're going to go from X dollars in ARR to Y dollars in ARR. In the next 6, 12 months and how things ladder up and your key inputs. Like, what are the things that need to be true month over month to get you to your number? Uh, could be rep growth, lead growth, new channel activation, the throughput of your, uh, onboarding team. But you gotta have a spreadsheet that tells you, gives you a map from A to B so that you can start to track to it. And then that is connected to your, uh, target setting rhythm that I talked about previously. Next, we have to have a planning cadence, and I'll show you mine next. Again, it's a tool and it's a rhythm. And then a project cadence. How do we pick the right projects that we want to work on? How do we check in on them? How do they— how do we make sure that those things are moving? This can go into overload really easily. So minimum effective dosage here is, is my reminder. What's the lightest weight version that you can make sure that things are moving in your organization? And then finally, you need a prioritization framework. What projects are you working on? How do we make these decisions? Annie Duke has a great version of this. You know, what are your potentials? What are the things you're choosing from? What are the, what are the payoffs from those particular potentials? What's the effort, the perspiration needed to do those? And what's, and what's the probability of those options working out? That's, that's the framework we use. You can use your own, but having some way for these decisions to get made is important. And then writing it down and just living by it. Again, it's all about speed. This, this whole revenue operating system should make your organization move faster and more efficiently. So one of the key tools under planning is this. We do it monthly. I write a monthly game plan, which now the functional leaders largely write. And so this is where I take stock of everything that happened in the previous month. So what were the outcomes? How did we do? I'll give shoutouts to the reps because this is a, this is a a document that everybody in the organization gets access to. What were the strategic priorities that we said were critical for us to accomplish in this period? Did we accomplish that? We'll grade ourselves. ABCDF. How did we do and why? And then I talk about what's happening in the next month. What are the key things that we need to do as a business in the next period to move forwards? And then important FYIs. If you can get into a solid rhythm here, your team will understand where you're going and why, and things will move faster. This is a great rhythm and it's most helpful for me or the person writing it, the leader writing it, to just get, get things on a piece of paper and to go, okay, I could do that. I have the resources. It's manageable. Let's go attack that plan. So that's my planning rhythm. So last is communicating. So I call it the, the, your Ironman thrusters, because unless you can communicate properly, and drive behavior change, you're not going to go anywhere. So this is what, this is what gives you velocity. And there's two components. There's communicating and educating on context, and then there's deploying change. How do we make change in our business? And there's a few key components. Having a knowledge hub is a great start. The knowledge hub is your Notion or your wiki where like as much information as possible can live. Where somebody can find all of the things that they need to understand. So my monthly reviews are there, our rules of engagement are there, but some central place where information can live. And that seems obvious, but what you see oftentimes is information is split across Notion and Google Drive and Slack and in emails. And, and that ends up being, uh, very, very slow. So a central knowledge hub where you can put everything, standards and templates for how you share information. And then some specific templates, which I'll show you next. So again, there's educating on context and then there's deploying change. So on educating on context, there's 3 principles here: clarity, context, consistency. So I default to transparency. I want to tell my team, my leaders, my individual contributors as much as possible about the business so that they can be high-context individuals to make good decisions when things are ambiguous, to feel like they are connected to the mission, connected to the vision. They know what's going on. Going on. People hate feeling out of control. It causes so much stress when people don't feel like they know where they're going. And so communicating as much context as possible is really critical. Starting with why is really important there. Um, and I try to treat my team like adults. Like, I'm not going to sugarcoat things. If things are not good, I'm going to tell them they're not good and why. And so sharing that context consistently is really critical and, and the why behind it so that they can move forward. Consistency is the next, is the next thing. There's a saying in rock climbing, you always want 3 points of contact. You want 3 things attached to the wall at any given time. There's a good communication principle here. I want to try to communicate things in 3 different ways and be consistent with it. People aren't going to remember things the first time. So if you want to educate people and, and make your team high-context contributors, consistency is important here. And then the components. A consistent template and a cadence by which you're sharing this information. You got to have like an all-hands or some all-team meeting where, where you can talk. AMAs are a great tool. They're super easy. Again, it's all about context. And again, this monthly— I'm— my monthly plan, I write it in a format that I can just share with everybody. So this serves as my planning cadence and part of my communication and education cadence. Again, just default to open. It's, it's a much easier way to operate. Okay, let's talk about deploying change. So your ability to win as a leader is your ability to change the behavior of your teams. Startups win, win or lose on speed. Can you change and adapt and iterate faster than your competitors and keep ahead of the market? And the key to being able to move fast, to change behavior, is being able to deploy change really, really well. And if you want to deploy change really well, you have to have some sort of a defined process and some consistency and predictability. And this is something that we didn't really spend a ton of time on until the last few months. We were not good at this as an, as an organization in my team. And so we've spent a bunch of time refactoring how we do this. And now things are way less noisy, moving way faster. People are picking up new things at a much more rapid pace. And so I'll talk a little bit about our framework. So this is on the more robust side. Again, my team's like 100, the company is about 200 people. And so this would be a more mature version. So we have a stoplight framework for change. A green change, something simple. It's a product update. It's something that you want people to know about, but doesn't need to be, you know, overly heavy-handed in terms of how you're rolling it out. That could just be a Slack update. And capture it somewhere in Notion. Again, easy peasy. On the other side, a red light change is something that's going to affect people pretty deeply. They need to make a big behavior change and it's significant to the individual. And that could be something like changing a comp plan. You want to overhaul a comp plan? Red light change. So you need, uh, more than 3 points of contact in, in this, uh, state, in this scenario. And so that would be, you know, written, like a thorough written update, a video explanation. It could be a training in your learning management system that people need to complete. You want to be updating people in team meetings and in one-on-one scenarios. We're really trying to lean into this change and make it very, very robust. And so you need to have a framework for deploying these different magnitudes of change. Do not do a red light change with a Slack update. Chaos, chaos will emerge. So this is one of the assets that you can use for deploying change, this is like a yellow and red type of change. And so this, it's a changelog. So we explain why we're making the change we're making. Again, context, why, that's how you get people bought in. What's changing? What do they need to know? The specific impact for the individual, like what do I need them to go do? And then some operational considerations, like what are the details that they need to be aware of? And again, for red light changes, this will be a video, then it'll be a training and work ramp that they have to deploy and get certified on. But even just having this, this changelog that you fill out when you make like a yellow or red change, that could be a good starting point for you. Okay, so we talked about measuring, managing, planning, communicating our 4 core components. So like where, where do we go from now? Like how do I get started? So here are some keys to victory. So one, build it up over time. Go slow. Start with the basics. Build standards. Document absolutely everything as much as you can, even though it's boring. Time-consuming, and then and only then use technology to automate it. So number one, Tony Stark did not have this fancy suit on the right when he got started. He had this crappy one on the left. So you don't need to go with a massively robust program, a revenue operating system out of the gate. You can start just with some basics. Just let, let the organization metabolize those changes because people can only adapt to so much change. So we're going to want to go slowly with this and build it up over time. this is not a sprint. You can get here over the course of years, arguably. Next is we're going to go slow, but we want to start with the— we want to start with the right things. So what do we want to start with? In my opinion, you got to start with your management rhythm. You can't really plan, you can't really manage unless you understand the metrics of the business. So start with the basics there. And it could be a really simple dashboard with 6 components, whatever reports you find yourself opening the most, or the thing that is open and always open in a tab. Just put that as a component in your dashboard, in your Salesforce dashboard or whatever tool you use. And you can just throw a couple things in. You got your 6 most popular reports and that's your dashboard to start. Great. Good starting point. And then as a new report you find yourself opening on a frequent basis is a really valuable one, pop it into that dashboard. But start with your, start with your measurement rhythm and get your basics there and establish the rhythm by which you're checking in on these things. Next is your growth model. You have to translate, you know, we want to double in revenue this year. Okay, well, show me the math of how to get there. Unless you have that math, it's going to be really hard to pilot your organization there. And it's not— the key mistake people here, people tend to make here is they assume that it's the number of reps times the quota I give them is the revenue that they produce. That's not really how revenue works. It's the pipeline that you generate The ability for you to, to, to, uh, convert that pipeline into revenue. And then the number of reps is a function of that equation, but it's, it's not, it's not linear. Revenue comes out of generating pipeline, driving good conversion rates, and then revenue comes. And part of the conversion rate is the right number of reps, the right people. So just be careful of that when you're building your growth model. And this is, this is now my map. This is my plan. And then I think you should establish team rituals just because it's really easy and it will, it will get your organization moving. Faster. So get people doing a written update every week. You could use Maple or something else. You could strip it down, but get information flowing more broadly across the organization. Have that delivered to you on a weekly basis and then bring some structure to your one-on-ones. So many people run one-on-ones as like, okay, this is your time. You know, I'm here to be a resource to you. I think that's a sort of a delinquent version of running one-on-ones. I prefer to give people a structure to use. And if you can bring some structure, those meetings will be more productive. They're valuable. 30 minutes, 2 people. It could be an hour with 6 people. Those are really important uses of time. So we want to structure them and make sure that they're, they're really productive. So this is, these are the basics that I would start with. Next is standardization. My whole presentation is about standardizing things across the board, so I won't belabor this, but this is going to reduce the cognitive load. And when I talk about standardization, I want to use the same concepts and frameworks across as much of the organization as possible. And so the Maple update that my team writes to me could be the same update that they write on a key project. So if there's a critical project and you need an update every week or every 2 weeks, just use Maple. Again, it reduces the cognitive load. It's a familiar thing that they know how to, how to use. And I encourage people to, to book dedicated time to build some of this stuff every week. Just put 60 minutes in your calendar. This is the time that you're going to use to work on your system. And that you're going to spend 60 minutes, you're only going to save a bit of time the next week, but now you're saving 30 minutes every week into perpetuity. That's a good investment. And then finally, try to get people to all use the same tools. And the common mistake here I see is your team, your sales team works out of Salesforce. That's where they're putting all their information. Their forecast is there. And then an executive says, okay, can you take that forecast and like put it in a Notion update every week? Resist that urge where your team operates and where that information lives. Encourage those people to live in the same tools so that you're not fracturing the way information flows. So, so agree to a common set of tools. If you're in Notion, ask another team not to be using Trello for the same information or Google Drive. Like try, try to get people to agree on common sets of things across not just revenue, but the entire organization. Document it all. Just spend time every week writing things down. Give people what good looks like so that they can do this well. It sounds really boring, but it's really, really powerful. And it will, it will accelerate the organization. Lastly, so once you have established some of these rhythms, they're in place, you're feeling good about them. People, people understand how they're working. Then you can talk, then you can automate it. Don't, don't jump to automation at the beginning because you'll automate a bunch of stuff that like doesn't work and then you've wasted all that time on the automation. Get your rhythms in place in a really good spot and then find opportunities to automate. And so there's a bunch of tools to use here. We use a tool called Momentum. The founders are here in the audience to push information to me as a revenue leader that I want to see. So when something happens in Salesforce, you know, a case has been in back to sales for over a certain number of days. I want the leader to be alerted of that so that they can take some action. That would be an example of a measurement rhythm that then we automate and push to the leader in Slack where they're going to be alerted so that they can go take some action. And so you can automate a whole ton of stuff, reports pushed to you on a certain, certain timeline so that you have that information, get your rhythms in place, but then definitely try to automate it and streamline. Then you'll really feel like Tony Stark. Okay, our keys to victory. Build it up over time. Start with the basics and don't overengineer it. Standardize the formats and agree on common tools as much as you can. Get good at documentation. Spend the time dedicated to writing. And then and only then use technology to automate. All right, our key takeaways. Final reminder on, on what we covered today. Your revenue operating system is here to bring order to chaos, to keep you out of the vortex, to make things predictable and to push your organization faster. We're going to apply the minimum effective dosage. Just do the smallest amount to get you the outcome you want. And there's 4 pieces to this flywheel. We want to measure, we want to manage, we want to plan, and we want to communicate. Start with the basics: measurement rhythm, growth model, and your team rhythms. And finally, just know like this is hard. It's not easy. These things take time to build up. You're asking people to do new things. It is real work. Go into any— deploying any of this stuff knowing that there is going to be some challenge. But it is critical, especially as you grow, especially if you want to get into that hypergrowth, 2x year over year above $10 million when there's a lot of things happening at any given time. Having a system for this is difficult but mission critical. That's it for me. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate the time.
More from Jason

Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an AI, Tragedy Apps, and Too Many AI SDRs? | The Agents #004

Our Agents Drove Our Salesforce Bill Up 80%, Marketo Hates Agents, and We Stealth-Churned Off Notion

Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Our $500K AI Bill, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions







