RevOps leaders Eddie Reynolds, Darrell Alfonso, and Mollie Bodensteiner explain why universal SLAs fail and how to build roadmaps that actually work. They argue SLAs stifle team autonomy and often mask deeper sales-marketing misalignment. The fix: tie your roadmap to company OKRs and focus on five key improvement areas instead of chasing tools.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
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You can't put SLAs everywhere because it's going to be, one, harder to just monitor and measure them. The other part is, you think about the people who are executing on things and providing them some autonomy in what they're doing to make sure that they can do the right things. But when you think about the customer experience, at what point, because you do not do something in a certain period of time— a key example of this is support tickets. If somebody's raising their hand, they need help from a customer support standpoint. If you don't have some mechanism to make sure you're reaching out in a certain period of time, how does that impact the customer's trust and the customer's value in your, in your platform?
Right. And, and, you know, and another great example is in an ideal world, sales should want to follow up on the leads that marketing passes over as fast as possible because they're good. They're really good. And, you know, the benefit is understood by both that more deals is going to be better for everyone. So if there's a problem, if you're trying to force that with an SLA, it's indicative of a larger problem, which means that probably the leads aren't good or, you know, there's a sales and marketing misalignment. So it's just another thing. And yeah, I agree with you. For sure.
Awesome. Well, I'd love to open this up to audience Q&A. So, and Elise, if you want to surface some questions from the audience, I can try to field them. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be looking for these questions though, so I'm going to give it just a second. Okay, great. Win rate versus product market fit. I'm not sure if I understand that question. Do you guys understand it? Darryl? Molly? Okay, so without a question, because I'm not seeing it, I'm just going to go move on to the next one that I have on the list. So I'd love to talk about roadmapping. So we've alluded a little bit to strategy, right? We talked about alignment, about broken processes, about, you know, whether an SLA, you know, really helps you figure out whether a process is aligned with the strategy. How do you guys turn this into an actual roadmap for RevOps? When you think about it, so oftentimes the challenge that we hear from folks working in RevOps is, is that they're just inundated with requests all day, every day. This person needs training, this update needs to be made in Salesforce or whatever tool. And it's a never-ending, constantly growing list that is constantly interrupted and added to throughout every day. How do you translate that into a roadmap where you actually know what you're working on and you're able to get things done within a specific period of time and really move the needle for revenue operations?
Yeah, so I'll jump in here because I think you made some really, really good points, right? There, we're constantly firefighters, even though I don't believe we should always be firefighters and have several things on the list of things pieces that we need to get done from a RevOps standpoint. So one of the things that I've found that's been really helpful is like, how do you educate your stakeholders on what you're working on? And I've built a nice like quadrant type of roadmap where I put all of the functional areas that I'm helping to support and laid out by quarters. What are the big objectives that each team is looking to, you know, hit in said quarter, and what's the input that's going to be needed from the revenue operations team? And at the bottom of the roadmap, I also put the business as usual. What are the things that cannot slip while we're working on these pieces? And understanding that from a capacity planning and like, how does that translate into the time that revenue operations has to support these larger initiatives based on what our estimates are? The other piece that I think is really important when you're doing, you know, what I'd consider revenue operations being really a cross-functional roadmap is understanding you know, what the objectives are in each of those functional areas and then how those downstream dependencies come. I can't tell you how many times I've sat in OKR planning sessions and sales comes with one thing, marketing comes with one thing, product comes with another thing, and they're all not aligned to what, what we're trying to achieve as a company. So it's really making sure you're getting that alignment and then translating it down to like, what are the key rocks that we have to hit each quarter? And then making sure you're keeping Keeping that surfaced. Oh yeah, sorry, OKR, objectives and key results. I gotta stop talking in acronyms, sorry guys.
And rocks.
Yes, and rocks, and so key goals. So making sure you're then surfacing that up and the company has visibility into that, and you're, you know, having those weekly or biweekly checkpoints with your stakeholders accordingly.
I could not agree with that more. Darryl, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah, so I agree with all of those things. I think that one way to do it that I really like to do is identify 5 of your biggest improvement areas that tie ops to your business objectives, and then work backwards to create your roadmap. That's how I would do it, rather than— and I've been guilty of this too— Rather than looking at your systems and processes and saying, hey, this, we can, we can do this for this system, this for this system, and this for this, you know, process. I wouldn't look at it like that way. I would start right at the beginning and think about the 5 biggest things that you could do to make an impact, you know, in relation to the goals. And I know we're like really running out of time, so I better end it there before I keep going.
Yeah, I'll take the last 30 seconds and just kind of respond to that. I think that what we see so oftentimes is people get— fall into the trap of tools, and it's like, okay, we bought a new tool, it can do these things, let's set this up, let's train people, etc. But we've got to bring it back to the strategy. So if the organization is doing OKRs, which is a framework for planning, Objectives and Key Results, there's some really great books written on it. Whatever framework they're using for planning, if you can understand that and align with that and then build your RevOps roadmap around that, then you can achieve great results and really focus on top priorities. And we're now at time. Thank you guys so much for joining. I guess I realized I didn't leave time for that.
Thanks everyone.
Yeah, thank you. This was great.
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