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Go ahead. Search in Google right now, something like “How do I in . There’s a lot to find about how to build whatever you want in that CRM system (you know the name), and not very much on how to solve the underlying process so that you can implement it in almost any system.
Except that your job as a Sales Operations (or Revenue Operations, or Marketing Operations, or Customer Operations) is not to be an expert at any one system. It’s to be an expert in solving problems. Learning how to use and configure the system(s) you need to solve business problems is table stakes for your real role: being a trusted partner to the business.
What does that mean, exactly? It means understanding the unit costs of the business, the input metrics and output metrics that people care about, and then organizing your daily efforts into a thesis that helps other people know what you care about and why. You will be more valuable to yourself and to your business when you think more about the business process than how to implement it in any one system. The latter is necessary but not sufficient.
Your Co-workers are Not 🧠 Mind Readers
You’ve probably had this thought before. “Why doesn’t my team support me? I’m working so hard to get things done and I’ve made great progress. If they only knew everything that I was doing, surely they would be impressed.” Think along with me for a moment. If you haven’t told your teammates what you’re doing, and you haven’t written it down, and you haven’t spent much time with them in person, the chances that they know what you think are near zero.
Dr. John Gottman, in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, found in long-term committed relationships, approximately 69% of the problems in a relationship are unsolvable. That doesn’t mean there will always be negative emotion in every interaction, but what it does signify is that is very hard to be truly understood in relationships. If you only agree with your spouse or partner about 1/3 of the time, it’s pretty clear you need to overcommunicate with your work team. Time to get to work.
Building Better Rules
With this disconnect in mind, how do you build a series of rules to define your business logic so that when you purchase , you adapt your preferred business rules to that system instead of the other way around?
To paraphrase Stephen Covey, “start with the end in mind.”
For the project at hand:
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What is the list of things to be done?
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How are you going to know that someone (or some process) is doing them?
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What will tell you that a thing is done?
A set of rules is a mental model for how you are approaching a task, what your goals are, and when you will complete it. Your co-workers don’t know how you are going to solve the problem, what problem you’re solving, and how you’re going to do it. So write it down.
A 30 minute Hack for Better Rules
Required tools
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An Egg Timer ⏲ (“Hey Siri, create a 30 minute timer” works too)
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An open Google Docs document (if you prefer, pen and paper is fine)
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Sitting in one place and writing what you think other people need to know (this one is the hardest, and I guarantee you will feel better after you do this)
PROCEDURE:
Write one or two paragraphs on the project. What is the simplest, most jargon-free way to describe what needs to be done? Next, explain the stages of the project as a numbered list of tasks. This is what needs to happen in order. Once you know what’s going to happen, and a rough order of tasks, it’s easier to answer the more challenging parts of this brief.
What could possibly go wrong? This might take the form of asking the open questions that haven’t been answered yet. It might be whatever is in your head that you are worried about and haven’t solved. Write it down so that other people will see what you are thinking.
Finally, make sure to point out a general timeline with resources, indicating if you think you are stuck or where you need help. After you’ve done this, take an editing pass and remove some words so this is easier to read.
Your Co-workers are Not have become 🧠 Mind Readers
Amazing. With the simple step of recording your thoughts on what the project is, what needs to be done, and how you’re planning to approach it, you’ve made your team into a bunch of mind readers. Well, not yet. What you’ve done is made it easy for them to have a discussion with you on how you are approaching the rules and where they agree and disagree.
Now, you’re ready to implement your business process in that well-known CRM (or any other operations system). Stating your inputs, the desired outputs, and the philosophy of how you want to get there makes it much more likely that you will retain your original business design even if that SaaS considers the problem differently than your idea. Is it perfect? Nope. But it does solve the initial problem that no one knows what you are thinking.
What’s the takeaway? Writing a simple process moves the discussion around a project from “no one knows what I’m thinking” to “let’s have a discussion about *some problem* – here’s what I’m thinking – when’s good to chat?” Stating the assumptions also makes it easier for team members to get oriented quickly and to share relevant feedback in a low-emotion format.
A Thread from This Week
A Twitter thread to dive into a topic
From one of the chief researchers of COVID19 at Fred Hutchison in Seattle, here’s a thread from @trvrb on what might happen with the latest COVID variant:
