Three Best Practices to Drive Operational Efficiencies

Originally published February 13, 2018 here.

When scaling a business, lessons from one industry can often apply to another. They can spur new, creative solutions to problems; solutions that may not have occurred to you otherwise. As an exec with experience across CPG, fin serv, digital media, and SaaS, I’ve found one of my greatest strengths has been the ability to see commonalities among operations across these businesses. Those insights have helped me to drive outsize results and can help you too.

Here are three considerations that can apply to operations optimization in just about any industry or company size.

1. Deeply understand the problem: Being data-driven is a must in today’s world. There’s no reason to make decisions without data when it is so readily available. Equally important is the ability to dive into the numbers to understand key drivers. I’ve found teams where status meetings were a simple exercise of reviewing the data for key customers with the leader asking surface level questions like “Is the customer happy? Can you get them to increase their order size this month?” With junior team members, the answers to these yes/no questions result in just that — answers of yes or no. To really understand the drivers behind the data, it’s important to ask open-ended questions about specific data points. It’s important to ask questions starting with “why” and “how”. The environment these questions are asked in is also important. What’s the culture of the team meeting? Is it an open trusting space where people can admit they need help? If not, then these questions are better asked in 1:1s or small group settings with a trusted leader. Ask questions, formulate hypotheses, test them, take findings and adjust hypotheses.
2. Revamp the team: In fast-paced environments, whether that’s an established business needing to reinvent itself — e.g. Ralph Lauren — or a new business looking to scale — e.g. e-comm startups, functions are sometimes formed with nebulous roles and responsibilities. The core R&Rs may originate as well-defined, but as the team grows it may over time accept additional responsibilities. This is normal and good as long as the team is up to the challenge and has the resources to succeed. Sometimes a function’s responsibilities change and the change may seem necessary and minor to a leader, but to the team the change is enormous. If the leader doesn’t recognise the team’s unease, then s/he may see a negative impact on results. The solution may be to take a step back when a change takes place and consider how it will affect the team. If you’ve built a trusting relationship with team leaders and members, then having a conversation to discuss how they feel about the changes can be illuminating. You may find that restructuring the team based on individual skills or interests optimizes results. You may identify a skill set gap which requires training and coaching. You may find that existing team members are not right for the new responsibility in which case you’ll have to determine whether that responsibility should lie elsewhere or you need additional headcount to get the right talent. Sometimes the conclusion is that the new responsibility isn’t necessary. There are many possible outcomes, but what’s important is that the situation is analyzed thoroughly from all angles and that you’ve dug beneath the surface to identify the real issues.
3. Quantify the qualitative: When it comes to sales and customer service, prospect and client feedback is critical to harness and analyze. Similar to conducting user research, qualitative feedback often is easier to come by and can be eye-opening, but it’s important to understand prevalence before taking major action to address it. For large sales and customer service teams, designing systems that are well-aligned with their day-to-day activities can be a game-changer. Often, inputting data into systems is a tedious task that creates “extra work” for sales and CS reps. However, if you understand their daily activities, you can minimize how intrusive the data collection is and thereby increase usage. For example, if sales reps create contracts on one platform and then have to enter the same information into a CRM, then one solution may be to integrate the contracts with the CRM. That way, you remove a step taken repeatedly and therefore save the rep time which they can allocate to value-added activities. Moreover, if sales reps have to enter the information into the CRM in order to generate a contract, then this increases both the amount of data received and the accuracy of the data. Automated deal desk is another process which can be easily implemented into CRM systems. We implemented a workflow within Salesforce where instead of using email to initiate deal desk proceedings, sales reps simply checked a box to trigger notifications to the deal desk team. The notification included key information — already entered by the rep into the CRM over the course of the sales cycle — and allowed deal desk members to take timely action. Additional upside with this process was that the data collected within the CRM across the reps and deal desk approvers’ actions allowed the ops team to analyze, troubleshoot, and improve. These are a few examples of instances where the amount of non-value added work for the rep decreased, data collection and reporting accuracy improved, and decision making sped up. The continuous CRM data generation can lead an ops team to better identify broader trends, insights, and issues; thereby increasing its ability to drive results.

Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com.