8 | Enabling Revenue Operations in a 21 st Century Commercial Model Copyright © Revenue Enablement Institute SMART AND IMPACTFUL WAYS TO STAIRSTEP YOUR ORGANIZATION TO COMMERCIAL TRANSFORMATION One of the biggest obstacles to commercial transformation is that it is perceived to be a “bridge too far.” The CEOs, executi ves and operations managers interviewed in this analysis voiced common concerns about the perceived amount of change involved and the time and commitment it will take to realize benefit from a Revenue Operations model. The leaders who have had success transforming their commercial models have realized three important things. ● Commercial transformation is a process of continuous incremental improvements . Much of the current research on Revenue Operations creates perceptions that all of these changes have to happen at once to realize performance gains. Seasoned executives understand that moving to a revenue operations model in the front office is very similar to applying the principles of Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and Total Quality Management to back offic e processes. ● Transformation starts at the top . Delegating change management to the operations function is a common reason efforts to align marketing, sales and customer success get stalled or fail. Organizations that have successfully moved the needle lik e Avaya, Cisco, Honeywell, GHX, Splunk, and Pentair have CEO support for transformation and have put in place executives with “CXO” roles with a remit to better manage commercial assets, the operations and enablement infrastructure, and the customer journey across the enterprise. ● The cost of not changing is greater than the pain of change in terms of diminished competitive differentiation, the ability to realize opportunities in the market, higher selling costs, seller attribution, and account churn. The le aders of GHX, iconectiv, Inmar Intelligence, Fortive and Honeywell have all taken similar steps to achieve commercial transformation. They are putting in place a CXO to lead that change, instilling a culture of continuous learning and improvem ent, and stai rstepping their way through a series of high impact changes to the commercial model. For example, Peter Ford , the VP of Global Sales at iconectiv, takes inspiration from how Dave Brailsford, who led the British cycling team to Olympic gold, broke down each element of the race and striving for just a 1% improvement rate for each. Ford has enli sted a similar marginal transformation process to improve the performance of his revenue team. “I don't believe that there is a single thing that contributes to the transformation of a sales organization,” Ford recalls. “What I did was break down the elements, keepi ng my eye on those that would bring the quickest gains. Ultimately, I found that it came down to focusing on people, process and tools.” Likewise the leadership at Fortive is driving growth by applying the principles of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement to fr ont - office processes – including sales and marketing, new product development, innovation, and market development. The Revenue Operations Maturity Model within this analysis lays out 16 discrete steps your organization can take to better al ign commercial revenue teams, operations, systems, and processes to grow faster at lower cost. Individually, these actions can be piloted, sequenced, and measured to create financially viable and bite sized stairsteps that move your organization through a transfor mation in ways that are politically, practically, and financially achievable. Collecti vely the sum of these steps can yield transformational results. To help CXOs visualize the steps they can take in the short, medium, and long term to grow faster and more profitably, the fa culty has synthesized the learnings from this analysis to create a step by step approach to commercial transformation. The table on the following page provides a menu of common steps organizations are taking to improve. Each of these steps creates measurable value, proof of concept, and buy in. Over time they add up to significant impact on growth, profits, and firm value. This roadmap represents an illustrative and commonsense blueprint for how your organization can sequence and scope the changes involved in commercial transformation. With an investment of only several hours, it is possible to create a much more bespoke Revenue Operations Roadmap using the Maturity Assessment provided at the end of this report to assess the state of their commercial transformation and i dentify the most financially viable way to “stairst ep” their organizations towards greater alignment of sales, marketing and CX teams, assets, systems, and processes.