This guide walks you through the different seasons in RevOps, explaining when you should be focusing on different areas of your team’s revenue strategy throughout the year, starting with planning in Q4.
Q4: Sales planning
RevOps and sales leaders must focus on key planning activities to ensure success in the coming year. Among the top priorities are sales planning, territory planning, budgeting, and revenue forecasting, all of which are crucial for setting realistic, achievable goals. By using platforms like Gradient Works, these tasks become not only manageable but highly strategic.
Sales planning is the foundation of a successful year, and Market Map is a critical product to support this. Market Map allows teams to score and group accounts into micro-segments, helping leaders identify high-potential opportunities and focus their outreach efforts on the best possible prospects. By using Market Map, RevOps leaders can create hyper-targeted campaigns that align with the overall sales strategy, ensuring their teams prioritize the right accounts.
Budgeting and revenue forecasting for the upcoming year requires precise data and insights. Gradient Works' Account Researcher plays a crucial role here by filling in data gaps and providing custom AI-powered insights that allow for more accurate account scoring and opportunity sizing. With these enriched insights, leaders can better estimate revenue potential and create a solid budget that reflects realistic growth projections that includes budgeting for headcount and new tech solutions. By utilizing Account Researcher, RevOps leaders can confidently forecast sales and set revenue goals that align with market trends and company capabilities.
Finally, when it comes to territory planning, ensuring that high-potential accounts are evenly distributed across the sales team is key, which generally means your teams (or some of them) are using dynamic territories and not static. Using Market Map and the Rep Coverage report you can determine how many accounts were worked last year, which accounts, and determine if the accounts need to be re-prioritized for next year. If you want more net-new accounts that look like the customers who closed in the last year, Lookalikes can help by enriching the account database with new, high-potential accounts that resemble your current best-fit customers. This enables RevOps teams to design territories that not only maximize coverage but also balance workload among the sales teams.
Q1: Assigning and adjusting
In Q1, RevOps leaders tackle several critical responsibilities to set the foundation for the rest of the year. One of the top priorities is executing the headcount plan, which is typically finalized in Q4 or beginning of Q1. This involves aligning the number of reps with the year’s revenue goals and ensuring the headcount is optimized for maximum market coverage. Once the sales strategy is solidified during SKO, RevOps leaders can better adjust rep capacity and align resources to meet targets.
Following the SKO, leaders shift to calculating sales quotas and rep capacity. Accurate capacity planning is essential, especially as quotas are distributed based on the expected workload and the available bandwidth of each rep. Gradient Works' target books ensure that accounts are assigned based on rep capacity, market opportunity, and strategic fit. This approach allows flexibility in account distribution, helping avoid overloading or underutilizing reps, while ensuring all high-potential accounts are properly covered.
Another significant focus in Q1 is preparing for the first board meeting of the year. RevOps leaders are responsible for presenting the sales plan, including headcount alignment, quota distribution, and expected revenue growth.
Finally, the sales plan rollout and new account assignments are executed using dynamic books. By adjusting account distribution based on your research from Q4, RevOps leaders can ensure that high-value accounts are matched with the reps who have the capacity and skills to work them. As you roll out the plan, you’ll need to be sure your rules of engagement are clear and that you have the solutions to determine if SDR complaints are worth looking at or if they need time to work their new accounts.
Q2: H2 check-in
In Q2, a RevOps leader must pivot from the foundational planning of Q1 and focus on ensuring the team is effectively executing the sales strategy.
One of the top priorities is re-prioritizing account segments based on the insights gathered from the first half of the year. Using solutions like Gradient Works' dynamic books reports for analyzing account performance and account coverage, leaders can reassess which account segments are performing well and which need more attention. Leaders must ensure that reps are actively working the right accounts and that no valuable opportunities are slipping through the cracks. Using dynamic books enables real-time tracking of account engagement, providing insights into which reps are handling their territories effectively and which accounts need to be reassigned. Adjusting the forecasting based on H1 results is essential for maintaining realistic expectations for the remainder of the year. These adjustments ensure that targets for H2 are not only ambitious but achievable based on real-time data.
Reassessing account selection criteria is a crucial next step after determining if you need to shake up your pipeline. By analyzing fit and timing signals with solutions like AI Researcher and Market Map, RevOps leaders can refine the process for assigning accounts to reps, ensuring only the most viable opportunities are prioritized. This refinement allows the team to avoid wasting time on accounts that may not convert and focus on the ones that align better with the company's ICP.
Recalculating rep capacity and quota attainment becomes vital as H1 data reveals trends in rep performance in your Rep Coverage report. This period is ideal for recalculating quotas to reflect the updated market dynamics and ensuring that rep workloads are balanced to prevent burnout while maximizing output. With a dynamic approach, leaders can easily reassign accounts to ensure every rep is working at an optimal level.
Q3: Focused on end of year goals
In Q3, RevOps leaders need to focus on closing deals that will help meet the year-end revenue goals while preparing for Q4 planning. One of the first tasks is to prioritize the deals that are most likely to convert by end-of-year. Using products like Market Map and AI Researcher allows leaders to identify accounts similar to those that have previously closed quickly or at the desired annual recurring revenue (ARR). Market Map's AI-driven analysis helps RevOps leaders find clusters of high-potential accounts that closely match the characteristics of existing top customers, ensuring that reps are focused on the most promising opportunities.
It's also important to evaluate the rollover pipeline from the previous quarter. Dynamic books can help by redistributing these accounts to reps with the capacity to work them, ensuring no valuable opportunities are overlooked.
Additionally, RevOps leaders should focus on hyper-targeted messaging for these high-potential accounts. Instead of broad, generic outreach, Market Map enables teams to craft messaging that resonates specifically with accounts that have a strong similarity to those that converted quickly in the past. This not only improves engagement but also shortens sales cycles, making the path to meeting revenue targets more efficient.
Lastly, as Q3 progresses, RevOps leaders should continue with their Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to track performance and recalibrate strategies. Using the insights from Market Map and dynamic books, leaders can adjust their account prioritization and quota expectations based on the results from the first half of the year, and forecast with vacations that will happen towards the end of the year to meet their goals.
Wrapping it all up
A successful RevOps strategy relies on proactive planning, execution, and adaptability throughout the year. Products like Market Map, AI Researcher, Lookalikes, and Bookbuilder empower leaders to prioritize accounts, refine strategies, and dynamically adjust resources. Through Quarterly Business Reviews and dynamic account reassignment, RevOps leaders ensure the team remains aligned with the goals for the remainder of the year, setting the stage for success.
