When you work in RevOps then everyone wants a piece of you. Marketing is waiting for a report, Sales is waiting for new territory, Customer Success is not happy with the Health Score calculation and the CEO needs a report that should be done by tomorrow for the board. That is the downside if you are a support function for all GTM teams! To process all incoming requests you will need a ticketing system.
Ticketing system
A ticketing system is a structured and organized approach to managing and tracking incoming requests, issues, or tasks. It provides a centralized platform for logging, processing, and resolving various types of inquiries, whether they come from external customers or internal stakeholders within an organization.
Their key benefit is that they allow tracking of requests. Without a ticketing system, the risk is high to forgetting a task, wrongly prioritize a task, or a lack of accountability. For those and many other reasons, we also see ticketing systems used within RevOps. No matter if you are a team of one or a team of many, a ticketing system would be recommended for a RevOps team of any size.
The set-up of a ticketing system does not need to be complex. The key requirements are that your stakeholders can create requests without friction and that your RevOps team can easily access them. For your stakeholders, I recommend that the team submit the tickets within Slack or Teams as they spend most of their time in those communication tools.
💪Pro Tip: Make clear to your stakeholders that any requests sent per direct message or any other communication channel will not be processed.
For your RevOps team, the tickets should arrive in your project management software so that it is there where your RevOps team spends most of their time. The most common project management tools offer this integration out of the box. Once set up, your team will receive a constant inflow of support tickets. What could possibly go wrong? The dreaded backlog.
Backlog management
A backlog in ticketing is a situation where there are more incoming requests than the support team can handle within a reasonable timeframe. A backlog is not necessarily a bad thing; it depends on the reasons why there is a backlog. It can accumulate due to various factors, such as high demand, insufficient support resources, or inefficiencies in the ticketing process. The key is to manage your backlog, and that starts with the information capture.
Each item is an internal client request. These should be written in a standardized format to ensure clarity and consistency. Each ticket includes a description, acceptance criteria, and any relevant details or attachments that help clarify what needs to be done. Then, the items in the backlog are prioritized based on various factors such as business value, urgency, complexity, and dependencies. Lastly, each item in the backlog should have a time estimate for completion. In its simplest form, it can look like the following:
You want to give your team some guidance on how they should submit requests. That can include a minimum requirement that should be included in a description. Train your team on that and explain that incomplete requests will be returned. This is important to avoid processing delays. Similarly, everyone should have the same understanding of the priority system. What one person sees as high priority may actually be a medium priority. The team should also be aware that RevOps is able to readjust the priority. However, make sure to inform your stakeholders about such changes to keep them happy.
Don’t forget to add an estimate to your backlog. Estimates are crucial in allocating resources to a task and for prioritization. In the example table above, we would not necessarily prioritize tasks 01 and 02. Rather, we would get task 03 out of the way as the time commitment is the lowest. The team should be able to make such a priority, and in doubt, the owner of the backlog has to decide.
Your backlog should have one owner who is responsible for managing the backlog. The role of that person is multifaceted. For your stakeholders, the person will handle disputes around the backlog. When you deal with multiple stakeholders, one stakeholder may certainly complain about why their requests are taking longer than another. For the RevOps team, the owner should give guidance on how to prioritize tasks and monitor the health of the backlog. The health can include anything from completing tickets, checking the workload against the capacity, or reviewing stale and outdated items. Should RevOps have a ticketing system? The answer is a clear yes. The companies I engage with that have the smoothest running operations all have ticketing systems. It’s not just beneficial for RevOps but for any team that is processing requests. The benefits of prioritization, resource allocation, and efficiency speak for themselves. Most importantly, a well-managed ticketing system and backlog will save the mental health of your team.
