Imagine your revenue team as an orchestra. Cadences are the beats your team must hit to create a resonant piece of music. All of the important moments in your revenue process should flow seamlessly from quarter to quarter, like a symphony.
Revenue operations professionals conduct these symphonies, guiding each player toward the shared goal of producing impactful results. Much like an orchestra, everyone on your revenue team must have the right timing, communication, and space to practice in order to do their best work.
Musical analogies aside, a revenue operating cadence is a predetermined, predictable schedule of critical moments that occur in the sales process. These cadences can happen on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, depending on your organization's RevOps maturity. A cadence is ultimately what drives your revenue process forward over a given period of time.
The Revenue Operations Council, a group of world-class RevOps experts, shares real-world strategies for creating effective cadences and communication for growth in their research paper, “Upleveling Your Revenue Operating Cadence and Communication.”
Cadences and communication are the driving forces that connect day-to-day actions to your company’s long-term vision of success. In other words, you need a cadence that you plan and communicate around in order to make progress toward your strategic revenue goals.
Now you can take the Revenue Operations Council’s insights back to your organization with the group’s ongoing worksheet series.
Leverage these two ready-to-use RevOps worksheets at your organization to fine-tune your cadence:
Weekly operating cadence worksheet
Building a revenue operating cadence doesn’t have to involve a drastic overhaul of your current processes. In fact, introducing or refining your cadence can be measured and careful.
You can start with a cadence that covers a shorter time period, such as a week. From there, you can gradually expand as process updates become more familiar and accepted across the revenue team.
Rolling out a smaller-scale cadence at the beginning is an approach recommended by Cody Guymon, COO of global sales at Qualtrics and an ROC member.
“Start a bi-weekly cadence, bringing together the formal or informal revenue operations key stakeholders to assess the current and future quarters’ needs of your organization,” says Guymon.
It’s critical to create a cadence that moves your company closer to achieving its strategic goals, such as boosting customer retention or expanding into new markets. There’s no one-size-fits-all cadence, so factoring in the unique needs of your organization is key. The worksheet below can help you create a customized weekly cadence.
>> Download the weekly operating cadence worksheet
Quarterly operating cadence worksheet
A quarterly cadence expands and builds upon the weekly cadence, and becomes more strategic. As you develop your organization’s quarterly cadence, consider your key performance indicators and what you want your revenue leaders to inspect at key moments during the quarter.
Your cadences should feed into your company’s overall goals. You can work backward from your company’s overall strategic goals, for example. If your goal is taking your company public, your cadence may need to be more frequent, cross-functional, and focused on consistent growth to stay on track in the lead up to an IPO.
The worksheet below shows you how to bring all the needs of your revenue team together in a quarterly cadence.
>> Download the quarterly operating cadence worksheet
Ultimately, an effective cadence empowers clear communication, so everyone on the revenue team knows their role, what’s expected of them, and when they need to deliver. The larger your team grows, the more complex it becomes. That’s why outlining your roadmap of key touch points—your cadence—is critical for achieving success at scale.
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