It’s been a wild, hot summer for much of the country, and let's not even talk about the nonstop craziness in the news. It makes me glad about one thing I can rely on to be steady, and that's the Bureau community. This group of committed business leaders is ready to make the world a better place, and each week I send out an email newsletter with helpful information cultivated from our conversations. I hope you'll sign up for it, but if you missed it here's a quick recap of what we discussed in July.
Office Politics
Here’s the question of the day (or election year): should we keep politics out of work? The Bureau talked about it, and there's no one answer that works for every environment. It can be helpful to allow reasoned discussion, perhaps in dedicated spaces separate from business conversations. Or those chats should be restricted to in-person conversations to minimize misunderstandings, since we’ve all missed typed sarcasm.
Whatever your choice, however, any political discourse has to be handled with the utmost respect for different points of view. If you want to encourage it, you might consider implementing a code of conduct that determines what is and isn't okay to talk about at work. So, uh, good luck!
The RevOps Revolution
Is RevOps just another buzzword? This one makes sense to me, because it unifies data, processes and tools to align every group with your business strategy. By adopting the RevOps approach, your sales process shares goals with your marketing operations and customer success efforts. It brings together CRM systems and automation tools so everyone is pointed in the same direction.
With RevOps, you're not locked into team silos but operate cross-functionally because you're keyed into shared goals and metrics that benefit the whole company. You'll be able to critically evaluate processes and push for continuous improvement instead of short-term gains. It's a lot to consider, but it can be done. And you can take it one step at a time.
Changing up Your Offerings
We all need to make some changes now and then, and that includes the services your shop provides -- especially if the client pool is getting a little stagnant. If you need to shake things up, a good place to start is by upgrading or expanding existing offerings. You might also package services together in a new productized approach to reduce headaches from customizing services. Adopting automation tools might be another way to shake things up a bit.
You could also shift to more of a consultation approach, where you help clients determine which offerings will benefit them the most by focusing on their business goals. This can help you develop long-term strategic partnerships that really demonstrate value (not to mention show the usefulness of real human partners instead of AI). You could also take another look at the way you set up agreements and incorporate more flexibility in the terms you offer.
This is just a sample of the content I share in our weekly newsletter. We dive in deeper each week. Feel free to sign up, but I’ll also have another summary of our best tips here next month.