How to Fuel Team Velocity for Sustainable Growth

Achieving Sustainable Growth requires not only speed but also strategic alignment across key functions like marketing, sales, and customer success. Team velocity, measuring both the pace and quality of work, becomes a critical factor in adapting to market changes and delivering value consistently. This blog explores the connection between team velocity and strategic alignment, highlighting how organisations can leverage these dynamics to drive long-term success and competitiveness.

What is Team Velocity?

Team velocity measures how much work a team can get done in a certain time, focusing on both the speed and quality of their work. As fast-paced as everything today is, keeping an eye on and boosting team velocity is key to staying competitive and growing over time. 

High team velocity helps organisations quickly adapt to market changes, innovate, and provide better value to customers. When marketing, sales, and customer success teams work together well, it improves overall performance and helps the business grow sustainably. This teamwork is crucial for working effectively and reaching goals more quickly and accurately.

Team Velocity in Revenue Operations

In Revenue Operations (RevOps), how quickly a team works is super important for driving revenue growth efficiently and effectively. By ensuring effectiveness and efficiency within marketing, sales, and customer success teams, RevOps helps smooth out the process of driving sales and keeping customers happy.

Team velocity is key here. When teams work well together and quickly adapt to new market trends and customer needs, the company can acquire more customers, retain them, and sell more, which utlimately helps drive revenue growth.

Also, with continuous evaluation and optimisation in place to improve team velocity, RevOps can figure out where to focus their efforts to boost sales the most. Essentially, speeding up how the team works helps the company grow faster and is crucial for long-term success.

Role of Team Velocity in Driving Sustainable Growth

Team velocity, as a core component of Revenue Operations (RevOps), plays a pivotal role in transitioning companies away from the 'growth at all costs' model towards a more sustainable growth strategy. In companies where rapid expansion is often prioritised over profitability and long-term viability, team velocity introduces a level of operational efficiency and agility that allows businesses to grow without the reckless expenditure of resources. This approach ensures that growth is not only fast but also sustainable and scalable.

By focusing on enhancing how teams collaborate and operate, organisations are better equipped to make informed decisions quickly, adapt to market changes with agility, and improve customer satisfaction—all without the need for excessive spending or resource wastage. This strategic alignment across departments ensures that growth efforts are both effective and efficient, leading to improved profitability and reduced risk of burnout or resource depletion. In essence, team velocity offers a path to sustainable growth by promoting smarter work practices over the unsustainable pursuit of rapid expansion at any cost.

We’ll now explore how to can build ramps to accelerate your team’s velocity: people and enablement.

The "People Ramp" and "Enablement Ramp" serve as dual pathways that accelerate sustainable growth by prioritising the development of human capital and the enhancement of operational capabilities, respectively.

The People Ramp

The people ramp focuses on investing in employees' skills, well-being, and professional growth. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptability, organisations empower their teams to innovate and tackle challenges more effectively. This investment in human resources ensures that the workforce remains motivated, engaged, and proficient in cutting-edge practices, thereby driving productivity and innovation from within.

In short, by focusing on people, companies set themselves up for long-term success. This people-first strategy ensures teams are skilled, motivated, and aligned with the company's objectives, which is crucial for moving faster without sacrificing quality or well-being.

Building Your People Ramp for Growth

1. Streamlining Onboarding for Immediate Impact

Efficient onboarding is crucial for integrating new hires quickly, allowing them to contribute meaningfully from the start. Strategies might include:

• Structured Onboarding Programs: Implementing well-organised training programs that cover essential tools, processes, and company culture.
• Mentorship and Buddy Systems: Pairing new hires with experienced team members for guidance and support.
• Clear Role Definitions and Expectations: Ensuring every team member, from marketing to sales and customer success, understands their role and how it aligns with the company's messaging and goals.

This alignment ensures that all departments work cohesively, ultimately accelerating overall team velocity. 

At Six & Flow, we have a 90 Days to Excellence program which is designed to help new members gain skills and knowledge that will help them grow their careers. We believe that by fostering continuous learning, personalised development, and a culture of growth and empowerment within the organization, our onboarding process plays a vital role in building team velocity right from the beginning!

2. Empowering Teams for Accelerated Performance

Empowering teams involves fostering quick adaptation and ownership of projects across departments

• Autonomy in Roles: Giving new team members the freedom to take charge of their tasks boosts confidence and productivity.
• Training and Development: Continuous learning opportunities help team members stay ahead in their roles, e.g., customer success teams refining upselling strategies or sales reps receiving advanced sales training to exceed quotas.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Encouraging collaboration between departments (e.g. marketing providing insights to sales) ensures a unified approach to business goals.

Such empowerment leads to efficient scaling and improved performance across the board.

3. Ensuring Customer Success for Long-term Growth

Happy customer success teams are directly linked to sustainable growth:

• Proactive Support: Training customer success teams to anticipate and solve issues before they escalate.
• Customer Feedback Loops: Regularly collecting and acting on customer feedback to improve services and products.
• Upselling and Cross-selling: Equipping teams with skills to identify new opportunities within the existing customer base.

By accelerating team velocity through customer success, businesses can ensure long-term satisfaction and loyalty, driving sustainable expansion.

4. High Standards for Excellence

Establishing high expectations is essential for rapid team ramp-up:

• Rigorous Hiring Processes: Selecting candidates who meet high excellence criteria ensures quality from the get-go.
• Performance Metrics: Setting clear, ambitious goals and regularly tracking progress.
• Continuous Improvement: Encouraging a mindset of always striving for better results in every task.

High standards push teams to deliver their best, speeding up the ramp-up process and boosting overall performance.

5. Fostering a Culture of Velocity

Creating a culture that prioritises velocity can significantly enhance team integration and productivity:

• Agile Methodologies: Implementing agile practices that allow for quick adjustments and fast-paced project cycles.
• Transparent Communication: Keeping lines of communication open and clear to prevent bottlenecks and misunderstandings.
• Recognition and Rewards: Acknowledging and rewarding fast, high-quality work to encourage continued high performance.

Enablement Ramp

The Enablement Ramp is centred around streamlining processes, implementing advanced technologies, and optimising resource allocation to bolster efficiency across all organisational functions. This involves deploying tools that facilitate better communication and collaboration, automating repetitive tasks to free up valuable time for strategic thinking, and adopting data-driven decision-making processes. 

By enhancing operational capabilities in this way, companies can scale their operations more efficiently without compromising quality or customer satisfaction.

1. Identifying Bottlenecks and Inefficiencies 

Identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies through regular process audits, including process mapping and employee feedback sessions, is crucial for team enablement. It allows for the streamlining of workflows, ensures resources are optimally allocated, and enhances overall productivity. This proactive approach empowers teams, enabling them to focus on their core tasks with greater efficiency and effectiveness. 

Here are some common bottlenecks in sales, marketing, and customer success teams:

• Sales: Misaligned handoffs between marketing and sales teams often create friction and slow down the sales cycle.
• Marketing: Lack of clear communication channels can lead to redundant efforts and missed opportunities.
• Customer Success: Transitioning from sales to customer success without clear success metrics can lead to inconsistent customer experience.

2. Standardisation of Procedures

By developing and documenting processes, teams have a clear guideline to follow, which reduces errors and variability in outcomes. It also facilitates onboarding of new team members, enabling them to quickly understand and adapt to the organisation's way of working. 

Moreover, standardised procedures make it easier to identify areas for improvement, driving continuous optimisation of workflows and productivity.

• Sales: Create detailed sales playbooks that cover each stage of the sales process, from lead generation to closing deals. Here are 10 strategies to standardise your sales team performance.
• Marketing: Develop content calendars and campaign templates to standardise marketing activities and ensure cohesive messaging.
• Customer Success: Document onboarding processes, customer engagement strategies, and escalation procedures to maintain high service standards.

3. Streamline your technology stack

Often, marketing, sales, and customer success departments operate independently, each wielding their own tools and metrics. This approach can lead to uncoordinated tool adoption, increasing costs, and disrupting efficient processes.

Building a successful technology stack is key for team speed and efficiency, directly affecting how well they communicate, collaborate, and get tasks done. The tools you pick, how well they work together, and what they can do are all critical to avoid slow-downs and boost productivity. The best tech stack helps teams by making tasks easier, giving quick access to information, and breaking departmental silos, hence promoting better visibility. Also, a tech stack that can grow and adapt is vital for keeping up with market changes and supporting the organisation's growth, making technology choice a crucial investment for the future.

4. Comprehensive Training Programs

Comprehensive training programs ensures your team is well-equipped will necessary skills to complete their tasks, utilise technology, and deliver results - thereby accelerating productivity and fostering an environment of continuous improvement. These programs enhance team performance, drive growth, and maintain a competitive edge.

• Sales: Regularly offer interactive workshops focusing on objection handling, negotiation skills, and upselling/cross-selling strategies. You must also implement certification programs to ensure sales reps meet competency standards before handling high-value accounts.
  
  
• Marketing: Begin by assessing the current skill set of your marketing team members, focusing on digital marketing, content creation, and data analytics. Provide access to specialised courses on SEO, PPC, social media marketing, and email marketing to enhance their expertise. Conduct workshops to develop effective content strategies, including storytelling techniques and brand messaging. Additionally, train marketers in using analytical tools to measure campaign effectiveness and optimise future efforts.
  
  
• Customer success: Educate your customer success team on mapping the customer journey to understand touchpoints and pain points effectively. Ensure they have deep product knowledge to troubleshoot issues and provide proactive support. Focus on enhancing their communication skills through workshops that cover empathy, active listening, and conflict resolution. Train them on tracking and reporting key success metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to monitor and improve customer satisfaction continuously.

5. Regular Evaluation and Optimisation

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) have traditionally been a cornerstone of performance assessment and strategic planning for revenue teams. Continuous evaluation and optimisation processes are vital in assessing team performance against set objectives. These evaluations help pinpoint areas that need improvement and allow for timely interventions if goals are not being met. By regularly reviewing processes and outcomes, organisations can identify inefficiencies and optimise their strategies to enhance overall performance. The insights gained from these evaluations can inform strategic planning, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with business goals. Additionally, regular assessments foster accountability, as team members are aware that their performance will be reviewed and discussed, encouraging them to consistently perform at their best.

When combined, the People Ramp and Enablement Ramp work together to drive organisations towards long-term growth. This comprehensive approach ensures that as the workforce continues to evolve and improve, the operational foundation of the organization remains strong enough to support expansion efforts. Ultimately, businesses not only experience accelerated growth but also gain increased resilience against market fluctuations and competitive challenges. In essence, these two pathways offer a holistic strategy for creating a sustainable future by leveraging the strengths of both human resources and operational efficiency.