What RevOps can learn from election politics

Every four years, we as a nation get consumed by election politics and things have gotten increasingly crazy these days. Whatever your political affiliation is, I see many lessons RevOps professionals can learn from what’s going on in the political landscape. Here are the top ten lessons I have learned.

1. RevOps is the independent press

Politics has always been about spin, which is building a narrative based on the available facts. Each party creates its spin off the same set of facts and data, while exercising a healthy dose of intentional data interpretation and visualization trickery. What has changed in recent years is the emergence of “alternative facts,” unsubstantiated claims that are accepted as facts by people living inside political echo chambers. The erosion of a common set of facts that we can agree on has made it very difficult to have productive discussions across the political divide. This is why an independent press is a key requirement to make democracy work, as the independent press is supposed to present the shared data and facts that we can use to evaluate the political spins.

Unfortunately this is also a common challenge in many GTM organizations, where sales, marketing, and customer success are not just presenting their own narratives, but building their narratives off different data. This lack of a common data foundation makes every report and analysis questionable. How many times have you heard the question, “Where did you get that data?” In the GTM realm, RevOps plays the role of the independent press. RevOps needs to be the unbiased, no axe-to-grind, independent provider of data so the GTM teams can spend more time extracting insights from data and less time on figuring out whose data is better.

2. Leverage multiple sources of data

The reason democracy hasn’t worked in many countries is because democracy works best with advanced citizenship, which requires voters to exercise critical thinking and be able and willing to question what they hear from politicians and media outlets, check facts using different information sources, then draw their own conclusions. Advanced citizenship is hard and expensive in terms of time and effort. To get to the truth requires multiple sources of information to validate the data and see different points of view.

Same is true in the RevOps world. RevOps needs to maximize the quality of first-party data by leveraging third-party data and open data sources. Multiple data sources can help fill in data gaps and resolve conflicting data. When it comes to acquiring third-party data, there is no single data vendor that can meet the needs of all companies or have perfect, complete data. A multi-vendor approach when it comes to data enrichment and acquisition is the only reliable way to achieve a high level of data quality.

3. Trust but verify

No one has enough hours in the day to research every single fact we hear and multi-source every bit of information. How many cable news channels can you watch without pulling your hair out? Yes, we all need to have some primary channels of information we trust most of the time. However, once in a while, it pays to verify the information with a bit of research, especially on claims that seem too good to be true, too outrageous, or that just don’t jibe with the observations from our peripheral vision.

To build a scalable RevOps, you also have to trust but verify. Automation can handle a large amount of work for the RevOps team, but some things still need to have human eyes on them. For example, when it comes to deduplication, you can separate out duplicates you have high confidence vs. low confidence in, based on levels of data match. The high-confidence-level duplicates can be automatically merged while the low-confidence-level duplicates can be routed for human review before merge. Trust the process, but verify just enough to have confidence in the process.

4. Aim for directional over perfect alignment

You will probably never agree with a party or a candidate on 100% of their policies and actions. You can disagree with a candidate or a party on specific issues, but still vote for them because you agree with them more often than not. That’s directionally aligned.

To create a scalable and agile RevOps, you also need to embrace and educate the stakeholders on the importance of being directionally aligned. Without this understanding, projects will take too long to finish and the teams will fuss over nuances that don’t matter. Attribution analysis is a great example of this. We see marketers get worked up about what type of multi-touch attribution model is best, then end up abandoning the project due to lack of consensus. Is a W or U model really better than an equally weighted flat model? Is one model really better or are they just different? Deploying a simple flat model quickly provides insights that can help the GTM team get directionally aligned, which is way better than just “driving blind.” 

5. AI/media should not replace critical thinking

Social media and the 24/7 cable news cycle provide us a constant flow of knee-jerk reactions, much of it lacking the proper context or even a millisecond of due diligence and contemplation. After every debate, press conference, rally, or town hall, there are 50 experts that want to give us their hot takes. The political and media establishments are focused on telling us what to think vs. giving us the data and analysis so we can think for ourselves. With this firehose of information, it’s easy for us to become lazy and passive, which is not what advanced citizenship calls for.

There is much parallel to this in the GTM world. There are endless solutions that promise to serve up your next customer on a silver platter without you having to do any of the hard work to understand your ideal customer profile, analyze what is a truly addressable market, what is a high-value customer, and what is the right value proposition given the current market condition. AI now promises to do all that work for you, tell you which prospect to contact and even do the research and write the email for you. The jury is still out on this, but GTM teams must not delegate critical thinking to technology completely, and RevOps needs to be at the forefront, helping the GTM team leverage technology for scale and efficiency, but not turning the GTM team into brainless zombies.

6. Make sure your playbook is still relevant

Whatever your stance and opinion on the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, it is clear that the repercussions of having achieved this reversal may have produced political consequences that are not favorable for its proponents. This situation has often been described as the dog that has caught the car and now doesn't know what to do as it is being dragged down the road.

Political strategists are not the only ones who can get overcommitted to a playbook and forget to check from time to time if the playbook is still valid. Market conditions change. In SaaS, for example, the ten years prior to 2022 was a nonstop expansion when every number just went up. An entire GTM playbook has been developed and refined for a market condition that had cheap capital and high demand. Since the tech downturn in 2022, this playbook is not working as cheap capital is not abundant and demand is stagnant. RevOp needs to be the data-driven voice of reason to help the GTM team constantly measure the effectiveness of the playbook and calibrate to market and other forces.

7. Soundbites are like shiny toys

Social media has turned politics into a battle of soundbites. These one-liners or 15-second videos, often taken completely out of context, are memorable and great clickbait. Given our collective attention deficit disorder and lack of advanced citizenship, voters often form their opinions completely based on soundbites accepted as the whole story.

In the RevOps world, shiny toys are the soundbite equivalent. Shiny toys usually promise results served on a silver platter, no hard work required and no dependencies like data quality. Buying into the lofty promises of shiny toys without understanding the context required for the technology to be successful is like accepting soundbites at face value without understanding the context.

8. Guard against faulty reasoning

There is a big bloc of voters who are so disenchanted by their economic situation that they think their only hope for a better life is to burn the system down and try something different. If democracy isn’t working for them, then how much worse can fascism be? This is a classic case of informal fallacy. Instead of working towards a long-term solution, which is rarely easy, people want to throw a Hail Mary, hoping short-term action can bring about short-term results.

We see this fallacy fairly frequently in RevOps as well. GTM teams often believe that changing technology will magically fix their broken people, processes, and data. For example, if your database quality is bad and you have no data governance, moving from Marketo to Eloqua will not solve your campaign execution challenges. If you don’t know what your ideal customer profile is and can’t target them with the right content and messaging, changing your ABM solution won’t improve your conversion rate. RevOps should lead by showing what the root causes are, which are rarely the technology, and defining a roadmap to solve the underlying problems with people, process, and data.

9. Focus on your core base and the swing voters

Election campaigning 101 is that you have to lock down your core base, then try to convert the swing voters. The other party’s core base is not worth the effort to try to convert because the return on investment is guaranteed to be abysmal. In this highly divisive political environment we are in today, this is more true than ever, which  is why all the campaign money is being spent in a handful of swing states. 

This is 100% applicable to GTM. Know who your core user base is, your ideal customer profile (ICP), and message them by reinforcing what they love about your product and company and what gets them excited about your vision. For the market segments that can be converted, you need to educate on why they need your solution or why you’re the right fit for them. Don’t waste any resources on the market segments that are not a good fit for your offerings. Targeting is a highly data-driven exercise, so RevOps should naturally take the lead.

10. Data does not speak for itself

While most economic indicators say that the U.S. economy is doing very well, maybe the strongest globally, a big bloc of voters seems to think the U.S. economy is doing worse than four years ago, if not the worst shape in decades. Despite the common saying that “data speaks for itself,” it doesn’t, and most people in life or in business need help to understand what data means. The data needs to be presented with a narrative if you want to leverage data to your advantage. For example, a lot of people think when inflation comes down, prices should come down, which of course is not how inflation works, so if the politician wants to take credit for inflation coming down, she better provide the proper narrative on how that data should be interpreted.

RevOps are the data geeks of the GTM organization and often know more about how the data is measured and stored, thus what insights the data really contains and how it should be read. All this can be completely non-trivial to stakeholders who do not have that detailed knowledge and can easily misread the data. So never present data on its own and trust the data can speak for itself. Always always always accompany the data with the necessary narrative.