Strategy to Operations: Avoid These 5 Mistakes for Success
By Lauren Costella
Strategy. This is a term used to describe the roadmap or plan for where your organization is going in order to achieve a goal. Everyone has one.
It’s a term that leaders of organizations use often, and yet, many fail to see that without operationalizing strategy appropriately, it’s quite meaningless.
A strategic plan is meant to be detailed. The goal, the strategy, the objectives, the outcomes from the initiatives and the owners are often determined when planning. However, this is usually too high level, and without getting into specifics like scope, timelines, and team needed to execute, strategy can fall apart pretty rapidly, especially when cross-functional work needs to take place.
How do you know it isn’t working? The signs that there’s a gap in operationalizing strategy are obvious. You’ll hear feedback internally like: “We don’t know what our priorities are.” Or “We started that idea but couldn’t get help from other teams to execute.” Or “We have too many things to focus on and not enough resources” Or “We tried to finish but X team dropped the ball because they had different priorities.”
Given that Customer Success is a highly cross-functional team, and needs the support of the company to achieve customer value and attain company goals, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the top 5 mistakes leaders make in developing their strategic roadmap and plan, and what you can do to avoid them.
We fail to align teams and prioritize initiatives
Once a strategy has been developed, the natural next step includes creating initiatives (projects) to bring that strategy to fruition. For example, perhaps part of a company strategy includes scaling through technology, going up market for enterprise, and rolling out a new product. But what do these strategies really mean? Which strategy is the most important to execute?
If the Customer Success team believes that building a tech touch program for customers is most important, and then Engineering believes that restructuring back end data is most important for scaling through tech, and then Sales has said that building a customer journey for enterprise is the most important, how do we decide which to do? Can we execute on all? What if Engineering is needed for the Customer Success initiative or vice versa?
Oftentimes the resources needed to execute overlap. And it’s mission critical to align teams around the right strategies and prioritize those strategies in order to get things completed. If it came down to a choice, which initiative needs to get done first? Too often, we fall into the trap of saying, “Well, all of them need to be done.” And then we tend to focus on the easiest, not the most important. Do not make that mistake! Prioritize your initiatives and make sure the biggest pillar gets knocked down first. And make sure teams are aligned around the right thing!
2. We don’t create clear outcomes
The next most important step of operationalizing the strategic plan is defining the outcome of the operational initiatives to support that strategy. Let’s use the same example as above. Let’s say we are scaling through technology, and part of the Customer Success roadmap is building a tech touch program for customers. We have to ask ourselves, what is the outcome of doing this? Does the outcome produce a better customer experience? Does building this program decrease the headcount needed to manage customers? What does it look like when this is done well? And how do you know (metrics) that you have achieved success?
If these questions aren’t answered, it’s going to be tough to align the right resources and build a plan to success because we won’t know what we are driving towards. And we won’t know when the project is complete. We need to put our stake in the ground and run the initiative until success is achieved. If we play out our tech touch example, let’s pretend the outcome is our tech touch program drives the same level of adoption or better but through technology and not human touch. With this outcome, we’d monitor adoption results by technology and compare that to what we drive with humans, and until the technology achieves those results, we continue to iterate.
3. We fail to define the scope and timeline for execution
It’s extremely important to define the scope and timeline of your initiatives. In my experience, most companies try to work in quarterly increments. This is great in terms of setting a timeline, but if the scope isn’t clear, you can miss delivery and/or create misaligned expectations.
Let’s consider again, driving a tech touch program for customers. How far can you get in a quarter? Are you planning to build out a tech touch strategy along the entire customer journey for all segments of customers or are you building for a certain portion of the journey and a particular segment? Do you have all of the technology to build it or do you need to identify technology?
Defining the scope matters so the team executing is clear but also the company is clear on how far we will get in a particular amount of time. Nothing is more frustrating than an undefined scope and then missing expectations at the end of the quarter because we didn’t define the scope upfront.
4. We don’t choose a single owner who is responsible for success
If the owner of a strategy and the following initiatives to drive toward that strategy is not clear, it will fail. This probably seems quite obvious, but too many times, I’ve seen strategy into operational execution fail simply because it’s not clear who owns what. It’s not clear who is leading and who is part of the team. Or, and this is the kiss of death, there are multiple “owners” for delivery.
When you define operational initiatives to support strategy, you need a single owner. There may be sub-projects and owners over different parts of execution, but all of these need to roll up to a single person.
When I was leading Customer Success at Goodtime, we rolled out an entirely new Pricing and Packaging initiative. There was one owner over the success of this initiative, but there were owners over subparts like: sales team enablement, contract updates, customer success team enablement, messaging and positioning, etc.
This type of cross-functional initiative touches so many areas of the company and work needs to be coordinated and executed operationally across various areas. Who owns ensuring each area executes to plan and on time? Leaving each area to do it “on their own” without someone overseeing it and ensuring alignment is a recipe for failure.
5. We set too many priorities and don’t ensure there are enough resources to execute
Finally, many companies fail on operationalizing strategy because there are too many initiatives and priorities to execute, and not enough resources to do it. I think of execution by the rule of three. No single person can be leading or executing more than 3 priorities at any given time. Too many times, we put the same leaders and teammates on all of our initiatives, and they end up being stretched so thin that we either create burnout, or we don’t actually execute.
It’s our job as leaders to ask the questions of who is going to be on the team to execute? Who is leading? Do these individuals have enough capacity? Are we overusing some resources and underutilizing others? Taking a step back to ask these questions will ensure you narrow your focus to the few most important priorities, resource them well, and get them done.
The Key to successful execution: avoid these mistakes.
Time and time again, I’ve joined companies and teams and seen these mistakes repeated over and over again. As a leader, it’s my job to uncover these gaps, and to create better clarity for the team and company. The signs will be clear when these gaps exist. And now, armed with understanding these top 5 mistakes, you can address and avoid them within your company and Customer Success organization.
