Revamping Revenue & Finance System Operations
Challenge — What we called the “Revenue org” at Vox Media — aka the sales people, the ones who worked on ad campaigns and brand partnerships, and the “org that made us money” — was the biggest department in the company. They had a number of tools they used that they had operational and analytical oversight of, like Salesforce (CRM) and Boostr (OMS). Salesforce overlapped with IT in that we owned the budget and administration of it, and the Salesforce administrator was my direct report. I discovered he had no good way to take requests from his Revenue colleagues — everything came through Slack or email. When I dug deeper, I found this was true across the Revenue org — their systems management was all over the place and the project managers and operators were overwhelmed with trying to help people use their systems.
Approach — I implemented a streamlined system for Revenue system requests:
Partnered with colleagues across the Revenue org to understand pain points
Supported and leveraged my direct report’s relationship with the Revenue org to gain trust and buy-in
Created a proposal that described the issues the department was facing and how we planned to solve them
Got sign off from the Chief of Staff to the CRO to move forward with the proposal
Assigned clear ownership of each tool to subject matter experts
Implemented a process whereby users could go to one Slack channel and submit requests, no matter what tool they needed help with
Funneled those requests into Zendesk for ease of visibility and reporting
Built forms in Zendesk that reflected information needed and FAQs
Trained Revenue colleagues on how to use Zendesk
Results —
Consolidated and streamlined Revenue system questions and requests, creating efficiency for both the subject matter experts and users
Provided visibility to senior leadership on previously “unseen” and untracked work
Created metrics and reporting through Zendesk
Improved the Revenue org’s ability to handle work and save time
Exposed areas of Revenue systems where more training and documentation were needed
Enhanced communication between Revenue system subject matter experts, allowing for more collaboration between systems
Created a model that I implemented with other departments (i.e., Finance adopted the ticketing system process for NetSuite)
Business Impact — I took a problem that Revenue leaders weren’t even thinking about — but one that was costing their staff a lot of time and headache — and influenced my Revenue colleagues to adopt a process that I knew worked well (we used something similar in IT for years). My approach improved operational efficiency, created metrics, and above all, reduced friction for users, saving time and money. The framework I established created sustainability, allowing the organization to handle more complex work with better predictability. Due to its success, I replicated this work with the Finance org, who I worked closely with on NetSuite implementation and administration.
