⚙️ The Ops Playbook #14

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Good Morning Operators ⚙️

With our first baby on the way in January, my wife has begun nesting. If anyone has any recommendations for first-time parents, I’d love to hear them!

While I sort through the thousands of baby clothes I need to buy, let’s talk about three topics:

• Creating raving customers

• How to get more work done at the end of the month

• 3 tips on building a great customer community

Let’s get it.

^{Together With OpsZen}
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1. Creating Raving Fans

Insight from First Round

With budgets tightening, sales pipelines have shrunk across the board.

To combat this, you should build up your customer champions to ensure you hit your sales goals.

Advocates who rave about your product can improve your business 10x fold.

To create raving customers, try to build out programs dedicated to building out their loyalty.

Try this:

1. Start with a Small Event → Focus on understanding customer’s needs and align them with company goals. Begin with a specific small program like a cocktail rooftop experience. 

2. Identify What’s Working → Concentrate on one program at a time to gauge its effectiveness. Get third-party reviews as a successful strategy to convert potential users.

3. Focus on Small Touches → Unique details can distinguish your events from competitors. Using the same example as the rooftop cocktail party, you could give guests personalized bottles of alcohol or a cocktail named after the guest speaker.

4. Offer Unique Value → Differentiate your offerings to make them appealing, especially in competitive spaces. An example is introductions to investors and networking opportunities.

5. Avoid Getting Distracted by Shiny Metrics → Focus on meaningful engagement and genuine customer partnerships rather than superficial metrics like open rates. 

2. Make sure you get work done

Insight from Ro Fernn

With the end of the month coming around, I always go over my calendar. Some months, I accomplished a ton. Others, I definitely got distracted.

I've noticed that I'm the most productive when I create a structure going into a new month.

If you feel you have too much to do and never enough time, try out this structure!

1. Using a Checklist to Focus → Create a weekly, monthly, or project-based checklist to organize tasks. This checklist could include routine tasks such as updating reports, cleaning inboxes, and reviewing past accomplishments. The idea is to free your mind from remembering everything.

2. Prioritizing and Scheduling Work → Stack rank your to-dos. You should use a template called Kanban+UPD. It visually defines urgent tasks, sets priorities, identifies deliverables, and plans starts for new tasks.

3. Kanban Board for Task Management → Tasks need to be categorized by their status (e.g., urgent, due soon, or not active). Their visual representation changes color based on their due date to help prioritize.

4. Delegation and the 10,000-Hour Work Matrix → For tasks that can be delegated, think about the leverage and skill required for each task.

3. Community Building Lessons at Hubspot

Insight from Hubspot

Hubspot has built its community since 2017. Here are the 3 lessons from a Principal Marketing Manager, Christina Garnett.

1. Choose Your Own Adventure → Let folks in the community do their own thing. It's like, you want to give a talk? Cool. More into answering questions? Go for it. This approach is great because it lets people figure out how they want to mingle with others.

2. Make Members the Hero → Communities should empower members to feel like heroes. Try to create opportunities for them to shine and share their experiences.

3. Balance Community ROI and Needs → Engagement strategies should cater to all members. You have to recognizing your members diverse experiences, ranging from the most active to the lurkers.

4.  Building a Transparent Organization

Insight from Stanford

If you don’t give people enough information, two things usually go wrong. The first is that employees won’t make the right decisions. The second is that you create a level of distrust.

When large companies hide information, people tend to eventually discover that information. And what is the first thing they do?

They leak it 😅 

To create a more transparent organization, try this with everyone:

1. Share metrics → Be sure to share metrics like revenue, expenses, and CSAT. Everyone should be able to access this information in real-time to help their decision-making.

2. Review Board Decks → After each board meeting, take the time to review the decks with everyone in the company. You can use this chance to gather feedback.

3. Create meeting notes that are shared → With growth, not everyone can make all meetings. To keep everyone aligned, create shareable notes for anyone to review

4. Allow everyone access to email → This is an extreme step, but you can provide everyone access to your email. Be sure to remove any personal information if you go this route!

Operators Library

• How to improve your sales with sales enablement (Link)

• Rethinking the role of a Middle Manager (Link)

• Should suppliers cooperate with bankrupt companies (Link)

• How DoorDash uses Data Science to grow revenue (Link)

P.S. If you want to get featured in this section, share the newsletter (your referral link is below), and I'll include you in a future newsletter issue. 

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Something Fun

Feel free to reply with your meme; I might add yours to next week’s edition.