Documentation Best Practices for RevOps | A Deep Dive, Part 3

[JenBergren]

Welcome to part 3 of this series on my favorite RevOps or general ops topic that is secret...because no one talks about it...documentation!

Documentation ties all the main elements of RevOps together, across all teams we work with, because it helps people consistently and efficiently use processes that use tech. In my 2020 RevOps interviews of 35 experts, I found that people, processes, and tools/tech are the three topics that are at the core of Revenue Operations.

Part 1 of this series explained some of the basics about what documentation is, who’s is or is not in charge of it, and why it is the secret weapon of RevOps: it helps you scale your business. Part 2 explained how documentation helps scale your business with less friction.

Now we’ll discuss some of the best practices for documentation, how to make it actually happen!

RevOps best practices for documentation 

The TL;DR version is: change management. Documentation is part of change management and you'll also need to use change management to make your documentation dreams a reality.

If documentation is something you’ve never done before as a company, you’ll have to be a change management pro to change the company culture from the top down and get everyone on the documentation bandwagon!

• Get buy-in from leadership on the importance of documentation to help the company scale. In addition to the points in the above section, HubSpot Academy professor Kyle Jepsen has a helpful blog on selling RevOps to leadership with a few related tips to framing the conversation to what leadership cares about. 
• Explain to all teams how documentation will help them be more efficient, remove the burden of remembering how to do everything, hire more help to make their jobs better, and help them promote and train their replacement sooner, basically all the points above framed to what the individuals care about.
• Train new employees across the company about the importance of documentation as part of their first 30-days tasks, such as requiring them to read relevant documentation, having a video or call with RevOps about the importance of documentation, and possibly taking quiz or earning an onboarding badge.
• Make it easy for documentation to happen, easy to know who’s responsible, and easy to keep it updated. Too often, the documentation does not get updated when everyone thinks, “Someone else will do that.” 
• This “Not me” thinking leads to a lot of the messes that RevOps is tasked to clean up. Since we want to be more strategic and not be the clean up crew, be clear about the process to create, own, and update documentation.
• The best tool to use for starting the habit of documentation is the tool most of your team is already using, so there is no need to train on a new tool or expect them to add one more piece of software into their routine. 
• Start with one format of documentation and then expand to include multiple formats to accommodate multiple learning styles and needs. For example, one wiki article may include any of the following and more: text, video with audio (and transcribed into text), screenshots, slides, and step-by-step gifs.
• If you are the first Ops person at a company, you may not have any documentation to start with, a “documentation debt” I spoke about in my previous blog. Though it would be nice to document large processes first, like how the sales process works, this information can be hard to extract and unify from multiple perspectives. If that is true, you may want to start small by:
• Documenting how people are currently using their main tool, such as HubSpot
• Analyzing that information from multiple people to see how each team should be using the tool for their jobs 
• Putting that documentation where both you and they can easily refer to it and update it 
• Once you learn more about the bigger processes in the company and how the tool helps with those processes, you can revise the documentation to make sure the tools are running the process in the best way
• Then you can record a live training with each team, a recording that is also given to new employees onboarding with each dept. and added to the knowledge base. 
• During your daily/weekly/monthly tool maintenance/cleanup routine, identifying the common causes and common people/teams causing particular data issues or other Hubspot issues. Solve the issues through training, automation, or revising processes in the documentation.
• Reward people using the tool well, and people documenting well!

I’ll stick to one of these bullets for the next blog: putting that documentation where both you and they can easily refer to it and update it.

So it will be about tools for documentation, to lure in those RevOps readers who want to talk about tools all day long! Stay tuned.