How the review works

How the review works

An engineer spends 45 minutes with one person from each role on your go-to-market team, starting with your SDRs and AEs, and gives you four documents: your ontology, your workflows, a roadmap and a gap list. Your team can build from them.
01

Who comes

The engineer's whole job is revenue operations and the tools behind it. They score your team against the Tenbound Standard, and they work on video calls or in your office.

They watch your team work and open the tools, instead of asking people to describe it.

  • A rep says the CRM cannot do something. The engineer opens it and checks. Often it can, and nobody set it up.
  • The engineer sees the steps nobody wrote down: the spreadsheet, the copy and paste, the lead that waits a day for a reply.
  • When two tools disagree about the same customer, the engineer finds out which one your team trusts, and why.
  • The plan is written by someone who could build it, so your team or any vendor can follow it.
A sales rep working at their desk with both hands on the keyboard, and an engineer standing at their shoulder, watching rather than typing.
A session: the rep works on a real account, the engineer watches and asks questions.
A consultant
the work

Asks people to describe the work, and stops there. What comes back is the version your team can put into words, which is the version that already made sense to them.

The engineer
the work

Asks the same questions, then stays and watches. Sees the list a rep actually built, the reply nobody routed, and the step everybody works around without mentioning it.

People leave steps out when they describe their own work, including your best reps, so the engineer checks what they say against what they do.
02

The steps

It can be done in a couple of days. How long it takes depends on how quickly the sessions can be booked with each role.

Nothing is installed and nothing is connected. The sessions happen on a screen share.

  1. 01

    Step 1: sessions

    45 minutes from one person in each role. Nobody prepares anything.

    The engineer spends 45 minutes with one person from each role, starting with your SDRs, AEs and sales manager, then marketing, RevOps, onboarding and customer success. They do their normal work on a screen share.

  2. 02

    Step 2: write-up

    Nothing. The engineer may ask one or two follow-up questions.

    The engineer writes the ontology, the workflows, the roadmap and the gap list from what was seen.

  3. 03

    Step 3: walkthrough

    60 to 90 minutes. The four documents arrive the same day.

    The engineer takes your team through the findings. Invite as many people as you like.

What each session covers

One person from each role joins, the person who does the work, not their manager. They work on a real, recent example.

  • SDR or BDR How the list gets built, which account gets worked first and why, what a first email says, what happens to a reply, and where a booked meeting goes.
  • Account executive How a meeting becomes an opportunity, what gets asked on the first call, what goes into the CRM and what stays in a notebook, and how a deal moves to the next stage.
  • Sales manager The pipeline review as it actually runs, where the forecast number comes from, and what gets coached.
  • Marketing How a campaign is set up, where a lead goes and by what rule, which numbers get read afterwards, and what happens to the leads that go nowhere.
  • Onboarding or customer success How a signed deal reaches the people who deliver it, what they are told, and what they have to find out again.
  • Any other role the work passes through RevOps, a CRM admin, finance, a partner manager. If the work passes through that role, the engineer sits with one person from it too.
Example: one SDR session, 45 minutes Example
  1. Opens the CRM queue The queue is ordered by date added, not by how well the account fits. Gap list
  2. Skips the queue and searches LinkedIn for a new VP of Sales The rep's own trigger works better than the queue. Nobody else on the team knows to do it. Automate
  3. Copies the contact into the CRM by hand About four minutes per contact, retyping data a tool already has. Automate
  4. Writes the first email from a template Only the first line changes. A draft could be written for the rep to edit. Assist
  5. Decides whether a reply is worth a call today A judgment call. Needs a written rule so every rep decides the same way. Keep with a person
  6. Sets a follow-up reminder in a personal calendar The follow-up is invisible to the manager and to the CRM. Gap list
An invented session to show the format. Automate, assist and keep with a person are the three answers the workflows document gives each step. Everything else goes on the gap list.

Questions the engineer asks

  1. 01 Walk me through what you actually do on Monday morning.
  2. 02 A lead comes in that does not fit your usual customer. Follow it all the way. Where does it end up?
  3. 03 A reply is unclear. Who decides what happens next, and how long does it wait?
  4. 04 Two systems disagree about a company. Which one is right, and who else knows that?
  5. 05 What do you have to do that you think is pointless?
03

What you get

Four documents, delivered the same day as the walkthrough. You keep all four whatever you decide next.

Ontology

The definitions your team and your tools share: what counts as a lead, a qualified meeting, an opportunity and a customer, and where each one lives.

Example
Qualified meeting
Held, with a decision maker, next step booked
Lives in
HubSpot, deal stage 2
Workflows

How each workflow runs today and how it should run, role by role. For every step: automate it, let a tool assist, or keep it with a person. Plus the fields, rules and connections to set it up.

Example
Inbound demo request
Route to an AE on arrival: automate
First reply to a prospect
Draft for the SDR to edit: assist
Roadmap

Where you stand on the Tenbound Standard, then what to fix first, in order. Every item has an owner, a date and a way to check it was done.

Example
Where you stand
Assisted
First fix
Write the routing rule. Owner: RevOps. Day 30
Gap list

Every place your tools should share data and do not, and every step nobody owns. Each gap comes with the fix and what fixing it saves.

Example
Demo requests
Wait four hours for an owner
Cost
About 6 hours of SDR time a week
Example entries, invented to show the format. Yours come from what the engineer sees.

How the score works

The roadmap opens with your score. Each of the six areas of the Tenbound Standard gets a level: Manual, Assisted, Orchestrated or Autonomous. Your overall level is your lowest area. Every score points to something the engineer saw, and an area the engineer did not see is marked as not seen.

See the four levels
  1. 01 Manual The work depends on individual effort and memory. It stops when a person stops.
  2. 02 Assisted Tools help. A human still decides every step.
  3. 03 Orchestrated The system runs the sequence. People intervene by exception.
  4. 04 Autonomous The system chooses the next action inside boundaries a human set, and reports back.
  5. Your level is your lowest pillar. The weakest connected capability sets the level of the whole system.

The gap list

It comes in two parts: what your team can fix alone, and what needs a decision from you.

Your team can fix these without you
  • Research a rep does by hand every morning gets drafted for them.
  • An inbound lead that waits for hours gets routed as soon as it arrives.
  • Accounts that should never have been on the list get removed.
  • A step where the same data is typed twice gets deleted.
These need a decision from you
  • Sales and finance count customers differently. Someone has to pick one.
  • Which replies a person answers and which a tool answers. Nobody has decided.
  • Reps who pick their own accounts will be told some are off limits.
  • A free text field becomes a fixed list, and everyone logs work differently.

Examples of the kind of gap the list contains, not findings from a client.

After the review

Your team can build from the workflows and the roadmap, or hand them to any vendor. If you would rather we build it, the same engineer and a team will, scoped and priced after you have read the findings. You are not locked in either way.

The review itself does not build anything, and nobody promises you a revenue number. What happens next depends on which fixes get made.

04

Telling your team

People who are watched at work assume they are being assessed. They are not. The engineer looks at the process and the tools, not at how well someone does their job.

Something like this works:

# sales-team Copy and adapt
Your name Head of Sales

An engineer is going to sit with one person from each team for 45 minutes to see how our process runs, before we plan next year. It is about the process, not about anyone's performance.

Send it before the first session, in whatever channel your team reads.
05

When not to buy it

The account executive will tell you the same on the call.

06

Terms

07

How to start

01 30 minutes, free

Talk to an account executive

A graph8 account executive asks how your team works today, gives you a first read on where the problem probably is, and tells you straight whether the review is worth doing now.

Book a discovery call
02 Card or invoice

Buy the blueprint

Your receipt has a link to pick your start date, and a one page prep sheet for each role. The roles get agreed with your sponsor, then the sessions are booked.

Buy the blueprint
08

Questions

What does it cost?

One fixed price, the same however many roles you have. It is on the pricing page with every term. The call with an account executive is free.

How long does it take?

It can be done in a couple of days. How long it takes depends on how quickly the sessions can be booked with each role.

How much of my team's time does it take?

45 minutes from one person in each role, a short kickoff with your sponsor, and the walkthrough at the end. Nobody prepares anything.

Is the discovery call a sales pitch?

It is 30 minutes with a graph8 account executive about how your team works. If the review would only tell you what you already know, the account executive says so.

Are you assessing my people?

No. The engineer looks at the process and the tools, not at how well someone does their job. Tell your team that before the first session.

We already know what is broken. What is left to find?

Most teams can name what breaks. The review shows whether fixing it needs one person or needs a decision from you, which decides how fast it gets fixed.

Do we have to buy software?

No. Where a fix needs a tool, the plan says so, and it is often a tool you already pay for.

Can we score our own team first?

Yes, for free, in six questions. The review checks that score against what the engineer actually sees.

Start here

Talk to an account executive

Free, with a graph8 account executive. Or buy the blueprint and book your sessions.