What is Risk Management? Everything RevOps Teams Should Know

Link copied to clipboard!

RevOps teams are surrounded by risk. When you’re managing tech stacks with so many different moving parts, the opportunity for miscommunication, incorrect reporting, and losing crucial field change data couldn’t be higher. Having a clear understanding of the risks surrounding your operation and ways to mitigate them will save your go-to-market teams a lot of headaches down the road. All departments should have an understanding of basic risk management processes to prepare them for when loss-generating events arise–especially RevOps. Here we’ll brush-up on what risk management is , how to build out a RevOps risk management plan, and the different ways Arovy can help support your overall risk management strategy.

What is risk management?

Risk management is the ongoing process of identifying, analyzing, and controlling events that have the potential to create loss for an organization. Loss can stem from a variety of factors, including financial uncertainty, legal liabilities, technology issues, management errors, natural disasters, or accidents. Every organization faces the risk of unexpected events that can negatively impact earnings, impede processes, or damage reputations. And risks not taken might inadvertently cause damage as well. Back in 2000, Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million, but their CEO thought the service was a joke and the “dot com era hysteria” was “completely overblown.” You can imagine how much he wishes he took that risk back then. With these things in mind, a successful risk management plan allows an organization to assess both the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between risks and the ripple effects they can have on strategic organizational goals.

Why is risk management important for ops teams?

We know all too well that the day-to-day job for ops teams can feel a lot like putting out fires left and right and constantly fixing problems that arise across multiple teams. Amid rising concerns about tech layoffs, tech stack budget evaluations , and the slow adoption of RevOps roles within many organizations, it’s more important than ever for RevOps leaders and admins to create a robust plan to prepare for and mitigate risk. Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a holistic approach to understanding and mitigating risk across an entire organization rather than having risk management decisions siloed in individual departments. In addition to anticipating negative risks, ERM also manages positive risk, including opportunities that could generate value—or, conversely, produce negative outcomes if not taken (think back to our Netflix and Blockbuster example). As an ops leader, we know you’re no stranger to working across departments and aligning teams to create more efficient systems. In the same way your RevOps team works across sales, marketing, and customer success departments to create a more profitable customer journey , an ops risk management strategy should seek to minimize risks that could create larger impact across teams if unmanaged. Risk management goes hand-in-hand with organizational strategy. Just like any other process within an organization, your risk management plan needs to meet legal, contractual, internal, and ethical standards across all departments in your org. Now that you understand what risk management is and why it matters forRevOps teams, here’s a brief overview of what exactly goes into the risk management process.

What is the risk management process?

An effective risk management strategy will help companies better understand and prepare for risk. The risk management process typically involves three phases: identifying risk, analyzing and assessing risk, and mitigating or controlling risk.

1. Risk identification

The first step in the risk management process is risk identification. Look for external and internal events that might cause data damage or leakage. Knowing your data architecture is critical, since many issues are caused by being unaware of integrations, connected apps, and installed packages. Unauthorized access is also a common source of risk, so it’s important to establish and understand custom roles and permissions to limit access to sensitive data. For RevOps leaders and Salesforce administrators, risk identification is a crucial step to take before diving into a new project. When discussing budget allocations for RevOps functions, unexpected operational costs, new systems to add to your tech stack, etc., consider creating a list of the potential risks surrounding each of these actions that might help to encourage budget allocation.

2. Risk analysis

During the next phase of your risk management process, conduct a risk analysis to help you understand the nature of hazards and determine the level of risk from each one. Throughout your risk analysis and assessment, you’ll want to establish the likelihood of an adverse risk occurring and sort the risks based on prominence and magnitude of consequences. Here is where you’ll strike a balance between taking risks and reducing them. Both an art and a science, risk analysts often use statistical models to numerically represent risk. With Arovy, you won’t have to worry about mapping out the magnitude of risks when making changes within your Salesforce system because we do it all for you. Arovy automatically applies tags so you know which fields and components are being used in your integrated technologies. There’s one step crossed off of your risk management list!

3. Risk mitigation

Once you’ve created a list of potential risks surrounding your organization and have assessed the prominence and magnitude of each, it’s time for risk mitigation. Risk mitigation involves actually creating strategies that will help reduce threats. Sometimes, threats are unpredictable and unavoidable. One way to supplement your risk management plan is to integrate crisis messaging into your communications strategy . Having messaging statements prepared when disaster strikes is one of the easiest ways to remain proactive in the face of uncertainty. Other ways that you can control risks include risk avoidance, which is the process of not participating in activities that might introduce risk, like investing or starting a new product line. Risk reduction aims to contain the effects of risk, rather than completely avoiding risk, and transferring risk to a third party like an insurance company is one way an organization might choose to mitigate risk.

How Arovy can help inform your risk management strategy

A risk management system functions best with a strong team of people, technologies, and processes working together to protect an organization from uncertainty. Arovy provides a technology that helps organizations better prepare for risk by giving full visibility into fields, relationships, and dependencies involved with specific objects in Salesforce. With Arovy’s predictive capabilities, you’re able to preview changes before they roll out to make sure nothing ever breaks, scoping the intensity and impact of changes before they even occur. Arovy intelligently guides any Salesforce transformation, whether it’s moving over automations, changing or updating fields, or cleaning up unused tech data. You can even use tools like FieldSpy, a free Arovy offering , in the Salesforce AppExchange, providing insight into field population percentages to safely identify fields to delete. Are you ready to see how Arovy can help guide your risk management strategy? Try Arovy for your organization today.