The newfound popularity of a Revenue Operations function seems, at face value, pretty obvious. The economy is exceedingly tough, which has prompted companies to hire experts in operational efficiency. The idea is to, as the saying goes, “Do more with less.”

Unfortunately, RevOps largely find themselves doing less than they’d hoped.

We recently surveyed 100 RevOps professionals, and overwhelmingly, they told us that instead of tackling strategic work, they’re bogged down in the muck of daily tasks. They’re falling into ticky-tacky time traps that can’t fix the origin of their team’s inefficiencies. Of these 100 respondents, 66% said they spend too much time on data hygiene and 73% said they spend too much time on process adherence.

It was — and still is — quite obvious that companies are hiring with an overly rosy outlook on what they want their new hires to achieve. But, thankfully, there are ways for RevOps to start digging their way out of this hole.

Let’s have a look on how to open up your schedule and get the time you need. RevOps leaders must get back enough time on their day to day first before they’re able to even think about approaching the larger, meatier projects.

To do this, we recommend:

1. Fight ad hoc requests with a ticketing system

Email, Slack, paper airplanes, shouts from across the office: For many RevOps, these inputs are an overwhelming, multichannel swarm of wishes, requests and outright demands.

For that, half the battle is in the tracking. Even if your team doesn’t use sophisticated software to manage tickets, you can start untangling this mess in three take-charge steps.

We suggest the following:

• Consolidate tracking of requests in one easy-to-access place.
• Track the order (date and time) and urgency of each request.
• Develop an SLA for yourself based on what is being asked and by whom (say, a week or more for a business development representative’s wish versus within a day for executive requests).

Your ticketing system can be as simple as a shareable Google Sheet with three columns: Who are you? What do you need? What date is it? Just set expectations that if rules are followed, everybody wins. (Bonus: Codification here will most definitely help leadership understand your burden and make resourcing decisions later.)

2. Automate, automate and automate

McKinsey says that 30% of sales activities can be automated. Be on the lookout for opportunities to streamline tasks to free up bandwidth. Some of the most impactful areas include:

• Contact creation: If you or your team is still creating contact or lead records by hand.
• Reporting: If you have recurring reports that are consistently delivered.