Saying No

I struggle with saying No to most things in my life, I have an instinct to squeeze everything in and sacrifice my sanity at times to make it all work. Part of this is being an extrovert, but part of it is just how I am wired - it’s the reason I’m such a busy person. I think this is part of the reason I landed in RevOps in my career, I was never a “no” person. You need a report run? I can squeeze that in! Want a new field, sure I can do that! Every time I started working with a new CRO, I built my credibility like a moat around me. I was the person that got it all done.

As my team grew, and my family, it became exhausting to say yes to everything. I had more projects on my plate and less time at home to squeeze in an extra few hours. I started to feel the burnout, but every time I said No I got pushback on how it wasn’t like me. I’m a people pleaser, I didn’t like that feedback either.

My first stage of growth with my operations team looked like a bunch of mini-me analysts. I wanted to protect their bandwidth while stretching mine. It felt like the right call, I was being promoted for how I interacted so that’s what I needed more of. If I just added one more analyst, I could say yes to all the things coming in - or at least that was the feedback loop I kept selling myself. And when you work at a high growth company, it’s not too hard to find the money to make that happen.

No matter how fast your company is growing, at some point the headcount will slow. Within the span of one week, I recall two conversations that really hit me hard. The first was with my CRO, he wanted to know what was going on and why I had become “The department of No”? His sales teams were complaining and he needed me, his team needed me. The other conversation was with my boss, he gave me total freedom to operate my corner of Sales Operations but he told me my promotion was rejected because I wasn’t “strategic enough”. I needed to prioritize he said, I couldn’t quantify the outputs for my team outside of ticket quantities and he wanted to see me “be strategic” before they resubmitted.

That’s tough feedback, you aren’t doing enough of the every day stuff to keep your customers happy but also not doing enough of the project work to keep the executive team impressed.

Somewhere between that version of me and today I learned how to deliver a “No” that worked for me. I learned how to be someone who supported my customers as well as someone that had the executive presence and understanding to prioritize appropriately. For me, this came from learning what type of No I needed to give and how I should deliver it.

There are four types of No you can give to someone, no matter how many words you use to get there you are ultimately pointing people down four different paths: Decline, Defer, Redirect, and Renegotiate.

Sometimes you have to give a hard No. Ideally it’s backed with logic on why so you can get to a mutual understanding, but there are times when a request just doesn’t make sense. Does someone want a new field to tag their accounts a very specific way? This is most likely a decline. Shutting someone down doesn’t feel good for anyone though, what really matters is the words you use to get there.

In breaking down how to deliver the No, I have found that in every instance it is key to start with a shared understanding. Ask the discovery questions, find out what their goal is, it’s worth the extra time in this moment to do the digging. The ask not only bridges the relationship with whoever you are working with but also helps you understand if you need to actually decline or if you can point them to a different solution or team to fix.

In many cases, you are declining because you can’t fit it into your very long to-do list. That shouldn’t be a decline, that’s a defer or renegotiation. It needs to go somewhere to determine if and when it can get done. Sometimes the person asking has the power to renegotiate what’s on your plate already, but sometimes they don’t. Creating transparency about the tradeoff, the process, the backlog in that moment helps everyone keep a shared goal.

Too many times the conversation ends there, it feels unfinished or unclear on how anything moves forward. Backlogs get long and asks feel like they are in a black hole to your customers. The best way to avoid this is make sure you offer options for moving forward and make a concrete ask back. This can look like offering to use another field and asking them go back to their leadership team to find out who else needs this request. It can look like offering a ticket submission option and asking them to follow up with a leader to prioritize.

Nailing the way you say “No” helps you find the balance in keeping your priorities and time prioritized, an important aspect of being a more strategic leader, while also protecting the relationships and political capital with your customers. This is one of the key topics I teach in The Modern Revenue Operations Leader^TM course. Not just the types of No and the anatomy of how to deliver it, but it also comes with a full library of “No Scripts” to help you find the words that you need.