Over the past 18 months, I’ve been quickly taking on more at my current company. I’ve moved quickly from a specialist role into a manager role as well as from a role solely supporting our Sales team to one that supports the entire Revenue team. My current role, the Sr. Revenue Strategy & Analytics Manger (I know – it’s a mouthful), is a role that was once held by multiple employees.

Because of this change in dynamic, for the past 6 months, I’ve been tasked with getting the work of two people done as just a single contributor. Though I’m efficient, I am not two people, so my life saver in maintaining my trust with colleagues as well as my sanity has been prioritization.

Though this is nothing revolutionary, it’s been ground-breaking in making my work more rewarding as well as making me a more impactful partner to the leaders I work with. Specifically, as I analyze my projects going into 2022, I’m using the same framework that I learned not only in my Sales role before this but also from my very first Ops manager: the effort vs. impact matrix.

The Effort vs. Impact Matrix

Every time I re-evaluate my project prioritization, I’m using the matrix above to classify everything on my plate. When our organization went through a re-org, this is what we used to prioritize handing off tasks between teams. When I set my goals after taking over the RevOps position, I put every project through this matrix. Even as a Sales rep, when I was working through my deals and accounts, this was the matrix I used to decide what activities I needed to do in a day to get the most out of my book of business.

The matrix forces you to classify every single activity as either high or low impact and either high or low effort. This should help you narrow in on the quickest, most impactful activities, while giving you time to fill in the gaps with quicker, smaller wins and plan for the long-term major wins. Here’s I usually utilize this list:

• High Impact, Low Effort (“Home Runs”): These are the activities I want as my top projects to be working on in this moment. They’re going to allow me to have the most impact as quickly as possible. These will have the highest return on investment for my time commitment.
• High Impact, High Effort (“Big Bets”): These are the activities I want to kick out a bit as I make more incremental improvements and do more research. There is a huge return on these projects, but it may involve additional work that can be done through other projects or potentially a learning gap I need to bridge.
• Low Impact, Low Effort (“Quick Wins”): These are the activities I like to use to build confidence with my partners and may use to progress us closer to some of our more long-term goals. They may not necessarily be the biggest return, but if used correctly, they can build momentum and even progress more long-term initiatives.
• Low Impact, High Effort (“Fall Backs”): These are the activities that I avoid until I can’t avoid them any more. Until they become a major impact, have added value to another higher impact project, or a simpler solution appears, these are things I put on the back burner immediately.

Where I’ve Applied This

I use this in almost every aspect of my life, including personal decisions. I cannot stress enough how useful this framework can be. However, I’ll provide a few examples across different positions and projects where it’s been most useful.

The first time I was introduced to this was in my Account Executive role. They used this exact matrix to talk about how we should be prioritizing our customer interactions. They pushed us to create a list of sales activities we needed to accomplish in the day and forced us to put them through the matrix. This immediately got rid of all the mediocre touch points I had arbitrarily created during my Sales process and pushed me to create more meaningful deadlines and follow-ups with my customers in order to justify interactions being in the matrix. I became not only more efficient, but honestly, a better partner to my customers.

Within that same Sales role, our leaders used this framework to classify accounts. We thought of “Impact” as the actual revenue we could recognize with this customer and “Effort” as the likelihood that customer would buy from us. Since we were selling “seats”, it was pretty simple to classify “Impact” as the size of the company. “Effort” on the other hand became a combination of a few different factors comprising of industry, volume of ideal contacts, familiarity with our product, tech literacy, and more. My entire book of business was classified in this matrix, which helped me further customize my outreach to the “Home Runs” and “Big Bets” while automating my outreach to my “Quick Wins” and “Fall Backs”.

Moving into Ops, this matrix is my life saver. Every quarter, I put my projects back through this matrix. Each quarter I’m working to knock out while I need to get done while collecting more and more project requests from my partners in our Revenue leadership team. As I near my standard quarterly check-in, I’m compiling every project within our Revenue Operations scope, and running it back through this matrix. This helps me catch anything that may have become easier but been put to the wayside prior due to having a high effort to execute. It also helps me surface projects that may be becoming a large pain to the business than previously. Being a one-woman team in my current company, this is what keeps me sane, and also helps me build trust with my colleagues by openly communicating why I may or may not have time to execute against all projects that have been requested.

Of course, I can’t leave out how this helps me in my group projects at school. To be a good team member, it’s important to always deliver as much value back to the team as possible. When working in a group for school, especially while also working full-time, this can be really difficult to balance. For me, it’s helped to think of the overall project or work we’re doing in small chunks and put these through this matrix. When I see a “Big Bet” on the matrix, I’m trying to find ways I can quickly progress out team to moving that over to the “Home Run” category. When I see a “Quick Win” on the matrix, I’m trying to volunteer what limited time I do have to knock those out and help our team continue to progress. It can be really difficult to be a good teammate when you’re also working 40 hours per week, but when you’re making those most of those hours you do have for the course by prioritizing in this way, your limited time becomes 10x more impactful to the broader team.

Conclusion

Prioritization can be used in any role, and 100% should be! If you’re not doing this on paper, you’re probably doing it in some way. The times where I find it most impactful are those where I feel like I have a lot of things to do and not enough hours in the day to do them.

I know we’ve all felt this way at some point in life, careers, or school. It can feel really wasteful to take a step back and slow down when you’re in that moment. However, the value you will get in return to running all those tasks through a matrix will save not only your time but also your mental health. Give it a go next time you’re in this loop! I promise it’s worth it.