If you are a tech company struggling to scale, get your critical departments to align, and deliver a fantastic buying experience — from lead generation to post-purchase — then this detailed guide on RevOps is what you need.
Short for ‘revenue operations,’ RevOps is a B2B function that applies automation to help teams — from marketing and sales to customer service and finance — make decisions that ultimately result in business growth.
The concept of RevOps revolves around three primary goals — revenue leakage reduction, quotation calculator for better conversions and higher margins, and identification of growth opportunities using customer data.
Businesses that deploy RevOps are ahead of the pack, generating nearly 3X higher revenues. That is because, besides enhancing operational efficiency, RevOps offers visibility across all revenue-focused teams in the company.
How Did RevOps Come Into Being?
RevOps was born out of necessity. It is not uncommon to see marketing, sales, and customer support teams working independently in silos with their technologies.
This arrangement results in miscommunication, poor management of time, and revenue loss. Imagine if your marketing team is running a campaign to sell a product at a 10% discount to the buyer persona ‘A.’
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Now, the sales reps are also targeting the same buyer persona and have a few leads in the pipeline. Selling the 10% discount proposition would be a good idea, right?
But because the teams do not collaborate as much, delivering accurate quotes to potential customers with the help of a CPQ software solution can be tedious.
What is CPQ, you ask? It stands for Configure Price Quote and is the process followed by sales reps to configure the pricing for their complex business offerings.
When marketing and sales work operate as a group, set common objectives, and share resources from a single place, it becomes hassle-free for marketers and sales reps to do their job better — whether to strategize a new email campaign, accurately quote for a product or service, or nurture a lead.
Who Is in Charge of RevOps?
This answer depends on organizational maturity. In most scenarios, it is led by a data-driven C-level exec with vast knowledge of various growth hacking components, including revenue forecasting, customer acquisition, and sales pipelines.
When do You Need RevOps?
Should a bootstrapped startup founded a month ago deploy RevOps? Probably not. But a mature startup experiencing growth stagnation can benefit from RevOps. Here are five common scenarios when dipping your toes in the RevOps lake makes sense:
1. Your departments are clashing.
You know something is wrong when members from different departments butt heads and frequently approach you for a solution. For instance, it is common for sales and marketing not to see eye-to-eye on advertising and selling your offerings. RevOps can bridge the communication gap to a great extent.
2. You want to adapt to market changes.
As your business grows, it requires significant changes — whether the transition is introducing new products or services or CRM re-implementation. You will need the support of your team throughout the cycle. RevOps ensures communication, project management, and training, making internal transitions seamless.
3. You want to align your marketing and sales efforts.
A LinkedIn study reports that collaboration between the two functions enables critical business growth. RevOps enables both marketers and sales reps of your company to speak to each, making it crystal clear where the growth opportunities are.
4. You are a business without an established sales process.
If you build a company where you are the whole and soul of the sales function and rely on your knowledge to fetch more business, there will be obstacles ahead. RevOps helps you introduce new people and technologies to the mix and increases the probability of driving higher leads and conversions.
5. You want to enhance the customer experience.
RevOps would not mean anything without the customer. Implementing a RevOps strategy gives you access to strategies and processes needed to achieve cross-functional collaboration among your teams so that they can collectively serve your customers better.
How to Implement RevOps for Your Tech Company
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for RevOps. All companies follow different RevOps frameworks — depending on their business models, industry niche, revenue goals, etc. Here is how you can implement RevOps for your company:
1. Reinforce the “one team” approach
Marketing, sales, and customer support should be brought together to create one Rev Ops team. The traits you want to emphasize in these teams are collaboration, a team player mindset, and a belief in the importance of interconnectivity.
Alignment issues between teams arise because their processes are inward-facing — focusing on the team rather than the customer journey.
An aligned RevOps strategy starts with shared goals, jointly agreed campaigns targeting the same audiences, and reviewing connected metrics.
2. Evaluate your tech stack and organize your data
Suppose your tech company uses one tool for your marketing automation, another for sales CRM, and another for customer support. In that case, your data is likely to be disconnected, which means your teams are not working as efficiently as they should be.
The market has evolved to a point where many sales acceleration vendors combine multiple capabilities, so you have a single hub to connect to execute multichannel communication with prospects, generate data from engagement, and keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs). Having a solid data foundation helps.
Get a third-party specialist to do a full tech stack audit and get an unbiased opinion of your current systems and recommendations on where you could be in the future with your toolset. The goal is to ensure all teams can access accurate contact and activity data on their systems.
3. Map your new process workflows
After you adopt new technologies, it is time to map your workflows. The best way to structure your RevOps is by prioritizing every function’s duties.
For instance, determine when leads should move from sales to marketing, which customer service tickets go to customer support, which sales questions may move back, and so on.
Knowing who owns every type of customer and prospect interaction is critical, reducing friction and putting the customer at the forefront of your business.
4. Identify metrics for measuring performance
RevOps is not a one-time initiative. It is an ongoing process that ensures you always consider what is working and what is not, making your internal communication as seamless as possible.
It might be worth tracking the goals set out by the RevOps teams. For instance, if at the start of Q2, you identified gaps in the process that improves deal velocity and funnel conversion, does that align with the results at the end of Q3? Did the team achieve what they set out to do?
A few key metrics you can keep track of include the following:
- Value: The average deal size moving through the sales process and converting into revenue.
- Volume: The number of deals moving through the sales process and converting into revenue.
- Velocity: The speed at which deals move through the sales cycle and convert into revenue.
- Conversions: The rate at which deals move from stage to stage in the sales process, from lead to revenue.
Therefore, choose appropriate metrics with the right approach. The results your RevOps team attains can equip them with all the data they need to stay on course or refocus for greater business success.
Over to You
Regardless of your business size or domain, customers do not care about the internal workings of your tech company. All they want is a great product and customer experience. If you can provide what they need at the right time, they are more likely to buy from you again.
RevOps helps you align your siloed and fragmented processes, teams, and technologies and gives you a framework to keep your revenue-generating and customer-facing operations running smoothly like a well-oiled machine.
