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What is RevOps? Aligning Marketing, Sales, and CS Teams

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What is RevOps?

The definition of Revenue Operations, put simply, is the alignment of marketing, sales, and success teams across processes, enablement, data, and technology to drive consistent and growing revenue.

RevOps delivers a holistic birds eye view for management/operations so they can closely monitor the customer journey before, during, and after a sale and precisely measure and improve the entire team’s impact. The different departments still have their structure, but RevOps provides a united front for goal creation, communication, training, processes, and reporting.

When we consider Revenue Operations in terms of how it can improve a business, we equate it to the strategy and logistics that organizations implement to drive revenue across the entire customer lifecycle.

Is a RevOps Approach Right For Your Business?

It’s probably the right time to consider bringing RevOps into your company if you’re asking yourself any of these questions:

  • Are teams speaking almost different languages and pursuing conflicting goals? 
  • Do your teams utilize too many systems that overlap or don’t seamlessly integrate with each other? 
  • Are departments at your company siloed into their own corners and not communicating with each other? 
  • Is there an overall lack in measurement, tracking, and analytics of the key performance indicators of success for your business?

These are all clear signs that you may benefit from a Revenue Operations strategy and presence at your company.

Understanding the RevOps Movement

Think of it this way: Revenue Operations takes your business from an individual sport to a team sport. With a new playbook, your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams can work together to score big. 

By centralizing these separate departments, Revenue Operations creates complementary processes, technologies, KPIs, analytics, methodology, and training across departments so all revenue teams have the capability to carry out the go-to-market strategy for the overall organization. In short, it aligns people, processes, and data across your revenue teams.

And while the RevOps terminology may have gained popularity more recently, the concept is not new. That’s because it is built upon a business truth: No revenue team should work independent of one another because they are all so interconnected. 

In the past, companies understood that marketing and sales needed to be aligned, but often left customer service out of the mix. Sales operations reduces friction in the sales process to make selling easier, while revenue operations reduces friction in the entire customer lifecycle to make attracting, selling, and retaining customers easier. 

The revenue operations framework understands that your current customers are your most likely customers in future years and that nurturing and expanding those relationships is crucial for the health of a company in terms of reducing churn and increasing revenue. 

Common Ways RevOps Promotes Interconnectedness of Teams: 

  • Marketing being involved at the top of the funnel all the way to customer retainment and expansion

  • Sales working with marketing at the top of the funnel to collaborate on awareness and outbound

  • Sales working with Customer Service to identify common issues, reduce churn, and identify expansion opportunities

Essential Components of a Revenue Operations Team

The four essential components of a revenue operations team are Operations, Enablement, Insights, and Technology. They work together to deliver your team's best performance. 

Operations

  • Operations handles the business strategy and management of cross-team work.
  • They create cross-team processes that support overall strategy and go-to-market strategy. This includes regular meetings and other communication channels.
  • They handle project management of RevOps initiatives to ensure deadlines are met. 
  • Operations leads quota and goal setting.
    • Keep in mind this is not just for Sales. Marketing and Customer Service can also have quotas that are driving revenue. Everyone should be on the same page in terms of their individual and team goals, and how they connect to company-wide revenue expectations.

Enablement

  • This is where the training is handled.
  • In order to ensure that all sellers are set-up for success, Enablement provides a comprehensive onboarding experience, as well as ongoing coaching and learning programs.
  • They clearly define the methodology driving sales and CS teams.
    • Having a methodology is important to keep the company, not just sales, aligned on how to interact and delight customers. 

Insights

  • Insights provides the data and interpretation to understand team performance and opportunities for improvement.
  • Insights sets up the reporting and analytics that will validate the strategies and processes which will ensure your company is making the right decisions.
  • Important metrics need to be the ones that are driving revenue, so if something is being measured, it must be clear how it is creating revenue. For instance, Marketing may want to see how their SEO is performing and measure website traffic, but ultimately, they need to understand how that website traffic is creating qualified leads that sales can close.
  • Popular KPIs include:
    • Annual Recurring Revenue
    • Customer Lifetime Value
    • Customer Retention Rate
  • Insights creates centralized reporting so all teams are looking at the same numbers. When this is the case, all stakeholders know where to find reporting and measure success.

Technology

  • This establishes a unified front for systems and processes via your tech stack.
  • How often have you looked at your tech stack and wondered why there are so many technologies for different teams, all siloed?
  • With Revenue Operations owning the technology used across marketing, sales, and CS, RevOps can make sure that systems speak to each other, they are supplementing each other not fulfilling duplicative functions, and they are all providing value that drives revenue.
  • From an ROI perspective, this also ensures that the team is getting full value of any software investment.

6 Overall Benefits of RevOps for Your Organization

Adopting this mindset of interdependence of teams and their shared values and strategies will lead to some pretty powerful outcomes for your organization. Let’s highlight six ways RevOps creates a revenue-generating machine: 

  1. RevOps Creates Alignment Amongst Teams
    • Departments may be siloed, but revenue operations creates shared KPIs, analytics, processes, training and more.
  2. RevOps Increases Transparency and Accountability
    • When everyone is working from the same playbook, it’s easier to track efficiencies and deficiencies within the system. Plus, it’s natural that competitive salespeople will dig in and perform better when their name is on a results tracking tool for all to see.
  3. RevOps Creates Predictability of Growth and Revenue
    • With one source of the truth, it’s easier for leadership to view real-time pipeline performance indicators and make data-driven decisions for the future. Overall, by holistically addressing revenue planning, it will lead to better results.
  4. RevOps Puts the Right People in the Right Seats
    • You must be sure that people with specific skills are reporting to specific people. For example: Is the head of sales the best person to oversee analytics and technology when they’ve never worked on those items? Of course not! In the same way, are the right people with the right skills given the right job? A salesperson can’t sell effectively if they are splitting their time on unrelated tasks better handled by marketing.
  5. RevOps Helps Teams Collaborate and Pivot As Needed
    • By connecting essential business and activity data across former organizational silos and technology stacks, teams now have a common view of the business that helps them work together to optimize processes and adjust as needed to build the best customer experience.
  6. RevOps Reduces Friction Across the Customer Journey
    • Sales Operations reduces friction in the sales process to make selling easier, while revenue operations reduces friction in the entire customer lifecycle to make attracting, selling, and retaining customers easier.

All of these RevOps benefits boil down to one incredible result: They create a better, more sustainable customer experience. Who could ask for a better outcome?

To learn more about how to optimize your Revenue Operations, reach out to the team at Vetrus Solutions. We’ll walk you through a RevOps checklist that helps guide your journey of building smarter processes, systems, and insights - with ROI in mind!