Why Is Everyone Talking About Revenue Operations?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the modern approach to running marketing, sales, and success operations as a unified business unit. It’s not a new approach, either. In 2019 Revenue Operations titles outpaced Sales Operations titles on LinkedIn.
So here’s the deal: In years past, you would have an operations person in each department. A marketing department had a marketing operations person, a sales department had a sales operations person, and a support/customer success department had their customer success operations person. All of these departments were connected as customer lifecycle interactions yet were siloed in many ways - reporting, processes, and tech stacks.
You may have observed friction between department handoffs - like qualified lead to opportunity conversion, or new sale handoff to the onboarding team. You may also have observed disputes when it comes time for quarterly board meetings – when leaders are reporting on similar metrics, and maybe even butt heads on definitions or the numbers themselves.
The solution
The goal of Revenue Operations is to unify the tools, processes, and reporting across all of these revenue-generating teams. When you unite the operations of marketing, sales, and customer success operations teams under one central leader marching toward one single goal - GENERATE REVENUE – you create visibility across your entire delta (marketing funnel, sales pipeline, new business wins, growth, and churn). With a Revenue Operations organization, you will improve efficiency across the entire revenue process including your customer experience, and it will drive revenue predictability/measurably.
What do you need to accomplish this?
People
Create a RevOps team to enable a unified view of the business. Traditional operations silos have an operations person assigned to each department governing that department’s systems. With a unified team instead, we have multiple operations professionals responsible for pieces of the technology stack but all are aligned to the whole revenue lifecycle and all downstream KPIs. Take your marketing, sales, and customer success KPIs and write them with that department’s goals in mind. When people are all aligned to work along the entire business lifecycle from marketing systems all the way through to customer success an organization is setting itself up for success!
Tools
Eliminate the organizational and technology silos. If your organization has unconnected technologies that aren’t talking to each other or redundant systems creating excess data it’s important to identify the gap and overlap that exists in your technology ecosystem. Once this mapping is complete, connect business tools and map data across systems to enable a unified view of the business lifecycle.
Align Efforts
A newly formed Revenue Operations department will now help managers and staff in functional business units (marketing, sales, customer success) accomplish unified goals across the revenue lifecycle. Involve the new operations team in forecasting calls, project planning, and all major staff motions. Let them establish integrated processes across teams and the tools used.
The Benefits
You can see by now that RevOps creates better collaboration and more predictable business growth. These are operational time-savers that are seen across multiple departments. Lowering the lift of those teams will have a direct impact on your profit. Studies are also starting to show that companies that align their revenue functions this way outperform those that don’t.
Looking for numbers?
Forrester has several reports on the benefits (see helpful links below). Flatly, public companies with RevOps had 71% higher stock performance than those that didn’t. They observed an average of 30% reductions in GTM expenses (unified technology is a beautiful thing!) and also 15% more in profits.
Other reports show department performance boosts:
Increased digital marketing ROI
Increased lead acceptance by sales
Increased sales and customer success productivity
Improved customer satisfaction responses
Are you ready?
Don’t dismiss the potential of unifying and automating your Revenue Operations. If you are ready to increase your marketing impact, and amplify how sales and customer success teams perform. Reach out to us at Op Methods. We can help you establish a unified revenue vision, and unify your teams and technology into a harmonized ecosystem.
