There has been considerable talk in the business and financial worlds about how revenue operations drives better value when companies use it to create a more streamlined approach to lead management and revenue enhancement. While the concept has been around for a while, its use has only recently come into full effect thanks to platforms like Salesforce and SalesLoft that make it easier for companies to implement a revenue operations strategy.
The key is understanding what revenue operations is, how to use it to maximize your revenue streams, and what value it brings to organizations. We’ll examine each of these points and more, so you can understand why revenue operations is valuable to your company.
What Is Revenue Operations?
In a traditional business, the customer service, sales, and marketing teams do their own thing with minimal connectivity. If there’s connectivity among them, it’s cursory at best, and their efforts probably aren’t coordinated.
The marketing team generates leads and nurtures them until they’re ready to speak to sales. The sales team identifies customer needs and presents ways to solve those challenges. The customer service team helps with retention and keeps the customer happy and satisfied with the provided products or services.
The Revenue Operations team (aka RevOps) brings all of these groups together cross-functionally to form a cohesive unit that works together to drive conversions and provide an excellent customer experience. The Revenue Operations team primarily focuses on three key pillars – processes, technology, and data/analytics.
Bringing Teams Together
The head of Revenue Operations then shares these strategies with members of their team, who include liaisons that regularly interact with each functional group. These liaisons are responsible for keeping the lines of communication open between the functional groups and Revenue Operations. This arrangement allows for data and ideas to be shared easily.
Platforms such as Salesforce and SalesLoft make data collection across teams easy and provide a high degree of visibility into prospect and client interactions with the entire company. Each functional group is responsible for key performance indicators (KPIs), including annual recurring revenue (ARR), the number of leads generated, customer turnover rate, and customer lifetime value.
Processes Designed to Bring Everything Together
The goal of revenue operations is to make sure all teams work together from the beginning, when a customer considers purchasing a product thanks to marketing, closing the deal with sales, and then customer service successfully renewing and upselling products or services.
The Revenue Operations team assists each functional group by mapping processes and documenting procedures that can be shared with other functional groups or used as training materials. These processes ensure that team members follow repeatable processes and achieve consistent results.
Processes help maintain cohesion from one team to the other and ensure that everyone understands what the other groups are doing. Processes create accountability across the teams and streamline revenue growth, so you see benefits like increased upsells, better customer retention, and shorter sales cycles.
All of these add value to your teams and your company. Don’t underestimate the importance of processes in revenue operations. Collaboration and data collection can only go so far unless there are processes in place to coordinate everything into a cohesive unit.
Difficulties Implementing Revenue Operations
One of the biggest problems is companies treating revenue operations as an experiment. They want to try it out, but they don’t invest the time and money into the resources needed to make it successful.
They may create the team but not invest in the technology stacks necessary or develop the processes required to meet KPIs. If you treat revenue operations as an experiment or as a proof of concept, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
You need to go all-in when it comes to revenue operations. There are services available to help you develop your revenue operations strategy, like Revenue Ops LLC.
Another barrier is centralizing and organizing clean data. As we mentioned before, data collection is one of the most important aspects of RevOps. With the ever-growing number of technology platforms utilized within companies, vast quantities of data are collected on prospects and clients who are interacting with your company. However, if you don’t properly analyze the data, you can’t use it to make the data-driven decisions that move the company forward.
Finally, some companies treat revenue operations as sales operations. Many companies believe that revenue operations and sales operations are the same, but they’re not. Revenue operations offers a holistic approach to business operations to fill in the gaps between sales, marketing, and customer service. In contrast, sales operations focus primarily on the processes, technology, and analytics most important to the sales team.
Value of Revenue Operations for Companies
Other benefits include increased ROI due to targeted prospect and customer interactions. Since connected systems like Pardot, Salesforce, and SalesLoft all share data and reveal different insights, the company can provide personalized messaging at the right time to prospects and customers. This experience leads to increased conversion rates and improved customer retention.
The ability to analyze data and make timely, data-driven decisions is also a fantastic benefit realized by companies that implement a Revenue Operations team. Since RevOps has fully integrated its technology systems, established standardized processes and procedures, and built reports and dashboards to analyze the entire sales and marketing funnel, detailed reporting can be created. So various teams can be agile and responsive to quickly changing market conditions.
Value Goes Beyond Revenue
There may be infighting and corporate animosity among the teams because they see themselves as internal competitors. It’s hard to create a team atmosphere when there’s little communication among the core teams.
Your revenue operations strategy instills a sense of unity and camaraderie. The success of one is the success of all. The organizational culture shifts from a “me vs. them” mentality to an altruistic mindset. The entire group shares in both the corporate successes and learning opportunities.
Revenue operations provides accountability. If one team underperforms, the others are there to offer support. There’s no relishing of defeat, but instead a desire to see everyone grow and succeed for the company.
Management can see how the team dynamic changes even after the first few weeks of adopting a revenue operations strategy. The teams generally become collaborative and comfortable with sharing constructive feedback. Productivity is positively impacted when there’s a mutual appreciation for different perspectives.
The Revenue Operations team is the impartial glue that holds the various groups together and helps them realize their true potential.
Start Your Revenue Operations Journey Today
Revenue Operations is becoming the norm for business-to-business companies that want to create more revenue and build a trusting and cooperative core team. Your competitors are working hard to get their revenue operations up and running, so you should too.
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This post was originally published on the Revenue Ops LLC blog.
