Contributed by Sonny SultaniRevenue Operations is something that has become increasingly popular in the business world in recent years. However, understanding Revenue Operations, or RevOps, can sometimes feel overwhelming. This Revenue Operations guide will help you explore many of the ins and outs of RevOps.
In today’s high-demand market, 78% of customers expect consistent interactions from all business departments, according to Salesforce. However, 59% of customers say each department feels unique instead of one cohesive company.
Revenue Operations works to overcome that disconnect and deliver a seamless experience for all customers no matter which departments they interact with.
Read through this guide to see if RevOps is right for you and learn how to implement it into your business strategy.
What Is RevOps?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the alignment of sales, marketing, and operations to maximize revenue potential. RevOps fully integrates customer retention, the marketing funnel, and sales processes so that each organization has the same goals and uses unified data.
“RevOps fully integrates customer retention, the marketing funnel, and sales processes so that each organization has the same goals and uses unified data.”
It includes nearly every business operation like identifying revenue leaks, reevaluating prices, and detecting at-risk customers.
In the end, the goal of RevOps is to increase business revenue and build better relationships with customers.
Consider implementing RevOps when:
- Your sales team is struggling to close deals
- Your marketing team is losing qualified leads
- Your operations team is performing at a snail’s pace
How to Implement RevOps
1. Audit the Customer Journey
The primary goal of RevOps is to provide a cohesive experience for your customers. Auditing the customer journey is the first step toward a unified vision. You are looking for any disconnects between departments.
- Examine your existing customer-facing content and make sure it aligns with the buyer’s journey. Plan to fill in any content gaps.
- Audit your CRM technology for your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to ensure they are tracking all customer interactions.
- Assess your website and other digital channels to eliminate any barriers for potential buyers.
2. Define and Align Customer Stages
Create goals and definitions for each stage of the customer journey. Make sure each team understands and agrees with these definitions and goals.
- Evaluate your analytical process to make sure you are collecting the right customer information at each point in the sale pipeline.
- Examine your tech stack to look for redundancies or gaps in your tools and software.
- Give all teams guidelines for your new streamlined RevOps procedures. This should include sales, content marketing, and the customer experience.
3. Build a RevOps Foundation
Once you have identified problem areas and created new definitions, you can start building a solid foundation for your new Revenue Operations processes.
You should create:
- A plan for customer acquisition that focuses on meeting or exceeding client expectations.
- Streamlined workflows that collect accurate data and move prospects quickly through the sales pipeline.
- Automated task queues that include follow-up emails and other customer touchpoints.
- A RevOps dashboard that identifies current customer bottlenecks.
4. Optimize Your RevOps Strategy
Once you put your Revenue Operations strategy into place, the work is still not finished. You will need to continually adjust and optimize your processes as your business grows.
- Create a routine RevOps meeting schedule to ensure alignment across all departments. Make sure all department heads recognize their roles in contributing to the growth and success of your RevOps plan.
- Analyze your RevOps dashboard each month to identify which phase of the customer journey needs the most attention.
What Makes RevOps an Ideal Business Solution
RevOps is an ideal business solution because it gives each department within a company the same goal – to create a cohesive customer experience that ultimately leads to higher revenues.
“RevOps is an ideal business solution because it gives each department within a company the same goal – to create a cohesive customer experience that ultimately leads to higher revenues.”
There are a few key benefits that make RevOps an easy business decision:
- Predictable Growth: Knowing what to expect can make a big difference in the success of your business. A solid RevOps process can give you more predictable growth. This can help you feel more confident in making certain business decisions, such as investing in new markets or creating new products.
- More Transparency: In many business meetings, each department is focused on its specialty and individual goals without understanding what the other teams are doing. This can cause competition and friction between teams, especially if problems arise. With a RevOps program, your teams have complete visibility among each other. Each team sees the same big picture, and this creates a seamless transition from one team to the next.
- Better Collaboration: With a unified goal and more transparency, your teams are more likely to work together. RevOps helps promote healthy collaboration and reduces infighting since all departments are working towards the same goal.
- Improved Customer Retention: With a solid RevOps plan in place, each department has access to the same data. This means when they interact with customers it creates a seamless experience no matter where in the pipeline that customer is. This smooth customer journey will naturally lead to improved customer retention and higher revenue.
Revenue Operations Team Structure
In your business, each department likely has its own manager and possibly even a high-level executive. While all these team leaders are part of the revenue operations strategy, it is a good idea to create a new position or team that can oversee the transition with an unbiased eye.
1. Hire a Solid Generalist
In the new role of revenue operations manager or revenue operations vice president, it is a good idea to start with a single person. You can either choose a new hire or promote an existing employee with a strong understanding of your business structure.
You need someone who is comfortable working with all your departments and doesn’t favor one department over another. This means you need a solid generalist.
A RevOps specialist should be familiar with and able to learn a wide range of technical programs. They will need to analyze data and have a good understanding of what that data means. This person also needs a growth mindset and must be willing to try new things. Permit them to experiment, create new processes, and fail.
“A RevOps specialist should be familiar with and able to learn a wide range of technical programs. They will need to analyze data and have a good understanding of what that data means. This person also needs a growth mindset and must be willing to try new things. Permit them to experiment, create new processes, and fail.”
As a final consideration, your new revenue operations specialist should have a strong personality that can convince department heads and general staff that change is a good thing.
2. Grow Your RevOps Team
As your RevOps plan starts to take shape, you will likely need to expand the team. Your RevOps manager or vice president will need a team of specialists to help guide the adjustments for each department. There are numerous revenue operations job roles available.
- Sales Ops: The Sales Ops manager on the RevOps team is primarily responsible for the CRM system. They will choose what data gets included and collected in the CRM. They will also work directly with the sales representative to train them and determine their quotas. As part of the RevOps team, they will help standardize sales processes and customer materials.
- Marketing Ops: A Marketing Ops manager will be focused on marketing data. They will track information like pipeline, revenue, and leads. They will also work through marketing attribution to try to determine which marketing channels are performing the best. Working with RevOps, the Marketing Ops team will determine how many leads are needed to achieve revenue goals each period.
- Customer Success Ops: A Customer Success (CS) Ops manager documents the customer journey and what it takes to improve customer support. They will work to improve workflow efficiency to help keep customers happy. As part of the RevOps team, they will handle customer health scoring and forecasting.
- Ops Analysts: If your RevOps team continues to grow, you might need additional RevOps Analysts. These will be people who specialize in data analytics and spend their time working with your tools and software. Many of these analysts will be SQL or BI specialists who are experts in collecting data.
3. Create a Unified Data Stream
The goal of any RevOps team is to create a single stream of unified data. You can accomplish this primarily through a CRM system. However, you can use other business intelligence (BI) tools to help you visualize the data.
Your Ops Analysts can create RevOps dashboards for each department and position. This will help each person in the company visualize his or her role in the overall RevOps mission.
Once created, your unified data stream will take constant upkeep. Your teams will continue to evolve, processes will change, and your products will improve – all these changes will require continual maintenance. However, the return will be well worth the investment.
4. Give Your RevOps Team the Power They Need
Knowing what needs to be done and having the power to do it go hand in hand. When you create your RevOps team, make sure you give them the power and authority they need to act.
“Knowing what needs to be done and having the power to do it go hand in hand. When you create your RevOps team, make sure you give them the power and authority they need to act.“
If they are limited to handing over a proposal to other team leaders, the plan will likely fail. The head of RevOps needs to have as much, or more, decision-making power as the heads of other departments.
Revenue Operations vs Sales Operations
While the term revenue operations is relatively new, most business executives are familiar with the term sales operations. This can lead to some confusion in thinking that revenue operations is just a new term for what they already know.
Instead, you can think of sales operations as a part of revenue operations. Sales ops is primarily concerned with the company’s sales, while RevOps is focused on the entire customer journey.
For example, a sales operations specialist might be responsible for training sales staff, creating lead scoring models, and helping sales reps hit their quotas.
A RevOps specialist, on the other hand, will focus on connecting sales with marketing and other general business operations so that every department is working together on the same goals. When working as a single team, each department will create more opportunities for revenue growth.
What to Look for in a RevOps Vendor
Choosing the right RevOps vendor can have a huge impact on how successful your RevOps program will be.
A good RevOps vendor should exhibit these four characteristics:
- Provide trustworthy automation and data: You want a RevOps solution that gives you automated data in real-time, so you always know the information you have is up to date. It should automatically gather data from sources like your CRM, calendar, email, and other business systems.
- Offer deep revenue insights: You want a RevOps solution that goes beyond surface-level information to give you new insights. With these deep insights, you can uncover customer pitfalls and bottlenecks that are slowing down your revenue stream.
- Have reliable performance: With a RevOps solution that gives you reliable performance and data month after month, you can spend more time focused on achieving your goals instead of digging through data for the answers you need.
- Deliver predictable revenue: A good RevOps solution will help you reliably predict what your revenue will look like in the future. When you can trust that information, it gives you the freedom to explore new business opportunities. Perhaps you want to expand into a new market or introduce a new product?
Revenue Operations Resources
If you want to learn even more about RevOps, there are numerous revenue operations books and revenue operations courses available. Here is a quick snapshot of what you can choose from.
Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales & Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth
In this book, written by Stephen G. Diorio and Chris K. Hummel, they explore what it takes to grow a business in the 21st century. They look at the practical steps you can take to align your teams and unlock more revenue potential. It includes real case studies from across numerous industries and offers a step-by-step approach to connecting your departmental infrastructure.
The Revenue Acceleration Playbook: Creating an Authentic Buyer Journey Across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
If you are ready to accelerate your sales, start making connections. That is the idea that author, Brent Keltner, presents in his book. He focuses on helping businesses create a more personalized and connected experience for their customers. He includes more than 20 real-life examples of businesses creating authentic customer journeys and increasing their sales.
Revenue Operations Courses
If you want to become a RevOps expert or make your resume more appealing for a future revenue operations role, consider these revenue operations courses.
- Revenue Operations Certification: Hubspot offers a free RevOps certification class. It offers a solid foundation in basic revenue operations principles. It takes about 5 hours to complete this course.
- Unleashing ROI: Offered by the RevOps Co-op, this 10-week course is designed to help you grow a career in revenue operations. It includes live instruction, permanent access to the course materials, a chat group with your cohort, and peer-reviewed work.
- Revenue Growth Architecture School: Offered by Pavilion, the goal of this class is to teach business professionals how to design and achieve sustainable growth. It is free to Pavilion Associate and Executive members and lasts for two weeks.
Explore the Revenue Operations Guide with Behind the Work
At Behind the Work, we believe in offering companies a predictable revenue flow. Revenue Operations is an essential part of that process. We aim to deliver a seamless Revenue Operations process that can help promote transparency and teamwork.
If this revenue operations guide has piqued your interest, we can help you improve your revenue flow.
Ready to take the next step in your Revenue Operations journey? Contact Behind the Work today to get started.