Strategy
April 26 2023
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Today, most companies that want to build success have different departments working separately with only a few interconnections to lead to that success. These departments probably also have their own needs and limitations. Marketing, sales and customer service departments probably all have their own managers and leaders who rely on their own KPIs and approaches to achieve success. Revenue Operations, also known as RevOps, makes it easier to integrate these departments and their functions to promote better growth for the entire company. RevOps is about creating a role to review departments, their processes and ways of working to find ways to work more in harmony.
The challenge with organizational silos is that it creates various friction points in the customer journey, which can lead to dissatisfaction or even churn. RevOps offers a framework that connects technology, processes and strategies to increase revenue for the company. This means fewer lost customers and higher customer satisfaction at every stage of the buying journey. Through improved operational efficiency, gaps in data, processes, technology and accountability are closed. This leads to a more cohesive business where everyone in the organization works towards common goals and shares information that helps the organization move forward.
How do you start?
Before a lead even enters a CRM system, it's important that all three departments (marketing/sales/customer service) are set up to understand how and why a RevOps strategy works. It requires an in-depth examination of the entire business, looking at the current state, what's working well and what's missing
Here are some points that are good to start from and evaluate:
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Customer losses
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Revenue per employee
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Customer relationship score
These three are data points that a RevOps can understand and use to improve the customer journey, speed up onboarding, and reduce friction points. RevOps do this by knowing exactly where, when, and how customer handoffs will occur, as well as how they intersect as the customer moves between departments in the organization. If you're willing to put in the work, there's a big financial payoff to starting to work with RevOps.
But what are the benefits of filling a RevOps role?
On Linkedin, we can see that RevOps has seen a 300% increase in related roles, as well as a 57% increase in companies building RevOps teams and strategizing around it.
According to a recent blog from HubSpot, companies implementing RevOps have seen the following effects:
10-20% increase in sales productivity.
15% increase in profitability.
19% increase in growth rate.
71% improvement in stock market index.
100-200% increase in digital marketing ROI.
In short, RevOps can give you these benefits:
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Making better decisions faster.
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Getting the right data to make decisions.
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Building trust and a predictable pipeline
It's important to note that a RevOps role doesn't sit above existing managers, but instead should unite departments. The RevOps role should help ensure that each department is using their tools and processes in the best possible way to achieve maximum results.
As RevOps is a relatively new concept, there are of course some challenges to be faced.
Below, we address some of them and briefly outline how to overcome them.
- Lack of commitment from business leaders
Establish on what grounds stakeholders object to this. Does the board object for financial, operational or cultural reasons? Do stakeholders feel threatened by change? Only with a clear objection can you structure a data-driven, logical response.
- Lack of alignment of the customer journey
Before implementing a RevOps program, you should take the time to do the hard work and ensure that basic customer journey improvements can even be made.
- Lack of internal expertise or ownership
One sure path to failure is that no one person has the expertise or time required to expand, implement and oversee the project. As soon as you know it can be done, you should start mapping out who will drive the work at the macro and micro level.
- Lack of budget
It can be challenging to justify the investment required to succeed with your RevOps strategy. So before you ask, make sure you have built a strong, data-driven business case for RevOps.
- Too much technology
Most companies use more technology than they need. A solid tech audit will give you a clear picture of the tech landscape so you can avoid tech-based logistics nightmares.
- Lack of processes/resources
Do you have the internal resources required to restructure? As with any project, you should make sure you have the right pieces on the table before making a change.
- Covering the cracks
If you start a RevOps function without addressing any of the above points, you will run into problems later.
To summarize
RevOps is about maximizing efficiency in marketing, sales, and customer service. This is done by the organization getting better at aligning tools and processes to then be able to reduce conversion friction and delight the customer at every stage of the customer journey.
To conclude, some good points to take away:
- Map the customer journey and the ideal customer profile
Map out the steps that the customer goes through in your customer journey, from the first time they come into contact with your brand until they become a customer and also what happens after. With a good insight into where and when marketing, sales and customer service come into contact with the customer, you can reduce friction points and provide a better customer experience. This can be anything from avoiding double messaging the customer by gathering all information in one place, to ensuring that information collected by sales can be used by marketing to qualify better leads faster from MQL to SQL. Make sure your people have access to data at the right time to reduce and standardize the sales cycle.
- Get everyone on board
Make sure everyone is on board with each department's business goals and where they're encountering friction today to better understand how RevOps will help them achieve those goals and reduce their friction points. Bring this information to the start of the RevOps process. Build feedback loops for rapid knowledge sharing and optimization. Don't be afraid to make changes in your organization, such as changes in your tech stack or in documentation and procedures. Be open and transparent so you get everyone on board and make sure feedback is a natural part of the process. Then use the feedback and address shortcomings as soon as possible to increase success in both the short and long term. The important thing is that any changes promote efficiency and unity in your organization.
- Include tools that provide faster insights or act as force multipliers.
A major challenge to creating an integrated approach to RevOps is technology solutions that are not integrated. Make sure that whoever is leading RevOps assesses what technologies are being used, and whether parts of your technology stack need to be replaced or superseded. Certainly, the process of evaluating and implementing new technologies can be daunting, and it's certainly not appealing when you have to take into account the skepticism of some people on your team. That's why it's important to have a dedicated person or team implementing tool selection to create efficiencies (and probably result in more money being made), and it will be easier to drive the technology adoption agenda forward. The idea is not that you have to rebuild the technology stack from scratch but to be objective and not be afraid to swap out and redo in order to optimize and ensure that the whole organization gains value and delivers better results.
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