RevOps Best Practices

RevOps strategies are the high-level plans of action businesses take to improve their customer journeys, align their departments, and achieve their greatest revenue goals. If you’re thinking about taking advantage of everything a RevOps approach can offer, you’ll need a strategy first. In this post, we’ll cover examples of RevOps strategies, how strategies can rely on different parts of your business, the difference between strategies and tactics, and much more. Let’s get started!

A Good RevOps Strategy

RevOps is an approach to organizing your business that aligns people, processes, and platforms. By de-siloing departments, you create more efficient processes and better communication. The effectiveness of RevOps at long-term revenue growth and better functioning organizations has led many people to adopt the model. 

We will look at individual strategies and tactics that can fall under the domains of people, process, and platform. You may not be ready to completely overhaul your entire company yet, but there are small steps you can take in each area to gradually shift toward a RevOps transformation.

Does whether I have a B2B vs B2C business change what strategy I use? 

Things aren’t that different for business-to-business (B2B) companies and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. In a modern economy, selling to businesses looks like selling to consumers. B2B customers want B2C experiences in the sales, service, and support processes they’re a part of. 

A better question to focus on is the difference between product or service and the billing models of each. Billing models can affect the choice of strategy, but it’s helpful to be aware of what is out there. 

A product can be a one-time purchase for a customer or business. Sales in B2C spaces typically have lower dollar values, and non-intensive or personalized sales processes. Ongoing billing can be associated with auto-delivered products for a business or a consumer. 

Services involve longer touch points with the client, depending on if the service is ongoing. This can affect customer support systems and will likely have a longer time to close as the value associated with these deals are likely higher.

Setting Yourself Up for RevOps Success

One of the key points of RevOps is that marketing, sales, and support are aligned. That means they’re working toward the same goals, not focusing entirely on departmental goals independently of each other. 

As these departments adopt the same goals, they’ll need to track the same metrics and discuss key performance indicators (KPIs) in the same way so they can remain on the same page. This can all be done without the need for a dedicated RevOps team and with or without shared tools or team members. 

Setting your organization up for alignment helps create a foundation for your specific RevOps strategy. No matter how you plan to do it, your team will need to practice real alignment in order to generate more predictable revenue.

RevOps Strategies that Depend on Your People

People are often at the core of RevOps strategies. After all, it’s people that actually carry out the strategy you use. A great platform and innovative business processes are ultimately tools: you still need the right people at the helm. If you don’t have them, you won't be able to fix your revenue generation problems or enhance your current efforts.

People Take Care of Your Customers

Accelerating and shortening the buyer’s journey is one of the primary functions of RevOps. And while RevOps is aimed at driving revenue: what that really looks like is smoothing the process of marketing to, selling to, and supporting customers. 

Adopting a customer-centric RevOps approach allows you to anchor why you’re doing what you’re doing. Customers at the end of the day want to be treated with respect and like they’re people, not hands just attached to credit cards. 

So if your strategy is to direct people to best support the customer through the buyer’s journey, how do you do that? This is where tactics come in. It’s important to remember that strategy and tactics are both necessary, but they’re not the same thing. 

Strategy is the planning and theory behind what your goals are and how you’re going to achieve them. Tactics are concrete, specific actions you take that move you toward your goals. You need both. 

So what are some tactics you can use for a people-focused RevOps strategy? We’ve got some examples for each department.

• Marketing can talk to customers like they’re people, not relying on annoying or interruptive communication. Use inbound, not outbound tactics. 
• Sales can treat customers as more than an opportunity or closed deal. Use an inviting, care-based approach to customers. Track information about them in the CRM to add a personal touch to the sales cycle. 
• Support can provide easy tools to get customer issues resolved if they’re not addressing it ahead of time through outreach or an available knowledge base.
  
  

People-Centric Tactics for All Teams

Teams need to be focused on enhancing the customer experience: that goes for marketing, sales, and support. Because of this, there are some tactics that work for all your teams. 

• Utilize ongoing professional development. All teams need to understand the basic operations and the language that the other teams are using.
• Cultivate good company culture. Encourage buy-in from ideally the whole company or at least team leads. Stress educational effort. 
• Ask all teams what their ideal customer is and come up with a profile for that individual.
  
  

People-Centric Tactics for Marketing Teams

There are also tactics that will be specific to each of your teams. Even though they are aligned, they still carry out different functions and will need to do different things to achieve your goals. Tactics that your marketing team specifically needs to use include:

• Focusing on cross-selling and up-selling.
• Preventing churn through customer marketing efforts. All too often, marketing departments focus entirely on customer acquisition, all while ignoring the customers they have. That’s a recipe for churn you’ll want to avoid. 
• Align available content including website, blogs, email, and social media. 
• Devise offers that customers actually want.
  
  

People-Centric Tactics for Sales Teams

Sales teams will need their own set of tactics to work effectively in a RevOps approach. Rather than just being there to close deals, they will also need to support your entire RevOps operation. Some tactics they can do this with include:

• Asking the customer what customer success looks like and providing this valuable information to the support team can drastically improve the customer experience. Sales teams can be a source of first-hand information on the customer. 
• Implement methods of making it easy and convenient for customers to add products or manage their billing during the sales process. 
  
  

People-Centric Tactics for Customer Success Teams

Support or success teams can make use of different resources to provide higher-quality customer experiences. They should:

• Gather and analyze data to help them anticipate needs. Tickets and support inquiries are inevitable no matter how tight a ship you run; support teams can use these situations as a source of information to take care of future customers. 
• Utilize tools that improve online experiences while lightening pressure on the sales team, including self-service options, chatbots, automated renewal notices, and after-hours support.
   

RevOps Strategies Based on Your Processes

The goal of processes is to support, organize, and empower teams to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. Determining your process comes out of a larger strategic planning effort. Organizational strategies that rely on process will take a wide look at the organization as a whole. 

Tactics involved in this kind of strategy include:

• Prioritizing effective project management to maintain and finetune internal processes. 
• Achieving and recognizing milestones across departments. This helps maintain the effectiveness of processes and supports morale. 
• Efficiently breaking down silos between departments. 
• Documenting existing processes
• Designating areas of improvement in existing processes
• Outlining your business’s customer journey map

The idea is that by improving your processes, you’re able to do more with the same people and tools you already have. This can be done no matter where you’re at now: there’s always room for improvement! Even if you just document each team’s approach to a problem and find ways to improve those responses, you’re beginning on the road to a RevOps strategy that works. 

RevOps Strategies that Center Platform

Platform enables great processes and great people to do a better job. An effective tool expands the limits of what your organization can accomplish. Basing your RevOps strategy on platform makes sense if you want to use the best tools possible to do the best job possible.

Some of the tactics you can use in a platform-based RevOps strategy include:

• Implementing a single source of truth that enables your teams to effectively align and use cross-functional collaboration.
• Creating helpful dashboards to make understanding data easy at a glance.

It’s also important to implement some metrics that could be helpful to track with the department responsible for being the data lead on it. Try some of the following. 

There are many more metrics you may encounter as you develop your RevOps strategy. That's why we wrote an entire blog dedicated to it.

While a specific team may lead on a metric, that doesn’t mean the other teams don’t use that metric at all. In RevOps, all departments use the same language to achieve the same business goals, ultimately, and will likely overlap in the metrics they track. Some strategies will even include an additional team, often a dedicated RevOps team, to help monitor and organize RevOps efforts across the organization.

You’re Well On Your Way to Your Own RevOps Strategy

Get excited! You’ve got enough knowledge to start putting together your very own RevOps strategy based on the strengths and goals of your business. Even if you don’t want to fully restructure for a full RevOps approach, just making these strategic shifts can earn you significant benefits. It’s all about how you want to achieve your goals. 

There’s more to learn about RevOps too. Check out the following blogs to get even deeper into the subject and learn everything you need to know about RevOps and RevOps processes.

Ready to take your RevOps to the next level? Take our RevOps Framework Assessment and discover how you can optimize your revenue operations for sustainable growth.