Revenue operations (RevOps) is tasked with aligning the sales, marketing and customer success teams of a business with the intent of breaking down silos between the teams. The ultimate goal of RevOps is to improve the customer journey and drive revenue growth through efficiency and accountability. This holistic approach involves business processes and technology and the people who use them.
RevOps is becoming more commonplace. In 2020, a study of B2B revenue trends found that 58 percent of businesses surveyed had a dedicated RevOps team in place or were in the process of building one. It’s not surprising that the same study found that 30 percent of businesses with RevOps teams reported seeing measurable improvement in go-to-market efficacy.
At Bridges, we offer RevOps expertise. If you need some great recommendations on setting up your revenue operations team, we’d love for you to reach out for a free consultation with us.
In this article, we will look at the importance of getting the right team members in the right positions. As we’ve said before, the power of your organization is in the people.
As more businesses utilize revenue operations, the required functions and positions needed for success have become clearer. We've made some suggestions below based on the size of your organization.
If you are a small business who is just starting to implement a revenue operations team structure, you may not have the resources to hire a full RevOps team. If this is the case, you may want to assign RevOps functions to existing sales, marketing and customer success team members. Those members could make up a revenue operations committee tasked with tracking key revenue operations metrics and goals.
If you do have funds for additional hires, it would probably be helpful to hire a Revenue Operations Manager to help you identify areas of improvement in your business processes and unite your customer-facing teams with common goals.
Larger organizations or those with more available funding will most likely want to hire experienced RevOps staff. You will probably add specialists who can focus on RevOps functions such as customer success or business insights.
You may hire a team of managers who can handle project management and supervise day-to-day operations. Most likely this team structure will have a director or VP of Revenue Operations to head up revenue operations.
To streamline decisions, align strategies, ensure accountability and make sure teams are collaborating as they should, one position needs to be in charge. Often deemed the Chief Revenue Officer, this position will supervise the heads of RevOps, marketing, sales and customer success. They will also serve as the communications link with the C-suite.
There are some common roles that are dedicated to revenue operations specifically. The positions mentioned are the most commonly utilized revenue operations job titles. However, some companies may have employees performing RevOps job functions who have completely different job titles. This is fairly common as revenue operations is a newer field within the business community.
Usually an entry-level position with a background in the speciality they are assigned to such as sales or customer success. Their job functions to educate and improve processes within their specialty. They are usually assigned to one or two branches of the go-to-market teams and they are often used for support of detailed processes and data analysis. A quick search for entry level Revenue Operations Analyst/Specialist jobs on ZipRecruiter found more than 287,000 open positions.
A Revenue Operations Manager is usually someone with a background in RevOps, sales operations, or business operations who understands how to optimize internal processes and manage teams of people. They will usually research and identify opportunities for improvement and implement solutions. They should have experience building relationships and fostering collaboration. A quick search of ZipRecruiter for Revenue Operations Managers found more than 263,000 open positions across the United States.
Start with selecting an experienced revenue operations manager or leader. An outside hire or promoting someone from one of your sales operations teams who is ready for a challenge is your first step. Once filled, that position will have insight into or can take responsibility for your remaining hires.
As you fill that initial RevOps position, they will help you define the core functions of your revenue operations team. Here's our initial recommendation.
The revenue operations framework centralizes goals and improves the customer experience by streamlining these key areas:
With the four core functions spelled out, you can develop individual team positions with specific responsibilities that contribute to the goals of the overall revenue operations functions.
Potential titles for your operations teams, outlined by seniority.
Analyze and improve the work operations and policies to increase efficiency; improve communications; develop strategies and programs; help with budgets, strategies and initiatives; assist in improving operations and decreasing risk; quality control, asset management, and help increase revenue.
Owns the overall strategy for ongoing collaboration between sales and marketing and support. Manages content management, engagement, performance, and sales enablement training initiatives.
Potential titles for your enablement teams, outlined by seniority.
The coordination of training across teams, enablement liaison between teams, establishing sales goals’ objectives and initiatives, establishing performance metrics and standards, coordinating status check-ins regarding those objectives, creating internal goal competitions, onboarding development and implementation, analyzing the objective changes in performances across teams, and establishing communications between different trainers across teams.
Potential titles for your insights teams, outlined by seniority:
Analysis:
Team and Insight Management:
Data analysis, data projection, data synthesis, market research compilation, growth and evolution projections, determination of successful or failed processes based on substantial data changes, using automated tools to extract data from primary and secondary sources, filter relevant data by reviewing reports and key performance indicators, analyzing market trends that could influence the performance of teams, preparing reports to determine and demonstrate important trends to outline predictions and projections, and compiling final analytical reports so cross-teams can make more educated decisions.
Potential titles for your tools teams, outlined by seniority:
Tool Management and Maintenance
Tool Management Leadership
Evaluation, procurement, and maintenance of the tech stack used by cross-teams, including updates and constant management; integration of different software and tools into the existing tech stack; crucial systems monitoring and administration; oversees all your cross-teams’ tools and equipment; tracks its overall performance and health; is responsible for integrating new equipment and software; replacing outdated tools; comparing and establishing when updated tools are necessary; consolidating redundant and competing processes; integrating processes that optimize automation systems and collaboration among cross-teams.
Thanks for reading. We have much more information available in our RevOps series of blogs. For your free RevOps consultation, contact us.