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Is your business firing on all cylinders and now it’s ready for more? Scaling a business is no easy feat, especially since so many confuse it with growing a business.
To be scalable is to grow. It’s infinitely more profitable because it relies less on increased investments in infrastructure. However, growing isn’t always scaling when it comes to your business.
The key to scalability, much more so than with growth, is revenue operations (RevOps) and the efficient interactions between multiple departments of a business. A RevOps team looks at the whole picture, identifying potential pitfalls and improving them.
In this blog, we’re looking at the difference between growing and scaling, how RevOps contributes to scalability, and when is the right time for a RevOps investment.
When you see just how much RevOps contribute to a successful scalable business model, let us help you with a free consultation and some hiring recommendations for your revenue operations teams.
Growing vs. Scaling
When you scale a boulder when rock climbing, nothing changes but how far up you are. You’re not exerting more energy or spending more money on new climbing gear than you would 50 feet lower.
Consider this forced metaphor when remembering the difference between scaling and growing.
- Scaling is about increasing revenue generation without equivalently increasing resources or investments. More revenue, the same amount of money as spent initially.
- Growth, on the other hand, requires additional resources or capital for revenue growth. More revenue, increased amount of money spent.
These two terms are used together often, but they are not interchangeable, especially when applied to your business model.
Growth, on its face, is easier to implement because you can always use resources to yield higher numbers. The trick is achieving increased profitability — gaining more revenue without spending the value of it in capital and resources.
That’s where scalability comes in — by efficiently using what a business already has (like a sales operations team, streamlined tech stack, and additional resources) instead of gradually increasing them as revenue rises, you are increasing revenue without incurring extra costs.
However, scaling a business isn’t free. The efficiency required to improve scalability often comes with tracking, analyzing, and implementing changes based on data.
That cost can be seen as an investment in your business’s future. Successful companies eventually stop growing, focus on maintaining the status quo, then devote their resources to a scalable business model design.
Is RevOps better for growth or scaling?
While RevOps can help with growth, as a business modeler, it’s better used for scalability applications. RevOps manages the interplay between departments like sales, marketing, and customer service.
By examining interactions between these departments, RevOps uses its analytical skill set to empower these pivotal teams to work together more effectively instead of just firing up the sales team for mindless growth.
While sales enablement is crucial for growth, revenue operations analyze sales processes through their alignment with other departments to reduce siloing. Silos are a thing of the past, reducing them is another characteristic of a successful scaled business.
RevOps should not require a ridiculous amount of capital to implement. Unless you need a complete overhaul, with strategic partners and expensive software updates, it is not nearly as difficult or costly as it sounds.
It can be as simple as using tools you already have more effectively, implementing training for your sales cycles, and adding analytics tools to better understand the customer experience.
Through these options, your sales ops, marketing teams, and customer service departments can improve their interactivity.
Doing so will identify deficiencies and redundancies that are costly and inefficient. By seeing these effects in real time, the causal link will be clear, and a RevOps model will help your business better utilize its people across multiple teams.
How RevOps Can Help Scale a Business
RevOps is imperative for business model scalability. If you have a business model that you think already works, adding growth can fracture key systems in small but harmful ways. We've dealt with many clients who don't have the infrastructure to deal with the massive amount of leads they start receiving from inbound marketing methods.
RevOps can help identify these stressors before they become a problem and help out with:
- Removing silos: Teams that talk to each other can identify problems quicker, allowing for improved customer dynamics. By putting the right platform in place, teams can consult the same metrics utilizing a single source of truth (SSOT).
- Increase efficiencies: Using a RevOps model unites all the teams with the common goal of driving revenue. Having a shared goal can get them operating together instead of in ways that can sometimes be at odds.
- Build scalable processes: With scalable infrastructure and practices like automation, your business could grow exponentially with fewer growing pains.
- Allocate responsibility and process owners: By knowing who is in charge of what, communication protocols and departmental interactivity become much more efficient.
- All of which increases revenue without needing a huge influx of capital.
Companies with cross-departmental alignment achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability than their more inefficient counterparts. When all parts are working in concert, RevOps can relieve stressors and roadblocks to revenue improvement.
Can RevOps help my business grow?
If you’re just starting out and focusing on hypergrowth, your business may not need RevOps. To grow a business takes more capital, time, and resources, whereas RevOps focuses on the efficient interaction between people, departments, and tools.
Customer retention should be one of the first things on your list if you’re looking for scalable growth. By extending your customer lifetime, you’re generating recurring revenue that is capable of driving revenue instead of needing large amounts of resources required to turn sales leads into customers.
When is the right time for an investment in RevOps to drive growth?
As in all things, investment decisions should be data-driven. Only go for growth when your business looks ready for it! Our recommendation is that you’re ready to invest in your business’s revenue growth if the following are true:
- Your foundational operations are solid
- You have a loyal customer base
- Your product is viable and replicable at different scales
- There are already existing intersections of people, processes, and platforms
If your business meets any of these criteria, RevOps can fine-tune your operations with revenue growth in mind!
Learn More About Revenue Operations
Your business has growth ambitions, and we applaud that. Your services and products are valuable and naturally, you want more people to access them. To do that, you need RevOps to increase your business’s scalability with agility and alignment.
If you’re curious about all the ways RevOps can help you improve your business’s scalability, get your free consultation today!
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