Contents
Revenue Operations (or Revenue Ops or RevOps) is a relatively new business methodology that aims to bring your entire organization into full cooperation with the goal of streamlining processes and growing revenue. Want to know if RevOps is a good fit for your organization? At Bridges, we’re RevOps pros, and we offer a free consultation to help you learn what RevOps can do for you.
How do we define RevOps?
RevOps is all about alignment. Think of your organization as a car. Each department is one of the wheels. If your wheels are unaligned, you can drive the car, but you’ll suffer in multiple areas from gas mileage to tire wear to the comfort of the ride. If your wheels are aligned, these problems vanish.
Alignment between sales, marketing, and service departments eliminates problems in the same way. And organizations are catching on. So what are the problems that this kind of organizational alignment can eliminate?
- Miscommunication. Nothing is more frustrating for your customers than talking to a service representative who says something completely different than what a sales or marketing representative told them before, especially when they’re speaking to a service representative about a problem. RevOps eliminates miscommunication by giving your departments the same source of truth, so they communicate in harmony. This creates a better customer experience and a seamless buyer’s journey.
- Disconnected and bad data. Because RevOps aligns your departments, it improves data communication and makes sure everyone is basing their decisions on the same data. There are less opportunities for bad data to influence the decision-making process when the entire organization is using that data.
- Lack of transparency and barriers to collaboration. Your organization is more than the sum of its parts, but siloed departments hold you back from reaching that full potential. RevOps aligns your organization for seamless collaboration and full transparency between departments.
- Unpredictable growth in accelerated sales cycles. RevOps focuses on creating revenue intelligence to better understand and predict changing sales cycles.
So then, how do we define RevOps? RevOps is the strategic alignment of sales, marketing, and service departments through people, platform, and process with the goal of maximizing revenue potential.
We’ve covered the first part of this: sales, marketing, and service. Let’s talk about the second part: people, platform, and process.
People
Organizations are run by people, not by machines. It’s important to have a tech stack that works for you, but flashy tools don’t mean anything without the right people using them.
Revenue operations teams empower sales, service, and marketing teams to work more effectively. RevOps teams often exist outside of traditional sales, marketing, and support silos and act as intermediaries between them. A RevOps team can be the glue that holds your organization together as they facilitate better communication and collaboration between these departments.
While sales, marketing, and service teams have their specific KPIs, RevOps is looking at all of those and seeing how they can benefit the bottom line. They’re also looking at any obstacles that get in the way of these organizations to help them sell better.
How do RevOps teams accomplish this?
- Alignment: Bringing customer-facing departments together ensures every campaign and customer initiative has a measurable outcome on the sales funnel from the start of the campaign to post-sale service needs.
- Creating focus: By bringing together sales, marketing and service, organizations can focus goals across the departments and get each group on the same page with the same endpoint in mind, such as generating leads, closing deals and expanding existing accounts.
- Simplification: By establishing a RevOps approach, organizations can remove roadblocks and silos within departments, increasing company wide efficiency and creating a better customer experience.
A RevOps team can act as the internal hub for customer information for the organization. By focusing on customer acquisition, bookings, recurring revenue, customer churn and satisfaction, and other customer-centric metrics, RevOps teams have the information all the departments need to succeed. It’s the RevOps team’s job to make sure that they do.
Although there are analytics, AI, and other technological aspects involved, RevOps is ultimately about putting people first.
Platform
In a RevOps approach, people come first, but they need the right technology. Data is essential to a high-performing RevOps team. To effectively bridge the gap between sales, service, and marketing, the RevOps team needs to be able to work with the data that these departments produce and interpret it with an eye to the bigger picture of your entire organization.
In addition to that, RevOps is a system. It looks at your organization as a whole rather than focusing on the pieces, and it can be complex. RevOps teams need the right platform to manage the big picture approach they must take. Without the intelligence and reporting capabilities of an effective platform, the holistic, eagle’s eye view of your organization is hard to find.
A single source of truth is critical to a RevOps approach. Because RevOps works by aligning departments, finding common focus, and simplifying processes, this is non-negotiable. Everyone must be on the same page for RevOps to work.
While we love HubSpot, many CRMs can and will support a sales operations approach first. This simpler approach has the same ultimate goal of RevOps — driving revenue growth — but focuses on the sales department rather than taking the holistic approach RevOps does.
The difference is a good RevOps platform will focus more on intelligence that’s useful outside of a purely sales context. These platforms will effectively blend data from multiple sources and give operations managers information across the entire revenue cycle, not just sales.
The crucial elements of a good RevOps platform are a space and system for marketing, sales, and service to source the same metrics and communicate internally, allowing transparency and accountability across the organization. A platform that allows for this quality of communication without prioritizing the functions of one department over the others is a platform that will help you reach your revenue goals.
Process
RevOps processes encourage collaboration and trust throughout an organization. These processes need to convert prospects and make the customer experience as seamless and enriching as possible. B2B and B2C buyers have never had higher expectations than they do now, and your revenue generation depends on meeting these expectations.
The way you accomplish this is with process. If people are the answer to “who?” and platform is the answer to “what?” then process is the answer to “how?” The outcomes you will get from your RevOps approach have as much to do with how you do things as it does with who does it and what they use.
Streamlined processes are what make people and platform work together. As you align departments and simplify your organization, you are creating process that will create the effects you’re looking for. RevOps is essentially a different way of doing things, so it makes sense that you will be reshaping the way your organization does things.
Even with amazing people and the best platform, if you cannot nail down processes that really work, you will have trouble. This is something that organizations run into all too frequently. Knowing your way of doing things and why you do it that way can make all the difference.
So ensure that you’re building effective processes that work for you, and don’t forget that part of streamlining means removing excess. Automating processes is a relatively new opportunity for streamlining that can have a big impact on your operations. Data cleanliness has been an issue for a long time, and dirty data can have particularly meddlesome effects in something like RevOps when a single source of truth is so essential.
Why does automation solve this problem? Because it can remove human error that’s unavoidable with large amounts of data entry. From outright mistakes to different ways of doing things in different departments, automation can standardize and stabilize your data entry processes, providing cleaner fuel for your RevOps functions.
Benefits of RevOps
As you can probably tell by now, there are a lot of benefits to putting in the effort to create a highly-effective RevOps approach in your organization. Let’s review some of the main benefits.
- Faster sales cycles and quicker wins: In many industries, sales cycles are getting longer and less predictable. B2B organizations that want to reduce the time and complexity of sales do well with RevOps. By streamlining processes and better integrating the work of other departments into sales, they sell faster.
- Sustainable and predictable scaling and growth: RevOps is much more than a short-term model for increasing revenue now. It creates avenues for growing revenue over time in a way that’s sustainable and predictable, meaning you can make long-term plans for your organization and not worry if you’ll be able to keep them.
- Unify sales, marketing, and customer success teams: Although these departments do different kinds of work within your organization, they are ultimately working toward the same goal, and that’s the key to RevOps. By uniting these departments, they are all able to better achieve their goals.
- Happier workers and better workplace culture: Because a RevOps approach brings people together and eliminates silos, your people work better together. There’s less miscommunication, less conflict, and less getting in each other’s way. That means there’s more transparency, more collaboration, and more shared wins.
- More aligned tech stack and strategic tech use: Having a good tech stack is one thing, but RevOps can help you make better use of your tech. It can increase conversion, improve data quality, and improve accuracy by implementing AI and automation.
Ready to start with RevOps? Here’s how.
Aligning marketing, sales, and service takes time. These are complex departments that do different things and likely have very different ways of working. If you know what you need, however, it is much easier to make it happen. You’ll need:
- All three departments to agree on metrics
- A plan for building credibility and trust between teams
- Clear, articulated oversight of your tech stack
- A management plan for overseeing organizational changes
You’ll also need to know whether you will implement a RevOps approach by distributing capabilities throughout your team or by creating specialized roles within each department. The first approach works best in small organizations, while the latter is better suited to large ones.
However you plan to get started, it will be crucial to remember that it takes time. RevOps is a long-term framework and the hard work will pay off in the end.
Get Started by Learning More About RevOps
There’s more to learn about each component of RevOps. You can dive right into more information or check out our guide if you’re not sure where to start. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
