Undoubtedly, the goal of every business is to increase revenue. However, until recently, a business’s sales, marketing, and customer success departments focused on revenue growth internally. In other words, each department worked independently of the others to generate revenue and drive company growth.
However, many companies are now shifting their business strategies to align sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Unifying these departments under a single revenue-oriented goal is known as revenue operations or RevOps.
In this guide to RevOps, we will discuss the benefits of revenue operations and how you can successfully implement the strategy.
What Are Revenue Operations?
RevOps is a strategy that aligns departments that contribute to revenue generation within the company. These departments often include marketing, sales, customer success, finance, and customer service. RevOps promotes collaboration and efficiency across departments to meet the overall goal of revenue growth.
With a revenue operations manager in charge, RevOps combines and aligns sales and revenue goals throughout the company’s marketing, sales, and customer success teams. By unifying these departments and focusing on a single goal, the business can promote consistency across the buyer’s journey and increase revenue through operational efficiencies.
Particularly, RevOps aims to break down the barriers among departments to increase operational transparency. As each department has full insight into the inner workings of its co-departments, the overall business can improve the customer journey and revenue-building strategies.
For instance, under the RevOps model, customer success team members can convey pertinent information regarding the customer’s pain points and feedback to the marketing department. In turn, the marketing department can utilize this information to create more targeted advertising campaigns.
What’s the Difference Between RevOps and SalesOps?
While RevOps and SalesOps seem similar, they are very different. Compared to RevOps, SalesOps strictly focuses on the sales process and converting a customer.
SalesOps is a strategy that supports only the sales department by developing processes, best practices, and structures to promote effective and efficient selling. For instance, SalesOps develops quotas and sales strategies, assigns sales personnel territories, manages customer relationship management (CRM) software, and determines commission.
Conversely, RevOps is more inclusive, focusing on aligning all the departments that generate revenue for the company and affect the customer pipeline. RevOps brings all these departments together to pursue a unified goal through collaboration.
Biggest Benefits of United RevOps
As mentioned previously, a RevOps strategy can improve collaboration, transparency, and efficiency across multiple departments. As a result, businesses that have implemented a RevOps strategy achieved 19% faster revenue growth and 15% more profitability.
Also, RevOps has helped companies:
- Increase sales productivity by 10% to 20%
- Increase customer satisfaction by 15% to 20%
- Reduce expenses by 30%
- Increase lead acceptance by 10%
- Increase digital marketing ROI by 100% to 200%
Here are additional benefits of united RevOps:
Improves Insight
Under the traditional approach, each department is siloed, working in an isolated manner to achieve internal goals. Often, this results in tedious routines as departments fail to remove their blinders to recognize the needs of other departments.
With RevOps, every department is aligned under a singular goal: revenue generation. As a result, team members can collaborate and share data, information, and processes cross-departmentally to improve transparency, insight, and efficiency within the overall business.
For instance, shared CRM software can offer transparency and insight between sales and customer success teams. Through this software, both departments can access pertinent information about each client, which can help team members improve visibility into the customer’s journey to better convert or retain customers. As a result, it can decrease long sales cycles and promote customer satisfaction.
Increases Sales and Revenue
With RevOps, collaboration is the name of the game. By aligning and consolidating departmental efforts, more hands are on deck pursuing the same goal. As a result, more insight and increased efficiency can lead to higher sales and revenue.
Let’s take an example. Within a traditional business structure, each department is focused on its internal goals and quotas. For instance, marketing teams are solely engaged in creating advertising content that drives traffic. However, these marketing efforts might be fruitless if the sales team cannot make sales and the customer success team cannot address the customer’s pain points.
Conversely, with a RevOps model, the barriers between these departments are lowered, allowing cross-communication. For instance, customer success teams can relay potential customer pain points to marketing and sales teams. In turn, marketers can develop campaigns that address those concerns. Similarly, sales members can also address the customer’s needs during conversion. In turn, this collaboration leads to improved insights and efficiency, leading to higher sales and revenue.
Offers Predictable Growth
Businesses can predict growth and revenue easier than before with a data-driven approach RevOps produces predictable growth through consistent, accurate data gathering. Moreover, because RevOps is a more synchronous process, teams are better equipped to adapt to market changes, resulting in predictable growth investment opportunities in new strategies and markets.
What Are Some Challenges When Implementing RevOps?
While the benefits of a RevOps strategy seem boundless, your business may face some hurdles when making such a significant transition in business operations. Some challenges may include the following:
- Lack of collaboration and cooperation between departments
- Requires upfront investment in new software and training
- Difficulty promoting cross-departmental communication and transparency
- Pushback to new upper management, such as a revenue operations manager
- Opposition to changes in departmental organization, job descriptions, and roles
How to Successfully Optimize Revenue Operations
Once your RevOps team is in place, it may take some adjusting for all parties involved. To ensure a smoother transition, here are four ways to successfully optimize your revenue operations:
Hire a Director of Revenue Operations
With several departments coming together, your business will need someone at the helm guiding them and ensuring overall revenue growth is achieved. As a result, the first step in implementing a RevOps strategy is hiring a director of revenue operations and a revenue operations manager.
These individuals will be responsible for the following:
- Lead the sales, marketing, and customer success teams and encourage collaboration
- Oversee the sales funnel and operation of each department
- Develop strategies, practices, and workflows that improve efficiency and transparency across departments
- Monitor revenue growth and business KPIs by collecting and analyzing data
- Educate and train team members
- Identifying areas for improvement, as well as developing improvement strategies and implementing them
When hiring for these roles, you’ll want to ensure the individual has the necessary experience and aligns with the revenue operations job descriptions. For instance, the candidate should have the following skills and experience:
- Previous employment in business, sales, or revenue management
- Knowledge of Salesforce and a CRM software
- Project management and leadership experience
- Knowledge of financial and revenue planning, modelling, and reporting
Get all Teams in on the Data
The revenue operations manager must get the marketing, sales, and customer success teams in on the data. All departments must understand the metrics, such as how long customers stay on board, how often they upgrade or downgrade, and which have the highest churn rates. With this information, each team can develop strategies aimed at the same goal: optimizing revenue operations.
Align Incentives
Revenue operation managers must align incentives for the whole team by creating strategies that promote collaboration. For instance, the marketing team is responsible for bringing leads to the sales team, whereas the latter must convert potential customers. Then, the customer success team is responsible for retaining the customers. RevOps works to align different teams, and managers should sharpen the alignment by mapping out clear objectives for all team members.
Agree on the Tech Stack
RevOps means that sales, marketing, and customer success teams must rely on the same tech stack, or software, to succeed and streamline operations. This may mean that companies need to add additional platforms to have each team’s needs met or cut back on tools. For example, some tools you can add to your tech stack include Datadog and New Relic to help IT and DevOps teams monitor performance metrics and provide quality service.
What Tools Do You Need for RevOps?
While cross-department collaboration goes a long way in improving efficiency, the right software and tools go even further. Since marketing, sales, and customer success teams will be utilizing the same software, the first step is to determine each department’s needs. Then, your business can decide which tools will be used most to offer the highest return on investment.
Some RevOps you may consider implementing include the following:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software: tracks customer data in one place. This can include past purchases, contact information, previous discussions, and preferences.
- Messaging: internal and external communication channels.
- Internal messaging may include instant messaging software for departments and video conferencing software.
- External messaging with customers may include SMS and email marketing.
- Help desk: support channel that addresses customer inquiries in real time. Typically, AI bots are utilized to answer frequently asked questions.
The Bottom Line
RevOps is a business strategy that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success teams. It promotes unison to reach the collective goal of revenue generation. Some of the top benefits of implementing a RevOps strategy are improved efficiency, transparency, consistency amongst various teams, customer satisfaction, and sales.
