B2B purchasing behaviour has shifted dramatically in recent years. As a result, businesses have had to quickly adapt to how they interact with potential clients as the traditional sales process that defines a prospect's buying path has been turned upside down.
Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success — these three distinct departments have a significant influence on revenue, but when each department begins to center their attention on their individual growth, it's easy for them to miss out on opportunities and for customers to lose out on a unifying buying experience. It's quite necessary therefore for these departments to come under a single entity as many companies have come to realise that a siloed strategy is no longer viable. This alignment brings about the subject of Revenue Operations.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations (also known as RevOps) is the business practice of driving revenue across teams. Revenue operations have one purpose, and that is to boost predictable revenue and streamline processes across marketing, sales, and customer successes. This results in increased revenue growth due to increased revenue team efficiency.
Why Is Revenue Operations So Important?
There are three crucial elements to note when it comes to aligning — People, Data, and Processes.
People
Suppose you have marketing, sales, and customer success departments. It's known that the goal of the marketing department is to generate leads for the sales department, who will, in turn, make an effort to turn those leads into sales. The converted customers are then handed over to the customer success team. As a result, each team has its own set of KPIs and targets to achieve.
But this can lead to a major flaw in revenue growth, in that your marketing team may be capable of generating a huge number of leads for sales but what if the leads generated are of poor quality? Does it probably mean that the sales team is wasting time on leads that are unlikely to convert?
This same logic also applies to the customer success team. Marketing sends the leads to Sales, which is responsible to close the sale and then will frequently hand that closed sale over to Customer Success. But there is not much collaboration between the Sales and Customer Success team to know how to increase revenue from those customers.
Data
Data is the lifeblood of any business. Any organisation having revenue growth in mind must know how to handle and derive insights from data.
There'll likely be a major disconnect when the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Department follow a siloed system. Each department looking at a different set of data is not helping.
Processes
Communication is a critical element here. With each team having individual metrics and processes, keeping track of huge teams and enormous amounts of leads and clients can be difficult.
As a result, it is important to adopt revenue operations as it enables you to unite your team under a single vision and offer them a single goal to achieve. Revenue operations help align teams and departments with the company’s goals and strategy, drive top-line growth and increase profitability. It is also an integral part of managing customer relationships. Revenue Operations allow you to streamline your processes and guarantee that everyone on your team is on the same page.
How To Know When It's Time To Invest In RevOps?
Knowing when to delve into RevOps is critical for the success of any business. However, one does not just simply go into RevOps simply because it's working for another organisation. It's essential to know when to invest in it and start working on a RevOps strategy.
The following 3 Questions (based on the above People, Data, and Processes) will help you know whether it is this is the right time to invest in RevOps:
- Are you experiencing Tool Overload?
- With recent developments in automation, a lot of tools are being used to ease the sales process. When you find your company employing the use of these many tools and they do not communicate well, that's a call to align your tech stack into one centralised tool.
- Are your data insights adding up?
- Having distinct data results from different departments can be a real mess. A RevOps team helps you avoid this while having a consolidated view of your data.
- Are my processes up to date and able to be scaled?
- For today's fast-paced industry, business processes must constantly adapt and remain informed and prepared. A RevOps team assembles the required people to keep processes current and adaptive.
Ready To Delve Into RevOps?
Now once you have decided that it's time to delve into RevOps, it all boils down to building your team and providing training for them.
You can decide to hire a RevOps specialist, one with a sales operations background, who knows how to work with marketing software tools, optimise sales, organise and analyse company data, and with extensive experience in creating scalable cross-functional processes and workflows.
Or you can just go along with an already-trained team of professionals that will be able to immediately assist your company.