Revenue Operations or RevOps is crucially transforming how companies look at growth. Instead of keeping departments and teams siloed, they should be streamlined and encouraged to work together. RevOps addresses the gap between revenue generation and company teams/departments. Revenue operations helps gain traction from sales flywheels. We will now discuss everything related to RevOps, the best practices, crucial components, benefits of revenue operations, key metrics of RevOps and how revenue operations (RevOps) impacts customer success, sales, and marketing.
What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the business process of driving revenue across teams. Teams like marketing, sales, customer service, renewals, and operations need to be aligned to support each other. It is a new concept but has promising results when companies are latching onto it.
The end goal of revenue operations is to improve efficiency of the revenue team, optimize the revenue process, improve revenue performance, and increase revenue growth. RevOps is a fast-growing job in the SaaS space.
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Who are the Crucial Components in RevOps
RevOps is all about some key players and their alignment. It includes people from sales, marketing and customer success operations.
Sales
Sales teams focus on closing deals. They are the bridge between marketing and customer service teams. Since the end goals of both sales and marketing teams is to make sure customers are onboard, there should be connections between the teams. With revenue operations, sales teams can get more revenue from the sales funnel. This is by optimizing marketing team funnels that will affect sales as well.
Marketing
In an ideal RevOps workflow, customer marketing is the core. The RevOps cycle is based on engaging with customers frequently and upselling to them. RevOps teams create software processes that help marketing teams work with other teams. Through this process, CLV and cost per lead are now important for marketing and sales teams as well.
Customer Success
In a RevOps workflow, customer success teams get involved with the customer way before they sign the deal. This means customer success teams understand the customer and can anticipate their relationship way before it becomes official. This helps understand the kind of experience the customer is looking for. This will help improve customer experience as a selling point.
Why Revenue Operations is Important
Revenue operations help ensure accountability and synchronize goals of operations who are revenue generating. In B2B companies, revenue growth is a challenge and a good RevOps strategy will help solve the alignment challenges. The core of RevOps is focusing on three pillars:
People
RevOps is based on aligning teams around shared revenue targets and business views
Processes
RevOps also looks to increase operations through QBRs, sales, forecast calls, and integrated processes.
Data
To connect data and businesses, there is a need to have a RevOps system in place.
How RevOps Impacts Marketing and Sales
Sales and marketing alignment will help improve conversions, communication and convert customers. It helps increase revenue potential and ensures alignment is active between streams. Consistent tech stacks are available with RevOps so that they can be used across teams. These tech stacks are fluid and can be used easily for both marketing and sales purposes.
RevOps and Customer Experiences
Revenue operations is also about customer retention. It’s about keeping customers you have gotten into the business. It is all about building a rapport with customers and ensuring they stay with your product based on trust and loyalty.
Benefits of Revenue Operations (RevOps)
The benefits of RevOps in a business are many.
- Increased collaboration across teams
- Lesser blame game among departments
- More accountability
- Better transparency
- Business growth that is predictable
- Better sales productivity
- Higher customer retention
- Enhanced customer experience
As per research by Boston Consulting Group, revenue operations or alignment across teams results in-
- Increase in lead acceptance
- Improvement in marketing ROI
- Increase in customer satisfaction
- Nearly 30 % of increase in go-to-market expenses
How to Optimise Your Business with Revenue Operations (RevOps)
To optimise your RevOps, you can take a cue from some best practices in RevOps. Since RevOps is all about optimising marketing, sales, and customer success, here are some best practices that help.
Keep the Data Central
Data is core. Keeping data at the center is necessary to keep teams aligned. Data needs to be on the same platform for teams to work together. How long are customers involved with the company? Are they on the right track? Is the data set they are referring to the same? Are they looking at two different sets of data?
Have the Same Tech Stack
RevOps requires that teams base themselves on the same tech stack. There is a need to make sure teams are aligned with the same tech stack. The strategy for RevOps needs customers to be use the same tools/platforms as others. This will help operations be smoother.
Align incentives across teams
Having a unified idea of revenue generation will help achieve growth. You can meet the same goals when the incentives are aligned across teams. Align the incentives for the three teams. Marketing teams need to bring leads to sales teams who will convert them into customers. And customer success is all about retaining customers. With RevOps, you can optimize business operations.
Focus on the big picture
Having a full-length strategy with actionable insights and pointers will help achieve the bigger picture. When the big picture is the one that is the core, teams can look to streamline identifying issues and resolving bottlenecks.
Key Metrics for Revenue Operations (RevOps)
The key goal of revenue operations is to drive revenue growth – predictable streams of revenue, mostly. Here are some of the KPI and metrics for revenue operations that can be counted as accountable.
- Annual Recurring Revenue
- Cost of Customer Acquisition
- Customer lifetime value
- Sales Cycle Time
- Forecast accuracy
- Renewals and upsells
- Customer churn rate
Bottom Line
Companies in this age of digital transparency must look to optimise their customer experience and revenue operations as much as possible. Keeping the buyer-first is required to ensure efficiency, growth, and revenue is improved at all stages. Revenue operations can increase predictable revenue and drive processes better.
Kruthan Appanna is a Customer Success Analyst with 5 years of experience. Passionate about leveraging data-driven insights to drive customer satisfaction and retention. Skilled in building strong client relationships and providing strategic solutions.
Published March 31, 2021, Updated May 23, 2024