Introduction
You want to increase your revenue and scale your business, but you might be running into a few common problems: your processes aren’t working, your tech stack is a royal mess and in spite of everyone's efforts, departments are never aligned or working together to achieve larger business goals.
So, how do you scale and hit revenue numbers in the face of such challenges?
Simple answer — Revenue Operations (RevOps).
It’s a B2B function that brings all teams responsible for revenue optimization like marketing, sales, customer success and finance together to drive business growth through operational efficiency and organizational synergy.
As per a Forrester report, 86 percent of executives believe revenue operations are essential to meet their goals. But only 41 percent of them are confident they know what it is and how to execute it.
In this article, we’ll discuss precisely what RevOps is, why it’s crucial to sales success and how to identify if you’re ready to adopt the function into your company.
What is revenue operations?
RevOps is an organizational function that aligns the revenue-generating teams, specifically sales, marketing and customer success, to drive revenue growth, identify hidden revenue optimization opportunities and fix leakages in your existing strategy.
This includes responsibilities like:
- Managing operations for improved performance and results.
- Reducing friction points and enabling sales, marketing and customer success teams with better information to achieve higher revenue numbers.
- Building and overseeing the management of a comprehensive tech stack for all revenue-generating teams to perform their tasks more efficiently.
- Producing reports and findings from different data sources to educate teams on potential revenue enhancement opportunities, costly leakages and how to better optimize your strategies for growth.
- Ensuring all revenue growth systems employed by the team are ethical and comply with national and international legislation and compliance standards.
Although RevOps is seen as the new kid on the block, more companies invest in it every year. In 2021, the title VP of Revenue Operations increased by 300 percent, and Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75 percent of the world’s highest growth companies will employ a RevOps model.
However, there’s a common confusion between revenue operations and sales operations that often keeps organizations in the dark about the effectiveness of RevOps. Let’s look at that.
RevOps vs. SalesOps
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A Sales operations team takes care of the B2B sales segment, reducing friction in the sales process and making systems to help teams close sales faster and more efficiently.
However, revenue operations covers a wider scope. It oversees the functioning and seamless operations of revenue-generating teams, including marketing, customer success, finance and sales.
It builds frictionless processes and automation workflows for the entire revenue-generating side of the business to avoid bottlenecks and ensure alignment and synergy toward achieving a common organizational goal.
That goal? Revenue growth, of course.
Why is revenue operations important to sales success?
Traditionally, individual teams manage their tech stacks, systems and processes to employ data and optimize their strategies for better results in their own way. But this leads to a tunnel vision, inefficiencies in achieving shared goals and too many data sources.
RevOps is a new and improved method that transforms this unorganized system into a unified method of achieving rapid revenue growth through cross-functional efforts and aligned goals.
Since 78 percent of B2B companies face the challenge of growing consistent revenue, RevOps an essential part of organizational growth.
Let’s look at some other reasons why RevOps is the superpower every sales team needs for success.
1. Increase in lead acceptance and marketing ROI
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) conducted a study that revealed B2B tech companies led by SaaS providers see exponential growth through RevOps.
They particularly see 10 percent increases in lead acceptance and a 100-200 percent increase in digital marketing ROI.
This growth happens because RevOps optimizes cross-functional collaboration and management processes to address sophisticated buyer behaviors and longer buying cycles as a result of evolving customer needs.
The revenue operations model allows go-to-market (GTM) teams like marketing, sales and customer service to achieve consistent growth. This happens through an advanced data and analytics tech stack, faster product innovations and launches, along with greater awareness around business metrics that matter.
This eventually helps GTM teams tailor their methods to achieve better lead acceptance, allowing organizations to get a bigger bang for their buck through significant ROI.
2. Reduction in go-to-market expenses
RevOps centralizes all systems, ensuring you can identify and streamline your processes to execute priority tasks that would cause bottlenecks in sales. It also:
- Eases the backend GTM processes by bringing everything in one place.
- Improves the integration of tools helping in lead generation and revenue generation or providing relative data.
- Helps prioritize investments.
- Identifies potential leakages in your present strategy that are making you lose out on money.
- Constantly upgrades outdated strategies to replace them with evolving, agile and dynamic ones.
Overall, RevOps helps you gain clarity on activities that help you increase your ROI and revenue to create strategies for doubling down on them and eliminating ineffective channels to increase your bottom line while reducing expenses.
3. Better cross-functional collaboration
Today, businesses worldwide are becoming more complicated with new channels, different tiered product packages and several buyer personas. Add to that the constantly changing customer buying patterns, and it’s safe to say that scaling your revenue isn’t an easy feat — especially if your revenue-generating teams are working in silos.
However, revenue operations teams help keep sales and finance connected as the organization scales revenue. It streamlines all buying channels and lets customers buy across them without disrupting your individual sales and marketing systems.
This can only happen when these teams function as one. This means you need an agile and dynamic cross-functional collaboration workflow and common goal.
"Teams should stop explaining problems and processes to each other and start showing them to each other instead. Every team member should bring their laptops to every meeting to show their colleagues how they operate. Explaining practical processes verbally can lead to misunderstanding as it leaves too much room for interpretation." — Deepak Shukla, Founder of Pearl Lemon
This will help teams understand each other's workload and build trust to achieve collective goals. Ensuring cross-functional synergy and maintaining accountability is one of the most significant RevOps responsibilities. Ultimately it'll help you achieve goals faster and more efficiently.
4. Helps build more realistic sales quotas and forecasts
RevOps helps predict revenue growth through data-driven analysis, accurate measurements and the creation of better-targeted strategies based on those insights. It allows sales leaders to set realistic key performance indicators (KPIs) and sales quotas that they can achieve in a specific period of time given the organization’s current sales numbers, growth speed, resources and tech stack.
Further, RevOps facilitate a more synchronous approach to sales by keeping everyone on the same page through cross-team meetings, process documentation and common tool dashboards.
So, RevOps doesn’t just help set realistic sales quotas; it helps align all the teams’ efforts in an organized pipeline for better, faster results.
5. Faster growth and increased profits
RevOps is a comprehensive B2B function. It doesn’t just pick a few numbers and implement an organization-wide strategy for revenue growth. But it has the potential to do a 360 on your operations by optimizing each stage of the sales process from lead generation to nurturing and retention.
For example, instead of the sales team qualifying every lead manually, it can set up automation to do an eligibility check for each prospect and present you with only the high conversion propensity prospects.
Besides, it turns your entire sales funnel into a butter-smooth machine by breaking organizational silos and making everyone a participant in revenue growth.
“RevOps isn't just important for sales; it's vital to the overall health of a business. For us, the investment was simple: hire a VP of Operations with significant sales experience and an obsession for processes. Within a year, our organization's processes, platforms and how people aligned with those systems completely evolved. Our Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) doubled, with many employees citing that they felt more connected with the company. In fact, investing in RevOps helped increase our sales by 45 percent YOY and ultimately led to a successful acquisition of our agency.” — Brett Farmiloe, CEO of Terkel
The main aim of RevOps is to remove obstructions from the three big areas of your business — sales, marketing, and customer success — so nothing blocks your path. This means no more miscommunication quarrels, interdepartmental disagreements or mismatched insights from different analytics tools.
Everything is gathered under one roof and focused on driving revenue, which ultimately helps increase profits.
When should you adopt revenue operations?
There’s a solid RevOps team behind most B2B tech companies you see today — Zoom, Slack, Shopify, Abode and many others. But it’s not easy to understand “when” you should start incorporating a revenue operations function into your organization. It’s definitely not when you’ve just started generating sales and are in the initial stages of your startup.
But, if you’ve been getting good sales numbers for a while, want to scale up further and are facing some challenges, RevOps can help. Here are some other signs that indicate you’re ready.
Sales, marketing and customer success aren't aligned
Sales, marketing and customer success together form your go-to-market team. And if this team isn’t aligned, then your data is bound to speak different languages at once. This results in a non-unified front and some pretty ineffective results (no matter how hard you try).
For example, if you’re conducting marketing campaigns with a high-converting landing page, spending a big budget on paid advertising and getting good traffic without see any significant sales numbers — it all comes down to nothing.
This disconnect from any department will ultimately put the entire revenue organization at risk and distract your efforts from optimizing revenue-generating activities to solving cross-functional leakages.
Here, a RevOps function can streamline all efforts under one umbrella and ensure marketing, sales and customer service work together as one big team.
Scribe top tip: You can use Scribe to create, share and store step-by-step guides for any process. This aligns cross-functional teams and gets rid of any dependence on word of mouth.
Key business metrics don’t match up
Traditionally, sales, marketing and customer success work individually — focusing on their own metrics, tech stacks and strategies. This leads to a siloed and often mismatched organizational vision where key business metrics for success don’t align well.
Revenue operations comes through to save the day. Your RevOps team creates a unified channel to measure and analyze growth, fix cross-functional leakages, reduce friction between GTM teams and create a common path for achieving larger business goals.
Forecasts are frequently off the mark
You make sales forecasts spotlighting the numbers you want to hit at the end of every quarter. But what if your actual sales numbers lie far behind your predictions? It indicates a huge gap between expectations and reality due to a lack of clarity and realistic forecasting.
RevOps employs a collective tech stack for all revenue-generating teams and helps create realistic sales quotas and forecasts based on data, team synergy and current numbers. Its core responsibility is ensuring you set data-backed predictions and create a practical roadmap that helps you achieve those numbers.
You want to drive transparency and accountability at scale
Transparency and accountability are two core pillars for achieving rapid organizational growth.
Only when the entire organization (from the marketing intern to the sales leader and customer success executives) is aligned, accountable and transparent with the go-to-market goals can you see revenue growth.
For this, each person in the organization needs to be tied together with a common objective and metrics to focus their efforts on. RevOps helps do just that.
RevOps is the key to building repeatable and scalable processes
If you want to actually hit those target metrics you discussed at the quarterly meeting, all team members need to be working with the same vision in mind. RevOps binds all revenue-generating teams and processes together to function as one well-oiled machine. This can increase revenue numbers, improve cross-functionality and ban any and all barriers.
Sales, marketing and customer success work better when working together. It’s crucial to unify and optimize these processes to power a revenue engine hits each milestone.
Use the information in this article to understand the importance of RevOps in a constantly changing tech world and employ it toward your team's success.
Building effective and actionable RevOps functions within organizational workflows is key to success. Scribe helps you do just that. Get started today!
