How to get started with Revenue Operations?

What is Revenue Operations?

Revenue operations (or RevOps), is the alignment of marketing, sales, and customer success operations across the full customer life cycle or funnel, to drive growth through operational efficiency. This includes increased communication between areas, more access to data, better data flow between departments, and a holistic approach in looking at organizational objectives.

RevOps works by centralizing four previously separate departments: sales operations, marketing operations, customer success operations and systems. The old approach of siloed operational teams isn’t working anymore and that is why centralized revenue operations functions will have a large effect on sales teams in the upcoming years. Well-run, high-quality RevOps departments will give early-adopter companies an immense competitive advantage.

When all teams are kept accountable to revenue, it frees up departments to focus on the customer and how to deliver value. This is a holistic approach designed to break down silos between the customer-facing areas.

The Three Pillars of Revenue Operations:

Process

RevOps activates uniform processes as teams start to work together to convert prospects. Additional benefits are shorter sales cycles, improved retention and a higher upsell volume.

Platform

Within your organization, you must connect and align your technology to provide a clear and accurate story around your revenue pipeline. By providing a single source of truth, people can identify how they, directly and indirectly, impact sales.

People

Who is responsible for bringing together and managing your process and digital platforms? Depending on your company’s size, RevOps will create a specific team or distribute the responsibilities among existing team members.

Benefits of Revenue Operations:

• Alignment: Bringing customer-facing departments together ensures every marketing 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 revenue ops approach, organizations can remove roadblocks and silos within departments, increasing companywide efficiency and creating a better customer experience.

How Do You Implement a RevOps Approach?

Designate an Operations Leader with a RevOps Mindset

It’s critical to think of RevOps as a mindset, not just a business practice. So to successfully implement it into your organization, you need someone at your organization to put on the RevOps “hat”. This person should hold the mindset that the key to growth is aligning core operational functions around revenue data. And this is the person you want to lead your operations team.

Audit Current Processes

Now that you have your operations leader with a RevOps mindset, work with this individual to audit all of your current digital processes. This will help you find any gaps or overlaps between departments. Look for the following:

• Misaligned process between departments
• Areas where a lack of process is requiring team members to create their own
• Overlap in processes where two or more departments are responsible for essentially the same thing

Develop RevOps Practices

The processes you develop should:

• Improve collaboration between sales, marketing and customer success
• Provide a data sharing process that gives transparent insight to each department
• Establish a feedback loop for each department that discusses improvement, business growth and revenue goals.

Here are some questions to ask that will help as you form these processes:

1. First: How do we implement a process with all of the teams that achieve our revenue goal?
2. Next: How do we connect departments to ensure collaboration towards this goal?
3. Then: That’s the data that we need to make sure all departments are aligned along the way?
4. Finally: what type of metrics will be used to track the effectiveness of these digital processes?

Create a Dedicated Revenue Operations Team

Once you (or your dedicated RevOps leader) have adopted the RevOps mindset and implemented the right processes, the natural next step is to build upon this value by creating a dedicated revenue operations team.

This known as the RevOps structure, or the reorganization of your company to make room for a single team focused on revenue growth.