Jul 15, 2022 5:56:58 PM | RevOps What is RevOps?

A new term has emerged in the last year or two called RevOps. What does it mean exactly, and why should you care?

There seems to be some confusion about what RevOps is. The acronym stands for Revenue Operations and simply means managing your revenue processes. When a company hires a consulting firm or an inbound marketing agency like us to look at their sales operations, they typically hire us to provide training, help identify problems, recommend improvements, etc. This helps improve revenue and reduce costs.

Simply, RevOps is helping companies increase profits.

RevOps is a term widely adopted by marketing agencies and consultants in recent years. They refer to the practice of improving customer service and streamlining the entire operation. If you want to master your revenue management strategy, then you need to get acquainted with RevOps.

What is RevOps?

Running a successful business is like playing a team sport. You need to align everyone around a common goal. In sports terms, you need to put together a winning team. If you don’t do that, no matter how good your players might be, you won’t win. Businesses are no different. When you run a successful operation, you need to align the people involved into a cohesive unit. Otherwise, you won't achieve your goals.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) are the functions within a B2B organization that aims to maximize the revenue potential by streamlining sales, marketing, and customer support processes across the entire enterprise. 

Imagine the departments are your team members. Each department plays a role in making sure the entire organization operates efficiently. For example, Sales Operations (Sales Ops), Marketing Operations (Marketing Ops), Customer Success Operations (CSO), and Systems Development & Operations (SD&O) work together to ensure that each group is aligned around a common set of objectives. These groups typically operate independently, but they need to come together to make sure everything runs smoothly.

In many companies, multiple departments play similar roles, such as CSO and SD&O. However, some organizations are realizing that having separate functions isn’t always best. Instead, they’re combining departments to form Revenue Operations (RevOps).

Why Revenue Operations Matters

The most important reason why Revenue Operations matters is that it helps businesses become more efficient. By combining the functions of Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and other areas into one team, RevOps can help businesses improve their overall performance.

Another benefit is that RevOps allows for better collaboration between teams. The process of working with others daily means that communication becomes easier. This is especially true when dealing with customers who have specific needs or issues. It also makes it easier to share information about new products, services, and features.

Finally, RevOps helps businesses gain a competitive advantage against their competitors. They can use data from all these areas to understand what works well and what doesn’t. Then, they can implement changes accordingly.

Why was RevOps created?

Revenue Operations were developed so that businesses could stop hoping for revenue, and start operationalizing it throughout their organization. Historically, companies operated in silos, where marketing technology was used within marketing teams, salespeople had different tools, and customer experience was handled by separate groups. This led to a lack of coordination across these areas, resulting in missed opportunities and dissatisfied customers.

In theory, one hand didn’t know what the other hand did, and money was being lost because of it. The rise of Revenue Ops came from a couple of key needs. First, there was a growing demand for better data in Marketing and Sales. Second, there was a desire to improve the efficiency of operations across Marketing, Customer Experience, and Sales.

The Three Pillars of Revenue Operations (RevOps) Framework

Revenue operations is a collaborative, customer-centric approach to optimizing the revenue potential of a business. RevOps has been founded around three pillars: Process, Platform, and People.

Each pillar is a foundational build block that the next pillar builds upon. Only when you have each of those pillars properly defined can you achieve Focus, Clarity, and Accountability throughout your organization.

Process

You need to make sure you are creating the right process to help your team collaborate effectively. This includes training, documentation, and coaching. A great way to start is to ask yourself what the most important thing is for your team to do correctly every day. Then make it easy for them to do so.

A healthy process will benefit the business with shorter sales cycles, improved retention, and a higher upsell volume.

Platform

Your people need to be able to access the tools and data they need to succeed. If you don't provide them with the right information, they won't know how to perform well.

Your business needs to connect and align its technology to provide a clear, accurate story around your revenue pipelines. By providing a single authoritative source of truth, you can help people understand how their actions directly or indirectly affect sales.

People

Finally, you must hire the right people. Hire the best talent possible because they will bring the highest level of performance to your team.

Who is responsible for making sure your processes and platforms run smoothly? Depending on your company's size, RevOps will assign responsibilities to existing team members or create a specific team.

What's the difference between Revenue Operations vs. Sales Operations

Once a company has incorporated revenue operations, the salespeople can focus on selling, while the RevOps people can handle the behind-the-scenes tasks of collecting and handling data for the sales team. Think about an operations backend and a frontend.

The main difference between them is that sales operations focus on making sales, whereas revenue operations focus not just on making sales but also on other functions, such as finance, marketing, sales, and customer service.

If sales operations are all about helping sales teams function so they can sell more, then revenue operations are about making everything else about generating revenue more effective.

The Benefits of Revenue operations (RevOps)

Beyond driving better revenue growth for an organization, adding a revenue ops team or strategic approach has other benefits, and they include:

Alignment

Bringing customer-facing departments together ensures every campaign or customer initiative has a measurable impact on the sales funnel from the start of the campaign. This includes aligning campaigns with specific objectives, ensuring metrics are tracked consistently, and identifying opportunities for improvement.

Creating Focus

By bringing together sales, marketing, product management, and operations teams under one umbrella, organizations can focus on goals and ensure everyone is working toward the same endpoints—such as generating leads, closing sales, and growing existing accounts.

Simplifying Processes

By establishing a revenue ops approach and putting processes in place, companies can eliminate roadblocks and silos inside departments, increasing overall efficiency and creating a better consumer experience.

Sales

A revenue operations manager knows every aspect of the sales process from start to finish. They are responsible for ensuring that everything runs smoothly throughout the entire sales cycle. This includes managing marketing campaigns, responding to leads, setting up appointments, following up on deals, and handling customer issues.

So, it means that if something goes wrong, they have enough knowledge and skills to fix things quickly. Salespeople can now spend more time doing what makes them most effective – engaging with prospects and selling new business.

Marketing

Marketing teams often use more technology and more analytics than their revenue-generating departments. The primary focus for the RevOps manager in B2B marketing is to stream­line the marketing tech stack by enabling marketers to access more data and insights from the other teams.

This leads to better decisions, improved productivity, and greater business growth.

Customer Success

When previously isolated departments are brought together into one cohesive team, they become more attuned to their customer's needs and concerns.  Customers notice better standards in communications and services.  Customer Success teams will be able to see an improvement in their upsells, renewals, and customer retention rates.

What are the Essential Revenue Operations tools?

The number one tool in Rev Ops is your company's CRMs. You need to make sure it provides all the capabilities you require to make your revenue ops strategy a success. 

The number one tool in RevOps is your company’s CRM. Make sure that your CRM has all the features you need to make your revenue operations strategy successful, including:

Contact and activity tracking: so you know where prospects and customers are in their buying journeys.

Forecasting revenue: the ability to use current and historical data to predict what will happen in the near future.

Analyzing revenue data: gathering information by observing business processes, and then reporting on their strength and weaknesses.

AI-powered analytics and insights: Using AI tools, analyzing and manipulating large amounts of complex data.

Individual account dashboards: Every lead and customer must have a section within your CRM, with full visibility for every department generating revenue.

Data aggregation from third parties: Your CRM can help you connect with prospects across multiple channels, so your reps can stay updated on their latest interactions.

Integrating with third parties: Best practice is to link your customer relationship management system to your marketing automation and sales enablement platforms.

The best CRM for revenue operation is HubSpot software. As a Hubspot partner agency, we can help you develop and implement your revenue operation strategy. 

RevOps Equals Competitive Advantage

Those companies that invest in a high-quality RevOps function first will have an enormous advantage. For others, that means hiring a good leader and qualified internal specialists who can help them grow their businesses.

If you don't have the budget to build an internal RevOp function, it means finding a qualified external provider to bridge the gap between now and when you're ready for a full team to handle it.

Build your Revenue Ops Strategy with Fine Media

Fine Media's industry experts provide comprehensive consulting services that include strategy, implementation, training, and ongoing support. We'll work with you to define your vision, develop a plan, implement best practices, measure results and make recommendations for future improvements.

Contact us today to learn how we can help your organization achieve its goals.