RevOps: The Next Gen of Sales Operations
Transparent & Full View Via Revenue Operations
RevOps (Revenue Operations) is the holistic framework that aligns an organization’s internal processes around revenue growth along the entire customer journey. We’re starting at the top with Marketing, passing through Sales, over to Success, and looping Finance in to get a fully transparent and complete view of the customer.
“Revenue Operations arose to unify, measure, analyze, and drive three principal owners of revenue generation. These are the hopelessly siloed bubbles of sales, marketing, and customer success.”
You may notice that ‘Finance’ isn’t mentioned in the above quote. We believe that Financial Operations is an oft-missed crucial part of the RevOps framework - a signed contract isn’t worth as much as cash in the bank, and without FinOps included we lack the confidence and ability to claim RevOps is performing as intended.
Image courtesy of Funnelcake, The RevOps Framework
How do we know if we need RevOps?
Everyone needs RevOps. You’re already doing parts of RevOps right now. You might have someone in a Marketing or Sales Ops role, you might have a Deal Desk system. These are all part of the holistic RevOps framework. The question is never ‘do we need RevOps’, but rather ‘How can we best migrate into a more holistic RevOps framework given our current organizational structure’.
How do we know if we’re already doing this thing?
Good question! Here are some of the benefits and indicators of a RevOps framework:
Unified technical solutions across all teams
Gone are the days of yore where Sales and Success had separate email cadence tools. Lost to time immemorial are the struggles of logging into multiple platforms just to be able to see a prospect’s engagement activity side-side with their current contract details and their recent invoice status.
Decrease in client confusion during the customer journey
Relegated to the annals of email archives are the occasions where you had to rally to soothe a prospective customer when they asked for something reasonable - when ‘reasonable’ was simply something that one team believed was true that another team did not.
Greater and more predictable revenue growth over time.
Everyone talks a big game about forecasting. It’s hip these days to talk about how data-driven your modeling is. Here’s the thing - if you deviate from your forecast, in either direction whether you come in below or above target, you’ve got a bad model. The goal is to be accurate, because that accuracy is knowledge, and that knowledge feeds back in and enables even greater growth.
Who else is doing this?
Everyone. Well ok, a lot of people. We’re not advocating jumping onto the RevOps bandwagon just for the sake of trendsetting.
That said, we can speak to the framework and its positive impact to both operational efficiency and revenue optimization.
So how do we get started?
Consolidate Accountability
Centralize the KPIs across multiple teams. Get people incentivized to get on board. Bring leadership in - both to direct and manage, but also to be held accountable for these processes.
Consolidate Responsibility
Look into what it would take to have fewer people doing less work for more teams. Find opportunities to to standardize your internal operations across departments. This isn’t about overwhelming someone by having one person perform the work of 4, it’s about recognizing and creating the reality where 75% of that work was duplicative at best and counter-productive at worst in the first place.
Consolidate Technology
Once your success metrics are agreed upon and a system of accountability/ownership/responsibility defined, take a look at your tech stack. How many solutions do you have that have 86% redundant features? What can you do - now that you’re aligned in mission, impact, leadership, and ownership - to unify the internal experience? Standardized operational experiences lead to increased institutional knowledge, confidence, competency, and performance.