Revenue Operations has seen a meteoric rise as a business function and concept recently, with more and more business leaders recognising it's importance in the digital space.
Last year a stunning 86% of B2B executives told Forrester Consulting that Revenue Operations will be an important factor in achieving their key 2021/22 business goals, and for good reason…
Businesses who lean into Revenue Operations are seeing exponential improvements to their digital marketing ROI, customer satisfaction and revenue generation.
A recent survey by the Boston consulting group found that B2B tech companies saw an increase in sales productivity as high as 20% after adopting the function, B2C companies recorded similar results.
This obsession is also reflected in the emerging job market…
Linkedin searches for roles using the keyword “Revenue Operations” frequently yield 10,000s of open job results, and titles like “Head of Growth” and “Chief Revenue Officer” are some of the fastest growing job titles on the platform.
Clearly, it is a snowballing business trend, but what exactly is Revenue Operations, or “RevOps”, where did it come from and what are the key elements needed to optimise the business function?
Despite CEOs and business leaders lamenting RevOps as an important function in their efforts to meet business objectives, 69% of these executives are unable to confidently define the term.
So let's go through it.
Fundamentally, RevOps is the alignment of a business’s key revenue generating teams; usually Marketing, Sales and Customer Service, in an effort to drive full funnel responsibility, increase customer advocacy and boost revenue.
In the RevOps model, Marketing, Sales and Customer Service all align under the same architecture, made up of people, processes, technology and data.
This isn’t simply about melting your various departments into one team. Quite the opposite - RevOps allows for further specialisation and lets your Marketers, Sales and Customer Services flourish, but flourish under the same roof, with an aligned goal.
It’s useful to think of RevOps as a relay race that never ends.
The Marketing department begins the sprint, picking up the baton, or qualifying the lead as a prospect. They then pass the baton to Sales, who transform the prospect into a paying customer, and finally relay the baton to Customer Services, who attempt to lead the customer back to start of the customer life-cycle, thus passing the baton back to Marketing!
Every department is specialised, but all are aligned closely by their goal and the strategy applied to achieve this goal.
It sounds like a foolproof plan to increase customer satisfaction and boost revenue, but it’s not always been this way…
Historically business leaders adopted a fragmented approach to running their revenue generating departments.
A litany of different strategies, data sets and personnel would be used by different departments to achieve the maximum level of return.
Revenue was seen as the fortunate byproduct of a product or service.
Existing customers? Just an afterthought.
The immediate rise of SaaS (software as a service) and other digital technologies lent their support to this approach initially; many were designed to help fragmented and specialised departments, thereby assisting a soloed model.
As reliance on increasingly sophisticated technology and digital data grew, a lack of cohesiveness became apparent as different functions were working independently, failing to collaborate as needed… many business leaders felt a disconnect between their various departments, resulting in reliance on mixed data-sets and patchwork company KPI’s, amongst other issues.
This, paired with increasing customer expectation for accountability and transparency, as well as expectation for a seamless buyer's journey, led business leaders back to the drawing board.
And so RevOps was born!
In the new RevOps model, revenue is no longer viewed as a byproduct of a service or goods, rather the byproduct of an optimised business process.
Customers and the entire customer experience is no longer an afterthought. They are central to the entire business process.
They are qualified and led initially by marketing, transformed into customers by sales, and are kept alive within the life-cycle by Customer Services
So how best can business leaders optimise their RevOps business function?
A tech stack can be defined as a combination of business applications used to execute a business's essential processes.
From capturing leads for marketing, processing deals for sales, and managing renewals for customer success your tech stack should help align your key revenue generating teams and the processes essential to their success.
Choosing the right tech stack can be a daunting task. With the thousands of applications out there on the market, all professing their importance, it can be easy to become overwhelmed.
Whilst some tools out there may be a waste of time, there are certainly areas of your tech stack you don't want to skimp out on, one of which is your CRM.
If you truly want your revenue generating teams to align, you'll need a flexible, user friendly and scalable CRM.
An easy to use, high performing CRM, that is the right fit for your business, will improve communication, increase operational capacity, increase sales capabilities, and when on-boarded and implemented correctly, make each prospect, lead, and customer interaction relevant and compelling… thus driving revenue.
It should be the backbone of business operations for all your revenue generating teams, with relevant applications and data sets feeding into this one source of truth.
Not all CRM's were made equal though, and there’s some on the market that you could do without.
We’ve been using HubSpot, a cloud based CRM, for over 6 years now, and we couldn’t recommend it enough. We’re not alone in this either. G2Crowd - something of a TripAdvisor for SAAS - recently ranked it there #1 CRM software.
With an entire suite of tools entirely purposed for RevOps optimisation, HubSpot is THE CRM to facilitate scalability by aligning your Marketing, Sales and Customer services to improve the customer journey and accountability, factors that will drive revenue.
Using the CRM’s workflow automations you can set up automatic trigger actions in third-party systems, like a slack message or an email from mailchimp, or harness a wide array of data sync options, ensuring centralise prospect, lead and customer data that maximises insight and improves performance.
Signing up to your preferred CRM is just the first step in adopting a sufficient tech stack. To realise your true RevOps potential your CRM will need all the relevant applications to bring together various data sets and processes into the same one environment.
Sometimes, this requires custom integrations, outside of those offered by your CRM.
Simplifying how developers integrate new application components into an existing architecture, custom APIs let your nuanced products or services communicate with your CRM, or other applications.
This can facilitate the transfer of information between your various data sets and business applications.
We love automating workflows into the HubSpot CRM, and this is almost always an important element when on-boarding HubSpot for clients who need nuanced applications to feed data into their CRM.
It's become easier than ever, too, with the rise of no and low-code automation platforms like N8N, which allows users to sync data between as many as 200 apps in one singular workflow, with little to no code at all!
With this technology on the market, there's never been a better time to combine formally soloed functions and applications.
The people within your business that oversee the alignment of your various revenue generating teams are essential to strong RevOps performance.
As previously mentioned, the RevOps emerging job market is gaining traction at an exponential rate, titles like "Head of Growth' "Chief RevOps Officer" are increasing in popularity, and are essential in overseeing the seamless alignment between your revenue generating teams.
These individuals act as the bridge between teams, delivering visibility across the board, improving efficiency across the revenue process and driving revenue predictability, with the ultimate goal of achieving revenue growth and scalability.
It's not uncommon for these individuals to manage revenue and sales forecasting, or to oversee entire "RevOps" teams, who are driven to attract more leads, convert more customers and drive greater CLTV.
Having the right people, in the right roles, is central to RevOps success!
With our HubSpot services, Karman Digital are no strangers to unleashing the potential of RevOps for clients.
If you are ready to take your company to new heights with a new business function, drop us a line today.