You might have seen the word ‘RevOps’ frequently in recent days on LinkedIn from companies and many leadership people.
It’s not a very new thing, but surely, it’s now much more organized than before and connected to the company’s prime functions and growth levers, and more importantly, with the 'modern sales'.
In recent years, amid the downturn and layoffs, companies have shifted their whole focus to one factor: 'revenue'’ and adopted strategies and methodologies that support their revenue growth.
Back then, RevOps was not so familiar with many organizations worldwide. Leadership focuses on marketing, sales, and customer success as the only go-to marketing engines.
But they’ve missed certain significant factors with these functions before. Each of them contributed their individual outcomes but connecting them all towards the end revenue outcome needs a lot of synergy, operational efficiency, and consistent iteration. And that’s where RevOps came into the picture.
RevOps has been the fastest-growing department across industries. Let’s scratch around from the basics, and we’ll cover roles and responsibilities, how it operates, and, more importantly, whether you should need revops for your organization or not—everything in this article.
Revops is a holistic strategic approach that is designed with the core notion of aligning marketing, sales, and customer success operations together with the customer life cycle to maximize revenue growth. It is done by unifying the people, processes, and automations to drive maximum operational efficiency towards the shared common objective, which is revenue growth’.
Each team has different goals and runs behind different processes, so it is very common to fall behind the synergy and work in silos. RevOps helps to break this siloed functioning, which impacts efficiency.
Overall, this function involves cross-collaboration, analysis, implementing the best tech stack for the teams, and using customer data points to uncover new revenue opportunities.
Traditionally, teams include the operations process as distinct entities, such as MarkOps and SalesOps, and operate in silos to drive efficiency. However, in today's trend, it is very important to keep a data-driven operational flow across the organization by connecting every team to one common goal at any time.
To drive the maximum revenue, there needs to be an individual or team with a holistic view from the top of every operational function going on. And that’s how RevOps was born—by consolidating these individual operations into a single operational framework. Not only does RevOps aim to enhance operational efficiency, but it also significantly influences customer satisfaction. A well-implemented CRM system should be the strong base for any successful revops function.
It's one powerful team (RevOps), which streamlines the entire company's effort in all functions toward revenue growth. Easier said than done. It’s not just about making MarkOps and SalesOps collaborate well. RevOps is a lot more than that. They are responsible for designing the processes, tech implementation, documenting, administration, and dataflow to keep everyone connected throughout the customer life cycle.
Some marketing and sales teams believe Revops is a threat. But in real life, it’s the other way around. With revops, they can deliver a lot more outcomes in a much shorter time if they are well strategized. It frees the departments from daily operational work, allowing them to foster deeper customer relationships.
A famous metaphor to understand the revops is “the revops team is responsible for building the tracks and ensuring the trains are running on time." Following are the core activities they perform to ensure coherence between different departments.
The primary cause of unsuccessful marketing and sales strategies in many companies is often attributed to disjointed strategies and poor team alignment, despite individual team members performing well. RevOps ensures strong collaboration. They ensure every operational facet is interconnected and contributes towards the revenue goal by not losing out on the harmony between teams at any time.
Everyone knows that a CRM is vital for any organization. But even more, a well-integrated CRM system provides a 360-degree view of the customer life cycle, and it helps to connect the datasets arriving from marketing, sales, and customer success to one central point. RevOps ensures this and establishes an integrated CRM system to deliver a holistic customer experience that will eventually drive and retain revenue.
Any organization that implements revenue operations functions must undergo a significant mental shift to adjust to a new internal operating model. Many organizations may find it challenging to adapt to this change, but it is a worthwhile investment, as it can enhance team synergy and establish a robust CRM system. This system will propel the organization to a new level of strategizing and decision-making, significantly impacting their customers and revenue potential.
The key revenue operations responsibilities are:
The head or director of revenue operations is a senior management member. This is simply the C-suite head of the RevOps team, and other operational heads such as MarkOps, SalesOps, and customer success should report to this person. This person is responsible for overviewing and devising the overall strategy to connect every team operationally across the company.
This role manages the team and delegates the necessary tasks to the members. The manager analyses if there are any revenue optimization opportunities available in the ongoing process and collaborates with leaders to kickstart any business initiatives. Apart from this, they work with all other teams to bridge operations and take care of data dashboards to communicate goals and progress with teams.
Associates are the ones who do multiple ground-level activities in revenue operations. They ensure up-to-date data by managing the CRM system to track it regularly and supporting the sales operations team by delivering insights regarding pipeline performance and other opportunities to improve. In addition to this, they help to distribute required reports, data dashboards, and other activities to support leadership in data-driven decision-making.
As RevOps is still an emerging concept across companies, it’s vital to get aware of the best practices under RevOps, execute them in the right way, and reap maximum benefits from them. Here, we are listing some best practices that you can also implement in your revops function.
Connect with every department head, regularly schedule performance assessments, and check the alignment between different teams. Regular assessment improves collaboration, and everyone will understand the expectations for adding their input and addressing challenges at the right time.
Executing the revisions within the company's culture requires significant changes to the existing processes that various departments follow. It's impractical to expect a drastic change in a short time with heavy targets for everyone. To avoid this overwhelming scenario, it’s better to start with small targets for every team and gradually push them towards progress.
‘Data’ is the oxygen of the revops function. It is obvious to track the correct data and keep it secure to execute the revops effectively. To stay on track, establish a well-connected tracking system and regularly audit data. Also, make sure to include only the necessary historical data in the process, as including unnecessary data could lead to issues.
Overview every team’s process and check the repetitive process going on with each team. Make a list of these processes and determine if automation is feasible without causing any additional issues. For instance, with the right tech-stack implementation, you can easily automate tasks like following up on leads in sales and certain email nurturing campaigns.
The ideal customer profile database is at the core of every marketing and sales activity. However, the catch is that it's not a one-time process. The buyers are evolving, and their expectations are so dynamic. Set a time interval, and regularly update the customer profile database based on your own research and industry trends.
Each department has its own challenges, and their interactions with customers differ. For example, a datapoint from an SDR call could be a game-changer for the marketing team, and a customer success person’s knowledge can help the whole sales team. Unless RevOps dives in and acts as an insight bridge between the teams, these insights will remain buried inside the teams. Collect it from every team and help teams incorporate it into their processes.
Revops strategy is an ideal plan to align and improve marketing, sales, and customer success processes to maximize revenue. An ideal buyer journey forms the crux of this strategy, around which all activities and processes revolve. The following are the steps to strategize the revops function, whether you are building it from scratch or strategizing the existing one.
In the first place, map your ideal buyer journey and identify all the ways that they can be more responsive and easier to communicate with us. One significant aspect is that you shouldn’t consider any conditions from your existing process. Start by creating a fresh buyer journey sketch and mapping all the activities from marketing, sales, and the customer success team to better serve your buyers.
Map your current pipeline by collecting data from your ongoing systems and processes. Analyze the existing technology stack that powers your existing processes concurrently. Correlate the pipeline and tech stack and identify where and why revenue leakage occurs. The revops team must identify the successful aspects of the existing process, identify areas for removal, and suggest overall improvements based on the collected data. In simple terms, you first need to identify and eliminate what's not working and improvise the process with what's already working.
This is simply a continuation of the previous step. Correlate the existing processes with the updated buyer journey, based on the most recent mapping. Identify where the cracks are and how inefficiencies are occurring. Based on the identified data, implement new systems, processes, and essential technology to adapt to the ideal buyer journey.
Evaluate how much budget will be required to change the system and processes. Developing an ideal plan based on the previous model is crucial. But there is no point if that ideal plan requires a huge budget and time to implement across the company. Every company has certain limitations in terms of resources, technology, and budget. So, with the evaluation from the previous steps, the revops team should identify what parts of the existing system changes can yield fruitful results in terms of revenue. This will enable the team to establish the revops engine at the lowest possible cost through gradual iterations on a solid plan across different systems.
With all the data obtained from the previous steps, rank all the changes in terms of cost and effort needed to execute. Whatever the steps you take, it's essential to form alignment between the teams and fix the existing inefficiencies with the help of the most up-to-date automation tools. Then revops can form a roadmap for the other implementation steps based on the cost, effort, and impact order. This is how a revops team can ideally execute their implementation process in real-time and start seeing results in revenue growth.
The 2024’s top North Star metric is ‘Net revenue retention’ (NRR), and the revops team plays a major role in driving this metric by organizing the teams and technology. In previous years, revenue growth was often associated with funnel growth, rather than focusing on maintaining the existing customer base.
With huge shifts in terms of buyer’s behavior, AI technologies, and state-of-the-art methodologies and systems, it’s very hard to weave the right combination and align everything across different teams. Companies that care for their customers by aligning everything with the modern buyer's journey are going to win big. To execute this, it needs a long-term commitment to provide real value for the customer.
Revenue operations have now become a necessity for growing organizations to keep their marketing, sales, and customer success functions more effective. Revenue operations has established itself as a core system to handle multi-disciplinary functions such as data management, technical expertise, and finance, to meet the demands of the modern revenue model and buyers' expectations. Today, revenue operations play a crucial role in monitoring the core objective of "revenue" and orchestrating every team's process from the top down. If the company is small, it can be managed by top-level leadership. However, once the company reaches the growth stage with increased team size, having a revenue operations team becomes so vital today.
You might have seen the word ‘RevOps’ frequently in recent days on LinkedIn from companies and many leadership people.
It’s not a very new thing, but surely, it’s now much more organized than before and connected to the company’s prime functions and growth levers, and more importantly, with the 'modern sales'.
In recent years, amid the downturn and layoffs, companies have shifted their whole focus to one factor: 'revenue'’ and adopted strategies and methodologies that support their revenue growth.
Back then, RevOps was not so familiar with many organizations worldwide. Leadership focuses on marketing, sales, and customer success as the only go-to marketing engines.
But they’ve missed certain significant factors with these functions before. Each of them contributed their individual outcomes but connecting them all towards the end revenue outcome needs a lot of synergy, operational efficiency, and consistent iteration. And that’s where RevOps came into the picture.
RevOps has been the fastest-growing department across industries. Let’s scratch around from the basics, and we’ll cover roles and responsibilities, how it operates, and, more importantly, whether you should need revops for your organization or not—everything in this article.
Revops is a holistic strategic approach that is designed with the core notion of aligning marketing, sales, and customer success operations together with the customer life cycle to maximize revenue growth. It is done by unifying the people, processes, and automations to drive maximum operational efficiency towards the shared common objective, which is revenue growth’.
Each team has different goals and runs behind different processes, so it is very common to fall behind the synergy and work in silos. RevOps helps to break this siloed functioning, which impacts efficiency.
Overall, this function involves cross-collaboration, analysis, implementing the best tech stack for the teams, and using customer data points to uncover new revenue opportunities.
Traditionally, teams include the operations process as distinct entities, such as MarkOps and SalesOps, and operate in silos to drive efficiency. However, in today's trend, it is very important to keep a data-driven operational flow across the organization by connecting every team to one common goal at any time.
To drive the maximum revenue, there needs to be an individual or team with a holistic view from the top of every operational function going on. And that’s how RevOps was born—by consolidating these individual operations into a single operational framework. Not only does RevOps aim to enhance operational efficiency, but it also significantly influences customer satisfaction. A well-implemented CRM system should be the strong base for any successful revops function.
It's one powerful team (RevOps), which streamlines the entire company's effort in all functions toward revenue growth. Easier said than done. It’s not just about making MarkOps and SalesOps collaborate well. RevOps is a lot more than that. They are responsible for designing the processes, tech implementation, documenting, administration, and dataflow to keep everyone connected throughout the customer life cycle.
Some marketing and sales teams believe Revops is a threat. But in real life, it’s the other way around. With revops, they can deliver a lot more outcomes in a much shorter time if they are well strategized. It frees the departments from daily operational work, allowing them to foster deeper customer relationships.
A famous metaphor to understand the revops is “the revops team is responsible for building the tracks and ensuring the trains are running on time." Following are the core activities they perform to ensure coherence between different departments.
The primary cause of unsuccessful marketing and sales strategies in many companies is often attributed to disjointed strategies and poor team alignment, despite individual team members performing well. RevOps ensures strong collaboration. They ensure every operational facet is interconnected and contributes towards the revenue goal by not losing out on the harmony between teams at any time.
Everyone knows that a CRM is vital for any organization. But even more, a well-integrated CRM system provides a 360-degree view of the customer life cycle, and it helps to connect the datasets arriving from marketing, sales, and customer success to one central point. RevOps ensures this and establishes an integrated CRM system to deliver a holistic customer experience that will eventually drive and retain revenue.
Any organization that implements revenue operations functions must undergo a significant mental shift to adjust to a new internal operating model. Many organizations may find it challenging to adapt to this change, but it is a worthwhile investment, as it can enhance team synergy and establish a robust CRM system. This system will propel the organization to a new level of strategizing and decision-making, significantly impacting their customers and revenue potential.
The key revenue operations responsibilities are:
The head or director of revenue operations is a senior management member. This is simply the C-suite head of the RevOps team, and other operational heads such as MarkOps, SalesOps, and customer success should report to this person. This person is responsible for overviewing and devising the overall strategy to connect every team operationally across the company.
This role manages the team and delegates the necessary tasks to the members. The manager analyses if there are any revenue optimization opportunities available in the ongoing process and collaborates with leaders to kickstart any business initiatives. Apart from this, they work with all other teams to bridge operations and take care of data dashboards to communicate goals and progress with teams.
Associates are the ones who do multiple ground-level activities in revenue operations. They ensure up-to-date data by managing the CRM system to track it regularly and supporting the sales operations team by delivering insights regarding pipeline performance and other opportunities to improve. In addition to this, they help to distribute required reports, data dashboards, and other activities to support leadership in data-driven decision-making.
As RevOps is still an emerging concept across companies, it’s vital to get aware of the best practices under RevOps, execute them in the right way, and reap maximum benefits from them. Here, we are listing some best practices that you can also implement in your revops function.
Connect with every department head, regularly schedule performance assessments, and check the alignment between different teams. Regular assessment improves collaboration, and everyone will understand the expectations for adding their input and addressing challenges at the right time.
Executing the revisions within the company's culture requires significant changes to the existing processes that various departments follow. It's impractical to expect a drastic change in a short time with heavy targets for everyone. To avoid this overwhelming scenario, it’s better to start with small targets for every team and gradually push them towards progress.
‘Data’ is the oxygen of the revops function. It is obvious to track the correct data and keep it secure to execute the revops effectively. To stay on track, establish a well-connected tracking system and regularly audit data. Also, make sure to include only the necessary historical data in the process, as including unnecessary data could lead to issues.
Overview every team’s process and check the repetitive process going on with each team. Make a list of these processes and determine if automation is feasible without causing any additional issues. For instance, with the right tech-stack implementation, you can easily automate tasks like following up on leads in sales and certain email nurturing campaigns.
The ideal customer profile database is at the core of every marketing and sales activity. However, the catch is that it's not a one-time process. The buyers are evolving, and their expectations are so dynamic. Set a time interval, and regularly update the customer profile database based on your own research and industry trends.
Each department has its own challenges, and their interactions with customers differ. For example, a datapoint from an SDR call could be a game-changer for the marketing team, and a customer success person’s knowledge can help the whole sales team. Unless RevOps dives in and acts as an insight bridge between the teams, these insights will remain buried inside the teams. Collect it from every team and help teams incorporate it into their processes.
Revops strategy is an ideal plan to align and improve marketing, sales, and customer success processes to maximize revenue. An ideal buyer journey forms the crux of this strategy, around which all activities and processes revolve. The following are the steps to strategize the revops function, whether you are building it from scratch or strategizing the existing one.
In the first place, map your ideal buyer journey and identify all the ways that they can be more responsive and easier to communicate with us. One significant aspect is that you shouldn’t consider any conditions from your existing process. Start by creating a fresh buyer journey sketch and mapping all the activities from marketing, sales, and the customer success team to better serve your buyers.
Map your current pipeline by collecting data from your ongoing systems and processes. Analyze the existing technology stack that powers your existing processes concurrently. Correlate the pipeline and tech stack and identify where and why revenue leakage occurs. The revops team must identify the successful aspects of the existing process, identify areas for removal, and suggest overall improvements based on the collected data. In simple terms, you first need to identify and eliminate what's not working and improvise the process with what's already working.
This is simply a continuation of the previous step. Correlate the existing processes with the updated buyer journey, based on the most recent mapping. Identify where the cracks are and how inefficiencies are occurring. Based on the identified data, implement new systems, processes, and essential technology to adapt to the ideal buyer journey.
Evaluate how much budget will be required to change the system and processes. Developing an ideal plan based on the previous model is crucial. But there is no point if that ideal plan requires a huge budget and time to implement across the company. Every company has certain limitations in terms of resources, technology, and budget. So, with the evaluation from the previous steps, the revops team should identify what parts of the existing system changes can yield fruitful results in terms of revenue. This will enable the team to establish the revops engine at the lowest possible cost through gradual iterations on a solid plan across different systems.
With all the data obtained from the previous steps, rank all the changes in terms of cost and effort needed to execute. Whatever the steps you take, it's essential to form alignment between the teams and fix the existing inefficiencies with the help of the most up-to-date automation tools. Then revops can form a roadmap for the other implementation steps based on the cost, effort, and impact order. This is how a revops team can ideally execute their implementation process in real-time and start seeing results in revenue growth.
The 2024’s top North Star metric is ‘Net revenue retention’ (NRR), and the revops team plays a major role in driving this metric by organizing the teams and technology. In previous years, revenue growth was often associated with funnel growth, rather than focusing on maintaining the existing customer base.
With huge shifts in terms of buyer’s behavior, AI technologies, and state-of-the-art methodologies and systems, it’s very hard to weave the right combination and align everything across different teams. Companies that care for their customers by aligning everything with the modern buyer's journey are going to win big. To execute this, it needs a long-term commitment to provide real value for the customer.
Revenue operations have now become a necessity for growing organizations to keep their marketing, sales, and customer success functions more effective. Revenue operations has established itself as a core system to handle multi-disciplinary functions such as data management, technical expertise, and finance, to meet the demands of the modern revenue model and buyers' expectations. Today, revenue operations play a crucial role in monitoring the core objective of "revenue" and orchestrating every team's process from the top down. If the company is small, it can be managed by top-level leadership. However, once the company reaches the growth stage with increased team size, having a revenue operations team becomes so vital today.
