As businesses work to scale sustainably, demand for RevOps (revenue operations) solutions is growing across the board. But as leaders seek out those operational solutions, there can be a lack of clarity around what’s actually needed to drive growth.
RevOps has been described as everything from a philosophy to a way of life to merely a way to align your tech stack. The reality is that it falls somewhere in between. It’s more than just managing your software stack, but it also isn’t a giant abstract ideology.
“Think about RevOps as a methodology around driving efficiency and getting the most value out of both of your people and your technology,” says Director of Services Al Moore. “Your technology should be designed to be in service of your people. More than just marketing and sales operational alignment, RevOps is also about people empowerment and getting the most from the overall investment you’re making in your business.”
“It begins with setting a strong operational foundation based on common revenue goals, as well as the associated marketing and sales processes to get there. And, it continues with ongoing integrations, data insights and process improvements to help you get the most value out of your staff and understand your customers better,” Al continues.
The Evolving Mentality of RevOps
One of the primary factors behind why RevOps is so frequently misconstrued as just technology is because that’s how people tend to perceive its components: marketing ops, sales ops and service ops.
These three operational areas used to exist separately from each other, often in a silo. However, in recent years there’s been a shift, and companies have started to realize how cross-functional alignment in terms of processes and technology can lead to a better business.
“If you’re really serious about RevOps, then you’re looking at it through the lens of data integrity and using data to better enable your people and your overall business,” Al says. “That means viewing it through all of those workstreams: the marketing operations, the service operations, the sales operations, and look at it as an ongoing investment as those three stitch into your overall business.”
When you stitch them together, you’re viewing your entire business in a way that leads to the sum being equal to more than the individual parts. RevOps doesn’t just break down the barriers between departments, it unifies everything in a seamless manner that leads to cohesive buyer and customer journeys.
The goal of a RevOps project shouldn’t be just to integrate platforms or create a reporting platform; it should be to complete those tactics in order to improve the overall company functioning.
“It has to be part of an overall cultural shift of looking at your data from a holistic lens and going from data reporting to actual data insights,” Al says. “The reporting should be just the beginning because you also want to be driving widespread belief across your organization in what this reporting will enable you to do and have an ongoing investment into iterating and improving the overall workflow around data.”
Real operational improvements occur when you switch from solving for an acute pain point to solve for the overall lifecycle. How will these operational efforts improve lead routing, funnel progression and/or customer success?
“The key is that you’re not looking at it from the lens of ‘I need some technical people to help me de-dupe my CRM, install an integration and do a migration,” Al says. “It needs to be more about asking the right questions and investing in your internal team in a way where you’re looking at it from ‘What happens after we do the migration?’ What happens after we de-dupe the records? What happens after we do the implementation? How can we design systems and processes that allow us to act on this data and accelerate revenue performance?’”
The Takeaway
As operational technologies continue to improve, revenue operations are rapidly emerging as an essential driver of effective growth strategy, with the potential to unite, align and scale both new and existing revenue streams.
RevOps success at scale depends on a comprehensive investment in process and technology alignment across the business and a commitment to creating data integrity to drive unified customer experiences.
Viewing RevOps as a “project” or a set of deliverables focused on one particular area, such as new business acquisition or reporting, will significantly limit your potential for long-term success.
Success begins with foundational systems alignment and data cleanliness but should extend to an ongoing process of analysis, automation, technology integration and process alignment across the entire customer lifecycle.
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