Even though they aren’t the ones closing deals or signing contracts, marketers play a vital role in generating revenue and driving sustainable company growth.
Your marketing campaigns attract, engage and delight new leads and long-time customers across various channels. Each campaign’s performance is at least partially measured by the eventual revenue it helps to generate.
What’s more, each marketing touch point contributes to your customers’ experiences. Your marketing team must work closely with sales and services to deliver consistent experiences, conduct seamless handoffs and drive value across the funnel — from a lead’s first interaction with your brand to their 100th day as a customer.
This level of cross-functional alignment is integral to revenue generation and a strategic goal for organizations across industries and markets. Even so, keeping marketing, sales and service teams on the same page day-in and day-out can be a formidable undertaking.
Enter: RevOps
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve probably heard the buzz around revenue operations (RevOps), especially if you’ve researched or recently implemented a CRM platform, data migration project or back-end integration.
RevOps might sound highly technical and partially sequestered from marketers’ day-to-day activities. However, its primary focus is to unite marketing, sales and service teams, which means it directly impacts your success as a marketer and allows your entire organization to focus on consistent, customer-centric revenue generation activities.
Contextualizing RevOps in the World of Marketing
Every marketer can relate to the frustration of developing an exciting new content offer or promotion, only to find that it doesn’t accurately reflect your sales teams’ goals or how they present solutions to potential customers.
Disjointed marketing and sales efforts result in poor-fit leads, rocky handoffs and, most notably, confusing experiences for customers. The potential for miscommunication only multiplies when a sales rep passes off new customers to an uninformed services department.
RevOps brings order to the complexities of B2B revenue generation by aligning your organization’s processes, people and platforms around integrated data.
It’s not limited to marketing, sales or services. Instead, RevOps empowers all three teams with systems and processes that increase cross-functional visibility and accelerate revenue-generating activities.
You shouldn’t base your strategic marketing efforts on industry trends or instincts alone. Instead, use RevOps to learn more about your audience, share your insights with other departments and inform future marketing activities.
How RevOps Empowers Marketers
It Helps Marketers Get to Know Their Audience
RevOps ensures data in your CRM, including valuable insights into your pipeline and customers, is accessible and actionable. What’s more, it also helps marketers and other teams collect valuable customer data across channels.
Each time you embed a form on your website, you have a chance to learn more about your target audience, from their basic contact information to qualification details about their organization.
Many RevOps professionals use progressive fields on forms to help marketers build a complete picture of their leads. These forms allow you to present leads with different questions each time they complete a lead generation form. That way, you can capture valuable contact details without asking people too many questions the first time they visit your site.
First-time site visitors will be asked to complete basic form fields, like those asking for their email address, phone number and company name. The next time they visit your site, your CMS reidentifies them based on their email and presents them with new, more in-depth form fields.
For example, you might use progressive fields on forms to ask leads who’ve recently downloaded a content offer about their pain points or goals when they return to your site to download a second offer.
You can then use your findings to target these leads more effectively and hand off detailed documentation to your sales team when they’re ready to move down the funnel.
Progressive fields on forms allow you to easily capture high-value information about leads, but they’re just one of the many data sources you can access through your CRM.
You can also lean into detailed contact records and data libraries to answer critical questions about your leads, including:
- Where did the majority of your leads originate?
- How did they first land on your website?
- Which pieces of content did they find most valuable?
You can track the ROI of your campaigns with similar data points and follow marketing motions to and through “closed deal” by using CRM data to answer:
- Which products or solutions did these leads end up purchasing?
- How did they rate their overall experience with your organization?
- What feedback have they provided to service or customer success teams?
It Enables Scalable Personalization
If you’re like most marketers, you understand the implicit value of personalization. Every message you share should speak directly to its recipient. It should make them feel like your company truly values and understands their business and its unique needs.
However, even the most efficient, hardworking marketing teams can’t scale their personalization efforts independently. Automation is a powerful, scalable way to reach your audience how, when and where they expect without working around the clock or doubling your headcount.
RevOps can help you automate various marketing tasks right from your CRM. Use automation to nurture leads with perfectly timed emails or other forms of communication and scale your marketing communications with ease.
By allowing you to integrate disparate systems, RevOps gives marketers previously unavailable insight into highly relevant customer activity. For example, by tying ERP and eCommerce tools to HubSpot, you can pull reports on customers who have recently purchased a specific item. From there, marketing and sales teams can act on that data to coordinate outreach, organize campaigns and solve for every customer’s unique needs.
Here are a few ways to leverage automation in your marketing efforts:
- Email Workflows – Nurture leads down the funnel and present them with relevant content based on their most recent interaction with your brand.
- Lead Scoring – Send leads to the next stage in a workflow, a new contact list or your sales team as soon as they meet predefined lead scoring criteria.
- Chatbots – Enable convenient self-service with AI-powered chatbots that automatically route users to your knowledge base, help desk or live support team.
Some marketers are hesitant to automate, especially since a generic, robotic-sounding message is a surefire way to turn leads away from your brand. The good news is, an effective RevOps strategy enables you to enjoy all the benefits of automation without losing control of your brand’s voice or sacrificing personalization features.
It Brings Alignment to Teams and Technology
Technology lies at the heart of most RevOps projects, whether an organization is migrating to a new CRM, setting up third-party integrations or simply exploring ways to consolidate their tech stack.
RevOps unifies your tech stack and your teams simultaneously, breaking down silos and aligning everyone around a single source of data truth.
However, even the most impressive tech stack won’t effectively support revenue generation if marketing, sales and service teams don’t leverage the tools within it. On the flip side, even the most impressive internal teams can’t collaborate effectively if they each operate on their own isolated platforms and have no way to connect them.
To achieve true alignment, your organization needs reliable, integrated platforms and repeatable, scalable processes that complement one another and support their end users. RevOps ensures every solution in your tech stack — like a CRM or ecommerce platform — performs well on its own and that all of your solutions work well together, too.
RevOps can design, deploy and manage integrations to bring all of your customer and operations data together under one roof without compromising quality or accessibility. That way, you use that data to deliver consistent customer experiences through your marketing efforts and share high-value insights with your sales and service teammates behind the scenes.
The Takeaway
Marketing interactions often define users’ first impression of your brand. However, even the most engaging, on-brand efforts will fall flat if they don’t align with sales strategies or if service delivery doesn’t deliver on customers’ expectations.
Fortunately, RevOps offers a scalable, tech-enabled way to align people, platforms and processes around the same goals and data sets. Some marketers might think RevOps is just a technical buzzword. In reality, RevOps presents marketers and other revenue-focused teams with accelerated growth opportunities. It enables everyone to act on data and accelerate revenue performance by uniting, aligning and scaling new and existing revenue streams.
Your organization’s investment in RevOps shouldn’t be tied to a set list of deliverables or one-time implementation. Instead, you should develop a strategy that’s built on cross-functional alignment and ongoing technology integration across your organization.
