Think of all the people, processes, and platforms that you need to run your business. To efficiently produce results, all of those elements need to be aligned and working towards the same goal — generating revenue.
Of course, you can’t expect to attribute every minute you spend working back to revenue, but at the end of the day, revenue is the core outcome businesses use to measure success.
To align elements across your organization, concentrating on this core outcome is not only wise, it’s a necessity. Hence, the reason more and more companies are adopting revenue operations (RevOps) in their organization.
What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?
RevOps is the convergence of marketing, sales and services operations to drive accountability, efficiency, and adoption across platforms.
But, what does that really mean? 
Essentially, it is the backbone that helps your business run effectively. RevOps teams provide the organization, documentation and expertise your business needs to function.
For a clearer view, let’s break down the meaning of RevOps’ constituent parts: marketing operations, sales operations and services operations.
Marketing Operations
Marketing operations is everything that happens in your marketing automation and CRM platforms to enable the delivery of the right message at the right time to people who are interested in your products and services.
Marketing operations lives behind the scenes. For example, while marketing operations specialists aren’t drafting and sending emails, they’re making sure those emails are sent to the right person.
Sales Operations
Sales operations is everything that happens in your CRM and sales engagement platforms to enable your sales team to communicate effectively with clients and control their sales process.
Like marketing operations, it lives behind the scenes, supporting your sales team’s execution of strategy and objectives.
Services Operations
Services operations involve working with professional service teams, customer success teams, customer support teams and customer experience teams to make it as efficient as possible for those teams to create an outstanding customer experience. To do so, service operations specialists will support and amplify team capacity, set up and maintain infrastructure such as ticketing systems and knowledge bases, capture and report on metrics to guide decisions and help your team scale.
With these definitions in mind, it is clear that RevOps has a wide scope. It is designed to ensure proper delivery of messages and offerings to provide an excellent experience throughout both the buyer and customer journeys.
The Benefits of Revenue Operations
You’re using a plethora of technology across your company. Software like marketing automation platforms (MAPs), sales engagement platforms (SEPs), customer relationship management (CRM) tools and content management systems (CMSs) are just a handful of the core elements for companies to organize their front-end operations. Not to mention the back-end platforms like communication applications, project management software, accounting programs and a host of other products are also necessary or provide key benefits to businesses.
Ultimately, your tech-stack needs to be interconnected, and there should be a document or process outlined for each tool. That way everyone within your organization knows how everything is intended to be used, how platforms are supposed to work together and what’s expected when certain situations arise. Documentation of your platforms is an integral part of RevOps.
Such documentation provides an excellent opportunity for training and adoption as well. Consider a scenario where a new hire is joining your team. If you have every process within your organization documented along with how platforms are supposed to work together, it will make each hire’s onboarding much easier for them and provide you with a faster time-to-value for every individual that joins your team.
With everything clearly outlined, there’s less room for misinterpretation around the intended process. They can simply reference the documentation whenever they need it.
Similar scenarios also play out every time someone transitions to a new role within your company or when you adopt a new process or platform. No matter the situation, detailed documentation makes everything more streamlined and efficient.
Besides documentation, RevOps teams also work with the software within your organization to ensure integrations are set up according to the documented process.
If individuals within your organization need to do reporting or share accurate information across platforms, properly setting up systems is vital. Without the logical documentation and secure integrations good RevOps provides, your business could fall into chaos.
If no details are provided on best practices, everyone could be pulling their own data, copying information into spreadsheets and making interpretations however they see fit. RevOps, on the other hand, provides consistency and ensures data integrity.
RevOps teams should also set up a single source of truth within their respective organizations. Your single source of truth is the platform where the most reliable data lives in your organization. For most companies, as it relates to revenue operations, this will be their CRM. This means that any additional systems that capture data, like your MAP or SEP, need to integrate with and update records in your CRM accordingly.
How RevOps Can Help You Grow
Have you ever wanted to know who your most valuable customers are and why they’re your most valuable customers?
On the surface, the answer to that question may seem straightforward. You probably have a reasonable idea of which customer or customers provide your company with the greatest financial benefit, but it’s wise to dig into the data. That way, you can truly determine which types of customers create the most mutual value for both you and them.
To actually determine how much value you’re giving and receiving, you need a lot of data. There are a number of questions you could ask to get more context. First, ask yourself how your customers became customers:
- What was their first interaction with your brand?
- What type of content did they interact with?
- How many offers did they interact with before closing?
- What was the last offer or piece of content that they interacted with before closing?
Also, evaluate how your sales process went with individual customers:
- What problems did they originally identify that they wanted to solve?
- What features of your product or service were they most excited about?
- Did you clearly communicate expectations for the offerings you provide?
- What was the customer’s transition from sales to onboarding like?
From there, construct a profile of each customer:
- What industry are they in?
- How many people work for their company?
- How long have they worked with your business?
- Which of your products or services do they use?
- How do they compare to your ICP?
Next, look at their deals:
- Is this their first contract with your company?
- What is their current deal size? What is their average deal size?
- Have they increased the amount they leverage your product or services over time?
- Have they increased their spend with your company over time?
- What is their customer lifetime value?
Then, you should consider if they are having problems with your offering or if you are effectively delivering your offering:
- Do they submit service tickets on a regular basis?
- What is their net promoter score (NPS)?
- Have they given your company positive reviews?
- Are they continually asking the same questions or presenting the same problems?
- Are you concerned they could churn? What is your churn rate?
Overall, for a comprehensive view of which customers are most valuable for your company and why, these are just some questions you could answer. It’s certainly not necessary to evaluate all of these areas at once, but it’s reasonable to assume you will want to answer most of these questions at some point.
Now, think about all the people, processes, and platforms you would need to prompt, evaluate and access in order to answer these questions. For example, let’s examine a simple question like, “what content is most impactful during the buyer’s journey?” The answer involves referencing data related to the content a prospect engaged with up until the point when they became a customer. This requires shared information between your CMS, MAP and CRM.
If you didn’t have any organizational systems, documentation, support or integrations between systems set up within your company, it would basically be impossible to make any progress. That is why RevOps is so important.
Key Takeaway
At the end of the day, you want to run your business in the most efficient way possible. In part, that involves the alignment and adoption of your tech stack across your entire company.
However, for that to occur, someone at your company needs to be owning and prioritizing that responsibility.
You need proper documentation and proper processes. You need flexible, proactive individuals on a team that works across your company. You need RevOps.
RevOps can help make your business more unified and help you make better, data-informed decisions. From there, RevOps will continue to aid your efforts, ultimately positively impacting the customer experience and your revenue generation.
