The emergence of RevOps is no surprise to people. Revenue roles are increasing in the world of work. RevOps isn’t some new phenomenon that fell from the sky. RevOps has always existed in some regard, just without the formal title.
Revenue operations (RevOps) is the operating model for driving efficient, predictable revenue. RevOps is not a function but rather a way to better align the organization. The combining and aligning of sales and revenue goals throughout marketing, sales, and success teams within a business. By delivering visibility across the entire revenue team and across the customer lifecycle, a business is able to optimize its sales and marketing funnel, collect more high-quality leads, and drive revenue growth.
RevOps isn’t some new phenomenon that fell from the sky. RevOps has always existed in some regard, just without the formal title. Now, it’s becoming one of the fastest-growing job titles among SaaS and B2B companies.
Director of Revenue Operations, Revenue Analyst, Chief Revenue Officer, and so on are among the fastest-growing job titles on LinkedIn at 59,000+ jobs and counting.
This increase in revenue positions is spearheaded by a new way to revenue known as RevOps.
Building a revenue team to concentrate on the revenue engine has become a necessity, explaining why this framework has become growingly popular.
The primary goal is to build an alignment strategy that drives revenue. Challenging? Yes. Achievable? Of course.
RevOps is a go-to marketing structure for aligning sales, marketing, and customer successes into a high-performing revenue engine for B2B companies.
This is done by merging sales ops, marketing ops, and success ops into one strategic team focused on maximizing revenue and growth across the entire revenue chain.
Revenue becomes more predictable and business growth is accelerated when team alignment breaks the barriers between siloed departments.
Before getting the revenue engine started, organizations must unify the processes generating their company’s top line of success.
Alignment is achieved by introducing the ultimate goal to everyone involved with the revenue engine. According to Clari, focusing on the following factors will unify a company's top line of success:
Management expert Ken Blanchard stated that teams fail roughly 60 percent of the time. Chemistry in work environments is just as important as chemistry on the football field.
RevOps is meant to create a stream of chemistry and ensure it is maintained throughout a company’s revenue operations. Aligning teams around one single business view ensures that every person has the same goal in mind.
Every person involved in the top line must understand the business view and all revenue targets that the company aims to meet when operations commence.
Businesses tend to fall into the habit of storing data in different places within their tech stack. This may include storing data in a CRM, an automation tool, spreadsheets, or even ignoring the data storing process.
It doesn’t have to be that way with Revenue Operations in charge. Connecting business and activity data is important, eliminating the time-wasting habit of unorganized data.
RevOps is an ultimate solution to disconnected data that makes up a tech stack, resolving problematic issues such as siloed team structures, time-wasting when comparing data, and what Clari calls, a lone wolf mentality.
Having documented, ingrained processes that every team can follow is important in RevOps. Processes ensure and increase operational efficiency throughout a company.
This doesn’t mean that teams must throw out the window every process that is implemented thus far. Having processes that increase operational efficiency means processes that each aligned team can follow to ensure that people are on the same page.
Clari mentions a few examples of processes they refer to as integrated cadences that include sales 1:1s, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and forecast calls.
Processes will ensure internal operations stay consistent while aligning with the main business view of a company.
As I mentioned above, the primary goal of RevOps is to drive revenue. How do you drive and increase revenue?
Teams close more deals, marketing drives pipeline growth, and fewer customers are lost while more customer successes are achieved and reported.
On another note, there are a handful of key metrics that are responsible for the successful performance of Revenue Operations. Below are a few examples of key metrics Clari recognizes are vital components that drive revenue:
The sales cycle time is important for any company closing deals measuring the amount of time from the first touchpoint with a prospect to closing the deal.
A sales cycle time is important because it introduces predictability into an organization’s sales forecasting and the process of estimating future sales.
Companies make informed, comfortable business decisions while predicting both short-term and long-term performance. The sales cycle time of a company is a KPI that works with tracking their sales pipeline and revenue growth—the shorter the sales cycle time, the more revenue a company is generating.
Another key metric accountable for Revenue Operations is win rates. Win rates tell a company the number of opportunities that they won—it is important to note that it is those opportunities that make it to the proposal stage.
This is a commonly used success metric for sales teams, measuring the efficiency of sales teams, and a crucial insight into a company’s sales process.
It is important to Revenue Operations because teams measure their performance through benchmarking, forecasting, and their pipeline, allowing them to identify weak links and turn around underperforming processes.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that measures customer success in RevOps. CLV is a way to measure how valuable a customer is to a company across the whole relationship.
Qualtrics found that it costs less to keep existing customers than it costs to find and acquire new customers. Increasing the value of a company’s current customers is a way to drive growth and more revenue in the long run.
As previously mentioned, customer success is a crucial component in RevOps that must also play a key part in generating revenue.
This includes understanding the customer experience of a company’s audience as well as measuring every ounce of feedback at every possible touchpoint. When a company understands its key drivers of CLV, then it can adjust or continue its processes to align with the RevOps framework.
Sales cycle time, win rates, and CLV are only a few of the bunch of metrics that Revenue Operations is accountable for. Stay tuned for a future blog post where we will analyze more metrics aligned with the RevOps framework.
Organizations that align their go-to-market functions outperform those that refuse to align their functions.
Clari reports that public companies with RevOps saw 71 percent higher stock performance compared to their competitors who have yet to adopt the RevOps framework. SiriusDecisions found that on average aligned companies see a growth rate of 19 percent and a 15 percent increase of more profits.
While RevOps organizations are enjoying their growth, Chief Revenue Officer positions are also increasing in many B2B companies. This is due to the alignment being an enormous step forward to siloed departments that simply don’t perform when they act from an individualistic point of view.
CROs are at the helm of these operations driving alignment not only promotes better collaboration and predictable business growth but it keeps every team honed in on their objective to drive revenue growth.
When you have a strong revenue operations team, you operate like a well-oiled machine. This has a positive domino effect—consistent tech stacks, clear expectations from customers, happier customers, more sales, and predictable growth.
Let’s go through each one.
A tech stack is a set of different tools and platforms to automate your job. With RevOps, since different teams are united, they can use the same tech stack. Tech stacks are more fluid throughout the teams, so the sales team knows how a customer was marketed to, and the success team knows what customers were sold on. Everyone can refer to different platforms within their synchronous tech stacks.
Oftentimes, different departments within a company don’t communicate fluidly. Marketers may say one thing while sales reps outreach to customers saying something contradictory. This is not the case with RevOps. Everyone is on the same page and communication is consistent. When RevOps are put in place properly, there are clear expectations from customers. Which brings me to my next point…
When there are clear expectations, customers are happier. When different departments are working harmoniously with one another, they are more attuned to a customer’s needs. This will undoubtedly make for happier customers because they feel that their needs are heard throughout the company.
Happy customers are a strong indicator of customer outcomes. Customer outcomes are the successes your customers are having because your product is having an impact on their business and in turn, providing revenue.
Revenue operations turn the sales funnel into a well-oiled machine, getting more customers to convert. Sales operations (which we will dive into a bit) is a siloed process. With RevOps, sales members are not the whole machine, they make up one part. When things go wrong, it’s easier to isolate the issue at the source and make quick fixes. When things run smoothly, customers recognize it and trust the company with their money, ultimately increasing sales and revenue.
With a data-driven, fluid machine, you can predict growth and revenue far easier than before. RevOps results in predictable growth through consistent, accurate measurement, and/or new strategies. Furthermore, since RevOps is a more synchronous process, teams can respond to market changes more efficiently, therefore resulting in predictable growth even in unpredictable situations.
Now that teams are aligned via RevOps, your business needs to show the value of its products through optimized pricing. With optimized pricing, your team will understand who aligns with certain pricing tiers and how to sell that tier to potential customers.
We believe in a value-based pricing strategy here at ProfitWell, which is pricing product based on what targeted customers believe it’s worth. Perceived product value increases when customers see and feel the company working toward one common goal, which is accomplished with RevOps.
Let’s not confuse SalesOps with RevOps. While they may look and seem somewhat similar, they are very different. I’ll explain.
SalesOps brings a system to selling. It refers to the unit, role, activities, and processes that support a sales team. SalesOps members handle a range of tactical and strategic responsibilities, such as compensation/incentive plans, territory structuring and alignment, lead management, process optimization, sales technology, et al.
With SalesOps, the leaders enable sales reps to focus more on selling in order to drive better results. As you can see, SalesOps is a siloed process when compared to RevOps because it is strictly focused on sales process and converting a customer.
On the other hand, RevOps is more inclusive because you bring in members from sales, customer success, and marketing. Oftentimes, siloed operations cause small issues to spin out of control because they don’t have a clear view of how various systems work harmoniously. When different operations work together, they have a better grip on why an issue surfaced and how to resolve it.
It’s important to note—RevOps is intentionally separated from the teams they serve and RevOps teams report to an organization’s senior leadership. For instance, a RevOps marketer wouldn’t report to the company’s CMO; they would report to the CRO, or whoever other RevOps members are reporting to.
Revenue operations isn’t just about making a sale, it’s also about keeping those customers you worked so hard for. RevOps is as much a retention-based operation as a sales-based operation. Since customer success is involved throughout the entire process, customer success team members know the customers extremely well. This builds rapport and trust with customers, therefore enticing them to stay with your product.
It’ll take some adjusting for all parties involved once a RevOps team is in place. To make the transition go smoother, here are four ways you can optimize your RevOps.
You need to be looking into certain metrics and asking the right questions. How long are customers staying on board? How often are they upgrading or downgrading? Which customers have the highest MRR, and which have the highest churn rates. We understand the SaaS world is flooded with metrics, making it hard to know where to start.
Don’t pin the sales team against the marketing, or vice versa. Instead, align incentives for the whole team. The marketing team must bring leads to the sales team. The Sales team must convert good potential customers. The Customer Success team must retain them. Since RevOps works to align different teams, you can sharpen that alignment by mapping out clear incentives.
What tech can Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success use to succeed? RevOps means these teams are relying on the same tech stack. You may have to cut back on tools/platforms that not everyone on RevOps has a use for. Or, you may need to add additional platforms in order to have everyone’s needs met. Either way, having everyone on board with the same tech stack will streamline your operations.
The CRO is the captain of this ship. It is their job to get the team going. The CRO needs to be clear about the previous three points I just made because they are the ones overseeing the process. The CRO needs to also act as a gatekeeper ensuring everyone is working toward the same common outcome.
RevOps is a centralized function that helps recognize and align revenue from Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. SaaS growth is no longer a funnel—it’s a flywheel. Adding RevOps to an organization makes growth even more fluid.
If you’re looking to add RevOps to your company, it requires aligning people from the following positions:
Everyone on these teams works in concert with one another. For instance, customer success is involved before a sale is made.
Finally, once you roll out RevOps, you may notice an influx of positive outcomes. A few direct ones we can almost guarantee you’ll experience are (1) consistent tech stacks (2) clear expectations from customers (3) happier customers (4) more sales and more revenue and (5) predictable growth.
The role of RevOps is to help B2B companies maximize their revenue potential. A well-established RevOps workflow helps demolish silos between departments to align them all - customer service, marketing, and salespeople. In that way, revenue operations is refining customer journey to ensure that potential leads slide down the funnel and become long-term customers.
Some of the biggest benefits of revenue ops include forecasting business growth, driving revenue, and adapting to changes in the market as you drive growth.
A revenue operations manager, also called the VP of Business Operations, is responsible for managing the team responsible for executing business strategy and fulfilling the set OKRs.
Revenue operations focuses on multiple functions in the company, from marketing, sales, and customer service to finance. Sales operations, on the other hand, focuses solely on sales enablement.
As our team continues to dive into the topic of Revenue Operations, be sure to subscribe to the MapleSage Blog.
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