Revenue Operations (often called RevOps) is a strategy of aligning an organization’s sales, marketing, and customer service departments, increasing efficiency and breaking down silos to maximize revenue. In today’s highly competitive market, RevOps has become critical to revenue generation and growth. To successfully implement a RevOps strategy, however, it’s important to begin with some foundational steps to set your company up for success.
1. Define your revenue goals and metrics.
First, identify your organization's revenue goals and the metrics you will use to measure success. The metrics you use could include, for example,
- Revenue growth rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Customer acquisition costs
- Sales cycle length
Establishing goals and metrics up front allows you to track progress towards revenue targets and inform data-driven decisions.
Each department should have goals as well. The marketing team, for instance, may aim to increase new leads by 20% over the next quarter, and the sales team might have a goal of shortening the sales cycle length by 15% by year’s end. By defining specific, time-bound goals, you can focus business efforts on achieving your top priorities.
2. Understand your systems and how they communicate.
To develop a successful RevOps strategy, you need a deep understanding of your organization’s internal systems and how your various platforms, such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and sales enablement, communicate (if they do at all). Audit the data within the platforms you are actively using, and integrate systems that influence like data or impact processes further down the sales pipeline. In this way, you can streamline processes and provide multiple teams with access to a unified source of real-time data.
A centralized system can help teams that are ordinarily disconnected collaborate more efficiently, reduce data-entry errors, and provide a seamless customer experience. Prioritize integration between your marketing and sales teams. By connecting your marketing automation platform with your CRM, you enable the marketing team to ensure they’re sharing the right leads with the sales team at the right time, reducing the number of unqualified leads passed to sales and saving valuable time and resources.
3. Establish a culture of collaboration.
A successful RevOps strategy requires a dedication to collaboration among your sales, marketing, and customer service teams. By creating a shared vision across departments, you can align teams toward common goals, incentivizing them to work together for their mutual benefit. For example, if a customer complains that your product doesn’t meet their expectations, the customer service team should share that feedback with the sales and marketing teams. This collaboration allows all teams to improve customer satisfaction. In this case, the company may need to ensure sales reps are accurately communicating product features and the marketing team is releasing content that clearly communicates key product details.
4. Focus on the customer experience.
While RevOps is highly focused on your organization’s internal processes, it’s important to not lose sight of the customer experience. Be sure to weigh the pros and cons of any alteration in your process and consider how it could affect the customer experience before moving forward. For example, the marketing-to-sales lead handoff is a highly crucial process, and many organizations tend to over automate it. While automation can be a great way to ensure the sales team is notified of highly qualified leads, over-reliance on automation could bog your sales team down with unqualified leads, encouraging them to eagerly reach out to prospects who weren’t ready to engage. This not only wastes valuable time but also can sour potential customers on your company.
5. Embrace data-driven decision making.
RevOps is all about data. Collecting and analyzing valuable data related to your revenue growth goals is essential to making informed decisions and identifying efforts that are fueling success. By unifying data from various platforms, you can identify patterns across departments and use these insights to improve your processes. To keep your departments running efficiently, however, carefully select the data you will share with each team to ensure it’s valuable for their processes and decision-making. For example, it’s useful for marketing teams to know when they’ve sent leads to sales that weren’t yet qualified; however, they don’t necessarily need a detailed report of all the sales data that’s monitored.
Get started with RevOps!
RevOps can help your company gain a competitive edge by encouraging a culture of collaboration. By aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service teams toward common goals, you set the stage for revenue growth. Defining revenue goals, understanding and integrating platforms, and improving internal processes to provide exceptional customer experiences will help your organization develop a RevOps strategy that drives results. To learn more tips for optimizing your sales pipeline, subscribe to the Blue Frog blog.
