Business is all about maximizing one’s returns on the amount that’s been invested but very rarely does any business achieve a level of efficiency where all the teams involved in the development, marketing, and sales of the product or service work in tandem with each other at an optimal level. We know this as “silos”.
In today’s highly competitive world, where there’s always a couple of other companies offering the same service as you, it’s important that all the employees in your teamwork together towards the singular goal of maximizing revenue. This is the crux of what RevOps (Revenue Operations) entails.
In this article:
- What is RevOps?
- Where did the idea of RevOps come from?
- RevOps and revenue marketing process
- Things could go wrong, though – here’s how to avoid that
What is Revops?
As a business function whose sole aim is to maximize the revenue potential of any organization, Revenue Ops aligns and integrates sales, marketing, and customer management in a holistic manner to achieve peak productivity and returns on investment. This approach is to be applied across the organization, on all levels.
Shifting to this sort of approach takes time and effort – many companies are structured so that different teams do completely compartmentalized tasks where the product goes through stages of development that involve a lot of miscommunication and disconnect. To avoid this, RevOps may require restructuring several internal operations that form the company’s foundation.
Think of every employee in a business working as a part of one big team towards the singular goal of driving revenue growth – a powerhouse company culture that aims for and encourages creative and innovative thought processes across departments for profit generation.
In short, growth is accelerated, and profit is maximized when your whole company works as a single unit with one goal in mind. You may be thinking that such an ideal company seems like a utopian concept, but it’s a lot easier to set up than it sounds and has assured results. B2B companies have reported that alignment of teams using RevOps has led to a 100% to 200% increase in ROI from digital marketing and a 10% increase in lead acceptance.
Where did this idea come from?
Before we begin with restructuring and integrating various teams in your company, we must understand why a system like RevOps was needed to develop.
Rev Ops came into being when entrepreneurs began thinking of operationalizing revenue across their entire business. A RevOps team would be able to clear out the disconnect between departments within the same company so that each employee understands their task and the larger purpose they fulfil within the company. Wait, you may ask, isn’t that ideally how every business should be run?
It’s true that it is ideal for all businesses to be run in this manner, but it’s easier said than done. Before the digital revolution changed how businesses worked forever, an entrepreneur could work with a disjointed company and still make considerable profits with no loss made to the workers or themselves.
However, with more competition and innovative alternatives coming into the picture after industrialization, mass digitization, and globalization, the business landscape changed into a world where entrepreneurs had to fight tooth and nail to make their mark.
Marketing technology became central to the picture, as did the practice of digital marketing techniques. Customers began to demand increasingly personalized products that stood apart from the million other similar things they could buy off the internet.
This is why revenue marketing, a goal-oriented and integrated approach where there is constant feedback within the sales and marketing team that works as a whole, is relevant in today’s highly competitive world.
Public companies have reported that revenue ops allowed them to achieve 71% higher stock performance. A tighter alignment between the teams also led to a 15% to 20% internal customer satisfaction increase for tech companies as well, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group.
Okay, so where do we start with RevOps and Revenue Marketing?
Brace yourself – the road ahead is rocky. It will involve looking into every minuscule detail about how your company operates and assessing it objectively so that you can change it for the better. In a revenue marketing system, the sales and marketing team works together to perfect every step of this process. Data has shown that trying to implement RevOps without orienting it around marketing prevents companies from achieving their full potential.
Step 1: Evaluate and understand
To improve the customer journey, you need to understand the customer and your company better. Take time to account for all of your existing processes and juxtapose them with your buyer’s lifecycle. Once you find that there are gaps, try to see how you can fill them in. Focusing on customer experience alone can increase revenue by a minimum of 10%.
These gaps may be in terms of technology, your digital presence, or any other barrier that stays in the way of your potential buyer and your product. Once you understand exactly what your customer needs and how you can market it to them, it becomes easier for you to align teams and explain to them what you are trying to achieve as a company.
One way to go about this is the JTBD (Jobs to be Done) approach – some entrepreneurs call this framework a glorified to-do list, but it involves an in-depth understanding of your customer needs and how you can do the job for them. Locate the pain points that your product or service can get rid of, how you can make your product stand apart and above its competitors, and how you will get the customer to notice and invest in what you have to offer.
Once you have a good idea of all the jobs to be done, you will find it easier to align various teams together and explain to them what the company’s goals are.
Step 2: Align and define
Once you have a full-funnel view of how your business can operate in a streamlined manner, it becomes easier to align your resources and your employees with the overall goal, which is to maximize revenue.
Define these goals to your team and make sure they have access to a streamlined RevOps system where various components that go into marketing and sales – digital marketing, content generation, and publication, outbound/inbound sales, and customer management – all come together on a single platform. Make sure that your tech stack is audited and any redundancies are removed from your resource pool.
Step 3: Rebuild and restructure
For starters, you need to build a RevOps oriented dashboard that shows you and your team what you aim to achieve each week. There should be an overarching plan for customer acquisition, the generation of leads, and customer satisfaction. Restructure the inflow of information so that every employee has access to accurate and detailed data at all times.
Step 4: Incentivize and optimize
Make sure that you hold regular meetings to remind your RevOps team of the company’s growth and revenue goals. There should still be heads of marketing, sales, and service who work together and have a clear understanding of how each others’ teams are doing at any given point in time.
Create a year-long implementation plan through which your RevOps strategy can evolve and adapt based on the rate of business growth. When and if your team runs into a dead-end, make sure to brainstorm and figure out the most innovative way to get through the bottleneck situation each month together as a team. Use the RevOps dashboard that was created earlier to ensure that everyone is on track.
Things could go wrong with Revops & how to avoid this!
Every strategy comes with its risks, and in the case of a highly idealistic and holistic approach like revenue marketing and RevOps, here are two things that you must be sure of before you start with your project.
There should be an initiative from the top
For a large-scale operation like this to work, there needs to be a strong CEO at the helm of the project, which is as invested in achieving the revenue goals as the rest of the team. If there is an evident lack of initiative from the top-down for whatever reason – lack of ambition, knowledge, or conflict management skills – it will reflect detrimentally on the company’s growth. RevOps works best with a dedicated and informed leader.
The teams should collaborate effectively
If there are not enough team players in your business, especially at leadership positions within your sales and marketing team, it will be hard to encourage effective collaboration. If the team is not on board with the idea of working with other departments and sharing work, information, and credit, the cookie may crumble faster than you think. To avoid such trouble, a reliable Revenue Operations manager should oversee and encourage the gradual integration and a healthy coworking atmosphere within the company.
Final thoughts on RevOps
There’s no doubt that revenue marketing and RevOps are key to building a successful business – especially one where the employees aren’t alienated from one another but are collaborators who produce creative and innovative solutions. By ensuring that there is strong leadership and an effort to collaborate within the employees, revenue marketing and operations can generate revenue in a way that will catapult your business into success.
Looking for other ways to maximize the output of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams? Here are some articles to get you going:
- Learn about MEDDPICC – the new and improved version of the infamous MEDDIC sales framework.
- Find opportunities in the market with White Space Analysis.
- Track, measure, and increase profits with our LTV:CAC ratio guide.
