Revenue Operations (RevOps) refers to the integration of sales, marketing, and customer success operations throughout the whole customer life cycle. Its purpose is to promote growth through operational efficiency and hold all teams accountable for revenue. This comprehensive strategy is intended to break through departmental boundaries.
The way businesses think about their revenue stream is changing dramatically. Accountability, predictability, and transparency are more important than ever, from the executives to the frontlines. This is heavily influenced by the way buyers purchase items nowadays. Consumers are now doing their own research long before a salesman contacts them and before they decide on purchasing an item.
The objective of putting together a RevOps team is to have everyone onboard working towards one goal: increasing the chances that the business will generate more income. When each department is required to evaluate and monitor metrics in addition to its targets, it may result in misaligned corporate goals, misunderstanding, or blame-shifting during strategy sessions. When it comes down to it, one of the most critical elements that propel successful businesses forward is effective communication. Having a RevOps team will help in eliminating these challenges so the business can focus its energy on more important matters, one of which is revenue generation.
Benefits of Having a RevOps Team
Before you begin building your revenue operations team, you must be curious as to what they can bring to the table. Well, a RevOps team’s contribution can be seen beyond the business’s revenue. Its presence can also bring the following benefits.
1. Aligned Vision
At its foundation, RevOps is intended to unite your team around a single vision. Your team determines what that goal is, whether it's a profit target, a certain quantity of potential clients in a given time frame, or an optional shift in which you sell and keep more high-value clients. This clarifies your team's goals and drives them to collaborate to produce the answers that will move you toward your vision. When your whole team is working towards the same goals, there's little doubt about what they should prioritize. This way, they will all be working towards unified success.
2. Effective Use of Tools & Technology
Your company is probably investing already in technologies and products that they are yet to use to their fullest potential. Before acquiring another tool, RevOps can step in and educate the rest on how to make the most of the ones they already have. Furthermore, as your team applies RevOps, the technologies you're already utilizing will begin to gather information more efficiently and produce data more effectively.
3. Seamless Process
RevOps helps to streamline team communication, eliminate conflict, and enable more effective cooperation between departments. This enables staff to make more robust decisions and provide better service to clients. The quicker your people break down barriers in the sales process, the more focused they can be on closing sales, ultimately leading to more income for the business.
4. Accurate Data and Forecasts
RevOps cleans up confusing data easily, allowing you to make data-driven decisions with confidence. It assists you in determining what data needs more focus and allows you to remove irrelevant and inappropriate ones that will not serve any purpose. With clean data, the team can have a clearer notion of how they could make sense of the data in such a way that could help them deliver more sales. The team can thus begin to make substantial improvements to the business, especially now that you can make data-driven choices.
5. Better Overall Experience
Having a RevOps team makes your accomplishments more evident. It's clearer where the company is looking to go with its strategy, and it thus becomes more apparent to them what's getting in their way. With a clearer vision, you will have the perfect opportunity to work together to overcome those challenges. Not only does this produce the ideal setting for progress, but it also generates a pleasant, productive, and reliable system that develops a productive team. Because everyone's efforts are accounted for, the collaborative atmosphere reduces conflict, and the team members are much more encouraged to perform better.
Ideal Structure of a RevOps Team
It's critical to evaluate your company's needs while determining the appropriate RevOps team structure for you. Depending on the existing structure of your business, revenue operations will include any department or job that influences the current revenue generation. As a result, your RevOps team may appear different from that of a smaller or larger business than yours, or those from a different sector.
Although team structure differs from company to company, some teams are common to all and could apply generally to any type of company. These are the people who ensure synchronization and alignment in your organization, making their functions vital.
Operations Management
The operations management team controls resources to guarantee that all profit and front-facing activities meet the demands of your organization. This team works at the micro and macro levels of the company. This also includes handling the marketing and sales operations. Eventually, you can even separate the ops management team into specializations.
Insights Team
This team handles the data gathered through different channels and processes them. The processed data will then be used in the company’s decision-making process. The roles for this team may include a database developer, a data scientist, and a business analyst. They are expected to handle data access, quality, and management, including operational and strategic insights.
Tech Enablement
As you may be aware, sales enablement is concerned with enabling a sales force to sell more efficiently and at a faster rate. The enablement team of RevOps applies enablement concepts to customer and marketing success. Each effort has a cascading effect on your whole firm, so you'll notice salespeople performing more successfully throughout your enterprise very fast.
Tools
As the name suggests, the tools team is responsible for managing the software tools. They are in charge of ensuring its functionalities, as well as recommending upgrades whenever possible. The team also conducts tech stack evaluation and system administration. These are your tech people.
Five Steps to Build Your RevOps Team
Efficient revenue operations require the alignment of marketing and sales as well as other customer-facing departments such as support and finance. Despite this, RevOps managers sometimes ignore other important revenue generation aspects such as marketing in assembling a revenue operations team. Revenue operations are focused on meeting sales targets. As a result, it is natural to place a significant emphasis on sales. However, marketing is critical for propelling the pipeline's early phases. As a result, marketing ops should be regarded as essential while assembling any RevOps team.
Here are five steps for creating a robust RevOps team.
1. Develop a New Team Structure
As previously said, there is no set structure that a RevOps team should adhere to – it is largely based on the size of your company and the industry that it belongs to. Your team structure may be as simple as having a RevOps leader for each division that comes into the picture during the customer lifecycle to assure data accuracy, depending on the size of your business. All of the teams that will be transferred and integrated into the revenue team must have open communication during this process.
2. Make a RevOps Organization Chart
A leadership hierarchy, like other company roles, should be formally formed to maintain order and establish a clear line of authority. By designing a RevOps org chart, all members of the team will understand exactly who they manage and to whom they are reporting. As revenue development is now one linked department, your director of revenue operations (or Chief Financial Officer) should have expertise in managing all parts of revenue development. Having an organizational chart ensures that those higher-ups guide the others in keeping track of the business objectives and goals.
3. Add Essential Supporting Roles
The RevOps team also has various support responsibilities. Adding additional team members, while not needed, allows customer service, sales, and marketing people to focus only on their areas of expertise, such as lead generation, deal closing, creative content production, or customer support. Some roles you can hire could be project management or customer service specialists.
4. Integrate the Needed Resources
Even with the strongest revenue operations team framework, a team's productivity and efficiency are only as good as the tools they're provided. Cross-department visibility is critical in RevOps for sustaining highly precise and useful revenue processes, which ultimately rely on a powerful tool stack.
Integrate your company systems such as your CRM, CMS, and other databases and platforms that are utilized by the RevOps sub-teams. This will allow smooth collaboration among the team members. They can keep track of contacts, make and log conversations using an embedded Voice over Internet Protocol tool, and access materials or other documents in one location rather than across many platforms.
5. Establish Strategies and Goals
Because each RevOps function is equally important to total revenue success, objectives and plans should be integrated and coordinated. If you have a company-wide goal to bring in a million dollars in revenue for the upcoming year, this herculean task should be broken down into sub-goals and subtasks that will all add up in the end. Each sector should contribute to the shared revenue objective of a million dollars under this unifying strategy. Moreover, they must be on the same page in terms of strategy, such as adopting a plan that relies on referrals to generate higher-quality leads, greater closing rates, and a high possibility of customer retention and satisfaction.
So, Should You Start Your Own RevOps Team?
The demand for RevOps teams has risen dramatically in recent years. The increase in the need for RevOps teams is the effect of a significant shift in how businesses manage their revenue processes. The huge shift in how consumers acquire products and services has enhanced the value of corporate departments such as advertising and customer success like never before. Previously, these functions were separated from finance and sales operations, resulting in a significant data gap that might influence various phases of the revenue system process and overall business growth.
If you have a complicated tech stack, a confusing workflow and platform, incomprehensible data, and misaligned team players, then you definitely should consider putting together your own RevOps team. RevOps was founded as a solution to a desire for increased company-wide openness. Through the RevOps team, companies may eliminate cross-departmental disconnects that create revenue data errors and inefficiencies by adopting a strong RevOps team led by a revenue management manager. To realize the benefits of RevOps in your business, you must establish your best team.
Final Words
To perform properly, your company relies on people, procedures, and platforms. And for those pieces to work together efficiently, they must all be focused on the same goal: generating income. In recent years, the techniques that consumers used to find desired items have evolved substantially. This shift in tendency can be attributed to e-commerce, which enables shoppers to acquire more product details at a click away. How can your online company compete in this digital world? Developing revenue operations (RevOps) may be the answer.
Businesses that adopted revenue operations profited threefold faster, proving once again that focusing on sales only is never a good strategy. As a result, firms are altering their revenue strategy. Forward-thinking companies see it as a funnel for corporate success and growth rather than a positive result of a high-quality service or product.
