The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Do you keep hearing the word "RevOps," but have no idea what it means? Are you curious about the benefits of revenue operations to businesses? Is this actually the first time you've heard of it but don't want to miss out?

Then you are in luck, as today you're going to learn everything you need to know about RevOps.

What is RevOps?

Revenue Operations, or "RevOps" for short, is the process companies use to align their marketing, sales and service strategies, with the goal of generating higher profits. This could include activities like implementing new processes to improve accountability and collaboration or improving reporting and analytics to produce more accurate data.

When RevOps is done well, companies operate more efficiently and with less waste, giving way to faster growth and increased revenue. This can be seen at every stage of the customer journey.

To implement it properly, you'll first need to understand some key things:

• Who is your target market?
• What is the product and its unique selling point?
• How can you put your product in front of your target audience?

Proper data analytics and reporting will help you to understand your progress against your strategic goals, allowing you to tailor your approach as you go.

Today, we'll look at the various processes and tools you can use to implement a strong RevOps strategy. But bear in mind, it's going to take some teamwork, as cross-functional collaboration is one of Revopp's most important features.

Why Does My Company Need RevOps?

Now, you have a basic. understanding of what RevOps is, but why does your business need revenue operations? What problems does RevOps actually solve? After all, the process is likely going to involve additional spending to improve processes and technology, so you need to know that it's worth the investment!

There are several justifications for implementing RevOps within your business. We will go over some of the biggest below.

1. Saving money

Yes, it's true that implementing RevOps may increase costs in the short term, but it can actually save your company money down the line. A key strategy in RevOps is leveraging automation to streamline tedious, manual work, such as managing email marketing campaigns. Automating these processes can save money by reducing the number staff required for these repetitive and tedious tasks.

When you add data analytics to the mix, you can make additional savings. Business decisions should be based on hard data as opposed to guesswork. Having access to a broad dataset from your marketing and sales teams allows you to focus on the right audience, convert more prospective customers and drive revenue growth

2. Increasing productivity and efficiency

The tasks that are typically easiest to streamline and automate are the repetitive, morale-sucking tasks, such as gathering and reporting on data, or preparing marketing campaigns. The beauty of RevOps is that it's designed to improve efficiency, giving your teams more time to spend on more important tasks.

When your staff are free to focus their efforts on other tasks, they can spend more time innovating or exploring new revenue streams. 

3. Improving collaboration and communication

Good communication and collaboration are essential between different teams within a business. If Sales, Customer Success and Marketing teams are working in silos, then your marketing efforts could be wasted by missing your target audience and their needs.

Having a dedicated RevOps team can eliminate siloed departments and bridge the gaps that exist between your customer-facing staff and your marketing teams. This ensures that everybody is working towards the company's overall business goals and can lead to greater customer satisfaction throughout the entire customer lifecycle

4. Providing key statistics to inform decisions

If you're lacking oversight of your sales and marketing efforts, then you're likely missing a reporting function. Solid reporting is a cornerstone of any good RevOps implementation, bringing together data from all areas of the sales funnel.

You need regular reports and dashboards that provide a high-level view of your funnel, highlighting areas that need improvement and others that are doing well. They can provide actionable insight into your customers' interactions throughout the sales funnel which can be used to determine opportunities for revenue generation.

5. Enhancing overall customer experience

Customer experience is such an important consideration for any company as happy Customers can make or break a business. Customers will only tell an average of 9 people about an excellent user experience that they had, but they'll tell 16 people about a negative experience.

Expectations are higher than they've ever been; consumers are spoiled by endless flashy applications, streamlined sales funnels, and platforms that work seamlessly. A disconnected customer experience sticks out immediately.

If your sales and marketing efforts are not aligned, then you can't create a consistent and refined customer experience.

What Is Involved In A RevOpps Strategy?

Short answer, everything! But, generally speaking, there are three key areas that RevOps touches upon the business processes, infrastructure and people involved in the transformation.

• Business processes

For RevOps to succeed, it's important to put processes in place that drive collaborative working across your organisation. This will drive process efficiencies to help you see a shorter sales cycle, reduced customer acquisition costs and improved retention.

• Infrastructure

Assuming that you have the right processes, you'll also need the right tools. Your sales funnel needs to be optimised as a unified whole. Every employee needs to understand where they fit into that pipeline and what their role is, not only increasing customer acquisition but creating a loyal customer base.

For example, marketers need to know which of their websites are performing best within an A/B test designed to increase conversion. Web Developers need to ensure that customer website activity is tracked and reported upon. And legal and compliance professionals need to ensure that every message complies with regulations, without losing the brand's voice. This allows senior management to make strategic decisions on the design and direction of the product.

• People

Finally, having the right people in the right role is essential. Depending on the size of your organisation, this could mean creating a dedicated RevOps team or, alternatively, working with key contacts from each team in the business.

Should you decide to go with the first approach, it could even lead to further gains in terms of employee output. Research has found that employees in high-trust organizations show higher levels of productivity. Placing this additional responsibility with trusted employees who have the capacity to take it on could help boost their development and their contribution to the business.

What Steps Do I Need To Take To Implement Revenue Operations?

Implementing RevOps within your organisation doesn't have to be daunting. And while software automation or additional hiring can involve upfront costs, you'll almost certainly recoup money over the long run by improving your business in all of the ways we've outlined above.

Here's a quick guide to getting started with revenue operations.

1. Analyse your funnel for slowdowns

First, you'll need to take a critical eye on your entire revenue process, understanding where there are limitations or slowdowns between your internal departments. What's giving a potential customer reason to pause or abandon the journey?

• • Examine sales and marketing materials and figure out where customers get stuck
  • Work out the touch points within your funnel and figure out where interactions are not being recorded or lacking data
  • Gather analytics that inform you about customer conversion and understand the most common points of entry for a prospective lead

2. Create a plan and ensure alignment between teams

Now that you're informed on where customers are entering, leaving or getting stuck within a funnel, you can come up with a plan to improve conversion and thus revenue potential.

• • Ensure that all areas of your funnel are reported on and any gaps identified in the previous stage have been addressed
  • Review your software to identify opportunities to retire unused tools or automate existing manual processes
  • Ensure that new processes are created, where needed, that determine best practices for your marketing, service and sales teams

3. Implement changes to improve customer conversion

Now, you can begin to put other software, tools, and processes into place that should help you to better track and convert customers. These steps will produce more analytics that you can use to further refine your RevOps strategy.

• • Create an effective business case that clearly defines actions and goals
  • Create new marketing campaigns with follow-up and outreach emails
  • Implement dashboards that track your new reports and highlight the key metrics, such as time on page, emails opened, conversions and so on
  
  

What next?

Once you've begun to make positive changes to your customer funnels and the alignment between teams within your business, your task isn't over yet.

Revenue Operations requires an indefinite time investment; your Revops team or responsible employees should meet regularly to review wins and regroup over any failings. This will allow you to ensure alignment while identifying any roadblocks that crop up.