Today’s businesses are facing more challenges than ever before. It’s not just supply chain issues and economic uncertainty that are causing executive teams to sweat. Consumers are also changing, becoming fickler with their purchasing choices, and more demanding.
In this competitive landscape, business leaders need to optimise how they manage their business operations, to ensure efficiency, productivity, and exceptional customer experiences.
Many market-leading companies are now moving from a “siloed” strategy where marketing, sales, and customer service teams are all responsible for their own processes, into a more unified environment. They’re bringing various departments together, allowing them to share data, skills, and ideas to help consistently move the business towards specific goals.
That’s the core idea of “RevOps”. However, a successful RevOps strategy requires companies to align their teams around the right concept or vision. So, what should be driving all of these different teams? The answer, at least for today’s companies is customer centricity.
RevOps, otherwise known as “Revenue Operations”, is an approach to business that helps companies to drive more predictable, sustainable growth. It does this by bridging the gaps between revenue functions and organisational silos. RevOps recognises that all of the different teams in a company need to work together to achieve results, from sales, to marketing and customer success.
Using a RevOps framework in a business involves leveraging automation and other tools to create a collaborative, cross-functional business, where you can streamline GTM operations, and unlock new opportunities. So, where does customer-centricity come into play?
Customer-centricity is the concept that businesses should put the experience of the customer first in everything they do. It involves generating a deep understanding of the needs, pain points, and preferences of the target audience, and taking steps to deliver the best experience possible.
For some time, conversations around revenue operations management have focused primarily on process efficiency. However, there’s more to the benefits of RevOps than making your business more efficient. In the modern world, companies can compete on product features, price, operational excellence, or customer relationships.
However, while products and services can be copied, operational excellence can be replicated, and prices can be undercut, customer experience delivers consistent value. This is particularly true in a landscape where customer loyalty and retention rates have been dropping ever since the pandemic.
Fortunately, there are ways companies can focus their RevOps strategy around the customer journey. A successful RevOps strategy can enable:
At the heart of any RevOps strategy is the drive to bring different business teams and systems together. Collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success teams leads to a deeper understanding of the entire customer journey, and the components within it.
Armed with insights from the marketing team, about which campaigns capture customer attention and drive loyalty, sales teams can craft pitches that appeal more to customer needs and pain points. Sales teams can share objections and concerns with customer success teams so that they can deliver onboarding experiences that minimise these issues.
All the while, better sales and customer success experience leads to greater opportunities for marketing teams, by transforming businesses into trusted brands. According to studies, 46% of US customers are willing to pay more to buy products from a brand they trust.
Shared data and technology is another core component of RevOps. In a customer-centric business, shared data acts as the catalyst for strategic growth and process refinement. All members of a team can access the same insights into market trends, customer preferences, and retention rates.
Marketing professionals find out which campaigns drive the most attention to the brand. Sales teams learn which pitches strike the best chords with customers, and customer success teams learn which strategies lead to higher levels of retention.
As customer behaviour continues to evolve, these insights open the door for rapid growth. Studies show that companies that align people, technology, and processes across their GTM landscape are 28% more profitable, and earn up to 36% more revenue.
As we’ve mentioned before on this website, the sales cycle and customer journey are two very different things. Customer journeys are becoming more complex and self-driven, and businesses need to adapt to ensure they’re nurturing relationships with customers every step of the way.
RevOps gives companies the insights they need to understand the customer journey on a deeper level, identifying critical touch points in the path to purchase and beyond. With meticulous mapping, companies can prepare to excel with every interaction.
In some cases, effective customer journey mapping can even pave the way for the implementation of productivity and efficiency-boosting solutions such as automation and AI.
So, why go through all the effort to focus your RevOps strategy on customer experience? Simply put, it’s the number one differentiating factor that determines whether customers will continue to interact with your brand. It’s also critical to growth, with 72% of consumers saying they would share a positive experience with 6 or more people, on average.
Taking a CX-centric RevOps approach paves the way for more consistent, sustainable growth, through improved platform alignment and data unification (as mentioned above). These things help to accelerate pipeline velocity and pave the way to more personalised customer experiences.
At the same time, customer-centric RevOps can help with:
It’s no secret that business success requires extensive planning. Similarly, delivering exceptional customer experiences requires the right strategy. When your business data is unified, through a RevOps strategy, it provides clear insights into your target audience’s preferences and buyer behaviours.
A single source of data can help you design the user profiles required for effective account-based marketing experiences. It also helps management teams to identify growth potential, both in existing markets, and external environments.
RevOps strategies also provide visibility into growth objectives, and the processes involved in executing various strategies. In a customer-centric RevOps environment, every team can clearly see the status of their deals and activities across segments, territories, and environments.
This makes it easier for every team member to understand the specific role they play in delighting, engaging, and retaining customers. With insights into the actions that unlock the best results and consistent access to the right resources, they can create smoother buyer experiences.
This increased visibility also leads to improved accountability for “customer experience” in every team, from front-line staff to the executive suite.
Finally, RevOps can streamline various processes within the business environment, from setting priorities to decision-making. When there are fluctuations in the market, as there are frequently in today’s world, or when production shortages happen, teams can quickly pivot their operations.
With end-to-end insights, RevOps teams can even use AI and similar tools to create “what if” scenarios, allowing them to develop plans for responding to disruptions.
Additionally, business data and feedback from customers can provide insights into where businesses should be focusing their attention. The analysis of feedback means companies can make iterative improvements to products and services, based on genuine insights.
The benefits of an effective RevOps strategy can be more comprehensive than businesses realise. Aligning your teams, data, and operations paves the way for better decision-making, new insights into opportunities, and greater resiliency.
In today’s experience-focused world, rooting your RevOps strategy in customer-centricity is one of the best ways to ensure every decision you make increases customer lifetime value, brand loyalty, and revenue for your brand.
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