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Revenue Operations (RevOps) isn’t a marketing buzzword. It’s a seismic shift from focusing on sales through sales channels to zeroing in on revenue growth through aligned teams, workflows, and strategies.
Gartner says, "A move from sales enablement to revenue enablement is needed in today’s rapidly shifting buying and selling dynamic.” That’s exactly what’s happening in today’s innovative businesses, and it’s just what’s needed for B2B sales.
RevOps aligns all organisational teams: sales, marketing, customer operations, product, leadership, and tech teams, as well as processes and platforms, towards revenue growth.
Doug Bushée, Senior Director Analyst in Gartner’s Sales practice, sums up the need for RevOps:
“CEOs and chief sales officers recognize that functional silos handing off clients from one function to the other, and using different technologies, people, and processes, are a barrier to revenue growth.”
RevOps alignment typically focuses on removing silos between sales, marketing, and customer service, three areas critical to B2B sales. The approach creates synergies in processes and communication and can even see shared KPIs and goals. Team members can participate in cross-functional teams or work together on campaigns that take a customer from lead to conversion to customer service.
Today’s technologies facilitate this shared, aligned approach by creating visibility of activities, customer interactions, and performance. RevOps tools create and collate the all-important data for powerful insights and customer personalisation. These insights can be shared by sales, marketing, and customer service teams who focus on their combined performance to generate revenue rather than traditional goals of personal and departmental targets.
The result is that these departments work side-by-side instead of producing disparate or even conflicting outputs. This is to the benefit of customers who see similar messages and sentiments at their every touchpoint. What’s more, each department shares a customer history. So, for example, customer service teams can view sales history and understand a customer’s original pain points.
B2B buyers expect this seamless multi-channel experience. In fact, it may take many touchpoints before a B2B prospect converts. Each interaction must reinforce product messaging and not distract from one another. Gartner estimates a typical buying team for a complex B2B product involves 6-10 decision-makers, each requiring 4-5 pieces of information, or touchpoints, to make a buy decision.
Under RevOps, data is collated from all touchpoints, including CRMs, marketing tools, and customer interactions. Sales teams and leaders can access this integrated data quickly to glean insights into customer behaviour, segment prospects, and tailor both marketing and sales campaigns accordingly.
A coordinated message contained in the initial email through to the first telephone call, follow-up email, marketing brochure, case study, and social media posts carefully matched to a customer's known pain points reinforces product benefits to an almost undeniable degree. This coordination and alignment makes sales negotiations all the more powerful and far more likely to generate revenue. With customer service teams also revenue-focused, opportunities to retain and upsell are maximised.
RevOps ability to remove silos between teams and team members extends further to removing data and communication inefficiencies. RevOps begins with a holistic view of an entire organisation and is enabled by AI and automation. New tools or integrations replace legacy systems, which often differ and are disparate between departments. With RevOps, processes are direct and smooth, without bottlenecks or delays. This synchronicity results in daily efficiencies but also greater customer focus and faster sales cycles.
The impact and benefits of RevOps for a B2B company are becoming clear, but how do we go about implementing a RevOps approach?
To remove silos, optimise processes and then allocate shared goals, it’s critical, to begin with a 360 view of your company and its wider ecosystem. Armed with this knowledge and the corresponding data, you can begin to structure your RevOps strategy.
Although this will be an ongoing endeavour, at least at first, teams can be aligned with meetings, cross-functional projects, new technologies, and shared goals and KPIs
The size of your business will determine the size of your RevOps team. You can allocate a leader or ambassadors or work with all your teams at once. Of paramount importance is building and sharing the RevOps focus.
If your team has the bandwidth, nominate roles to ensure success. RevOps requires data and technology expertise to implement or integrate software and ensure data flows are seamless, optimised, and provide the powerful insights you need.
If you have the capacity, you may want to pass the baton of RevOps leadership to a dedicated role, such as a Chief Revenue Officer or Manager of Revenue Operations. This role can take responsibility for RevOps across departments and supervise market segmentation, marketing activities, sales performance, pricing strategies, and customer retention.
RevOps goes hand in hand with transformation and automation. A company running three different core platforms to serve marketing, sales, and customer experience will find it challenging to align teams, processes, insights, data, and goals. It may be time to consider a single platform that supports and enables RevOps methodology.
You can start small and build a cross-functional team with RevOps ambassadors in each department, implement RevOps singlehandedly, or create a new division. The critical outcome is a high-impact RevOps team or focus that tears apart barriers created by conventional departmentalised and disparate company structures.
From here, you can foster collaboration, leverage data, redefine workflows, create efficiencies, and increase productivity to improve sales and customer experience and ultimately achieve sustained revenue growth.
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