Revenue operations (RevOps) is a relatively new term in business and marketing, and it doesn’t yet have many established training or resources in place to refer to. This term describes a profile or a team that works to streamline a company’s efforts toward maximizing revenue, while also acting as a collaborative force between the marketing, sales, and service departments of a business.
The beauty of this role is that it does not compete with any of these departments. Instead, RevOps acts as a facilitator to identify any barriers teams might face that may block them from achieving goals. Then the RevOps team helps to solve these problems and create a seamless experience for customers.
RevOps also gives business leaders a cohesive picture of the operational needs of the company and helps them develop a cultural framework within the organization designed to achieve smooth communication between all revenue-focused departments.
Why do we need RevOps?
The huge growth in technology and the prevalent use of data in modern business have resulted in the growing need and increasing prevalence of RevOps. Marketing, sales, and customer success departments are particularly dependent on new technology and data use. However, ownership and access to the tech stack are often not shared between teams — a factor that can cause major issues and could directly affect the progress of the business. A RevOps professional can help identify communication difficulties and develop solutions to improve transparency and productivity.
A recent study by Boston Consulting Group found that RevOps has a high impact on B2B technology companies, with outcomes that include:
- 100–200% increase in digital marketing ROI
- 10-20% increase in sales productivity
- 10% increase in lead acceptance
- 15–20% increase in internal customer satisfaction
- 30% reduction in GTM expenses
The roles and responsibilities of a RevOps leader
A RevOps leader is required to create business process innovation and make management changes. It is also their responsibility to facilitate collaboration, sales planning, and compensation. Data management, data access, operational insights, visibility, and tech stack integration are some of the other important aspects of a RevOps leader’s role.
As a facilitator who takes a bird’s eye view of revenue leaks and plugs them for maximum returns; the responsibilities of a RevOps leader can be divided into three broad segments: strategy, enablement, and insights. Examples include:
Strategy:
- Listening to the go-to-market team leaders to identify friction points
- Measuring current operational success and finding ways to improve it
- Streamlining A/R collection to tighten the revenue collection process
- Strategizing to identify opportunities in the revenue cycle
Enablement:
- Easing the finance process and metric analysis
- Owning the tech stack and enabling frictionless use and visualization
- Maximizing value from every deal
- Breaking data silos and managing data and data access
Insights:
- Identifying real-time revenue leaks and facilitating solutions to plug them
- Understanding individual business processes and mapping them to customer journeys
- Identifying and predicting customer churn behaviors
- Finding the balance between top-down and bottom-up sales motion
These examples offer a broad understanding of the RevOps role. Depending on the growth stage of a business, a RevOps leader might be required to shift their focus to high-priority segments, and flexibility will be necessary to manage a range of duties and meet company needs.
Your first 30 days as a RevOps leader
Now that we have identified the need for RevOps and the responsibilities of a RevOps leader, let’s investigate considerations for the first 30 days of this role that are critical for long-term success.
While the nature of the position is primarily collaborative and responsive to the needs of other departments, without a sound plan in place, a new leader pioneering RevOps in their company may feel like they are being pulled in many directions. Having a plan for the first 30, 60, or 90 days will help to build a trust-based relationship with coworkers and will act as a framework for short- and long-term goals.
In the first 30 days, it is a great idea to build a strong foundation by understanding the business processes of company departments.
- Understand the structure of the marketing, sales, and support teams and get to know the team members you will be working with.
- Talk to the leaders of each team to learn about their typical work day. Take note of the challenges they face, the tools they use, and the processes that they rely on.
- Communicate with prospects and customers by taking part in sales and support discussions.
- Establish a request process between each department and your team to improve communication and collaboration within the company.
- Become familiar with the people and processes of each department to develop an understanding of the complete customer journey across business processes. And, to visualize tech dependencies across the tech stack used by your business.
Planning for the next 60–90 days in your RevOps role
Your first 30 days should focus on familiarizing yourself with your organization and the processes used in each department. The next step is to audit existing processes and systems. You will need to identify the gaps in the processes used by marketing, sales, and support teams so solutions can be developed to improve them.
To get started auditing these systems, create a list of the tools used by each department and map them to the appropriate processes. This will help you understand the tech stack and how it is used to support the business. You may uncover tech bloat within a department that could be trimmed down, or there may be blind spots in the customer journey that need to be addressed. An audit that is synchronized across processes, systems, and tech stack will allow you to identify problems more efficiently. The audit process is extremely important, as it will help to direct RevOps leaders as they build a project plan that will benefit the company.
Successful auditing will also help to develop prompt solutions that will improve company function. Short term goals of a RevOps leader are to identify needs and execute plans to resolve them.
Strategies for long-term success as a RevOps leader
Auditing provides a RevOps leader with a roadmap of immediate changes and long-term inefficiencies that need to be resolved. As the focus will be on improving efficiency, a RevOps leader must think strategically to assimilate data collected during audits and present them to revenue-focused department leaders. This is instrumental in collaborating to resolve inefficiencies or problems occurring across departments.
Analyzing the impact of changes and tracking company success and revenue growth should be a focus for a RevOps leader from the beginning. This data will demonstrate accomplishments and progress made and can be relayed to internal stakeholders to inform them of the company’s direction.
Operational inefficiencies and siloed roles can bring down revenue. It is important for an organization to identify these pitfalls as early as possible and to develop frameworks to plug any leaks.
A RevOps leader works cohesively across a variety of business areas to improve outcomes including CRM usage, understanding customers, streamlining sales policies, identifying KPIs with interdepartmental impact, and using tech-stack for better forecasting.
Listening to all company stakeholders should be a RevOps leader’s priority for their first 30 days working in a new organization.
How Spekit enables RevOps
Increase technology adoption and collaboration
The future of revenue enablement is digital. It means delivering information when sales reps need it. Digital enablement solutions like Spekit also help RevOps teams reduce retraining time and build scalable onboarding and training programs.
Spekit helps RevOps increase technology adoption and cross-functional collaboration. The solution comes with templates that assist RevOps teams in building sales enablement foundations. Spekit also facilitates collaboration and makes building engaging learning tracks easy. Additionally, built-in analytics gives RevOps teams insight into what content is working and what isn’t.
Reduce retraining with just-in-time learning
Reps will go through onboarding, where they may learn how to build a quote. But in reality, the sales rep won’t have to build a quote until months later. By then, most of them would have forgotten what they had learned. They’d have to relearn the process, join a new cohort’s onboarding session, or find time for one-to-one training. But slowing down and relearning what they’ve already sat through is highly inefficient.
Spekit helps RevOps teams meet reps where they are by embedding training content into the tools they use every day. So rather than having reps sit through hours of training, they get how-to knowledge and their questions answered in their workflows as they come up.
Reps can access training content directly from Salesforce and learn it independently when they need it instead of (re)attending a training session. RevOps teams can embed knowledge about customer stages, pricing changes, and more straight in the apps sales teams use every day without friction.
Spekit integrates directly into sales teams’ workflows, in the app they are working in, and offers a wealth of features to help them onboard and master their jobs.
- Spotlights: in-app notifications
- Speks: icons that can be attached to any field object, picklist, or keyword in Salesforce. Speks are contextual learning prompts that help new users learn in small, digestible bites.
- Flows: in-app step-by-step instructions. Flows guide users and are they especially useful for communicating change.
Chrome Extension: a contextual, collapsible sidebar that follows users navigating Salesforce and any other Chrome-based page. The feature allows users to search for what they need, when, and how they need it.
To find success as a RevOps leader, remember this four-step process: Listen, Audit, Strategize, and Implement. With this in mind, hit the ground running as a critical player in the future success of your company.
To learn more about how Spekit can help your RevOps team achieve its goals, schedule your demo today.
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