What is RevOps?
Over the last few years, there has been a movement growing in companies all over the world. This movement is called Revenue Operations or RevOps for short. So what is it, how does it look structurally and how can it help you?
First of all, let’s look at what it is. I have seen some very complex definitions of RevOps, but for me, it is best summed up as follows:
"An alignment of multiple areas within a company in order to work together for the overal benefit of all."
At its simplest, this could mean that just two departments, Marketing and Sales, work together with the same aims. ie marketing stop working on metrics like 'the number of leads created' and instead use data and conversations with Sales to work on ‘the number of the right leads created'. At the same time, Sales start passing Leads back to Marketing to mature instead of hogging them in the vain hope that the prospect will come back to them personally without any prompts.
The next level of RevOps is to bring in other departments like Finance, Operations and/or Customer Success. Traditionally each of these departments works towards its own KPIs. This can lead lead to departmental success without company-level success. You can always tell when departments work on their own personalised KPIs as you will hear comments like "Marketing don't create quality leads" or "the Sales team don't care if the customer churns". I have heard, and probably said, both of these too many times. In comparison, in a company with a RevOps mentality and structure, you often hear comments like "We should give them a discount if they agree to a case study" from the salespeople, or "I will discuss that with finance to see if their data supports the idea". That might sound a bit too rosy, and maybe it is; however, these are the types of comments I hear when in customer meetings.
So how does all this look structurally?
This is quite a company-specific thing; however, generally, it involves having a RevOps team outside of the classic departments but involving people from each department. It is also imperative that this team has a voice at the board level. From a requirements perspective, data is vital if you are going to do it properly, so access to all your company’s data using a tool like Tableau or CRM analysts is ideal, but before you get to this, it is important to integrate information into a central system. I would recommend Salesforce to be the master system based on conversations with various RevOps leaders, but I do have to acknowledge that I am quite biased on this. Whichever system you use as your master, ensure you can carry out as much data analysis in real-time as possible and implement learnings. For instance, let’s say you look at a particular industry from the perspective of Finance, Sales and Marketing. Let’s say that Finance data shows that these customers pay on time; Sales data shows you that their sales cycle is 20% shorter than average, and Marketing data shows that they are 15% more lies to respond to re-engagement activity. From this data, you may then choose to adjust sales cadences in tools like sales Engagement to move these customers into re-engagement programs earlier. This change should be actionable within a day at the slowest to ensure you get the best results. This is the power of RevOps.
As you may be able to tell, I am a fan of RevOps, but only because I have seen great results for customers who have implemented its mentalities and structures. If you are unsure if a RevOps mentality would create organisational scar tissue or great leaps forward, please don't hesitate to get in touch if you would like to talk through your thoughts.
