Driving revenue requires collaboration and integration across the business, but this is often a significant challenge for organizations; particularly those with separate sales, marketing, and services teams.
To tear down departmental silos, ensure all information, insights, and trends are aligned with the company’s broader goals and strategy, and — ultimately — maximize revenue, organizations need a dedicated RevOps team.
Here, we’ll take a deep dive into RevOps, including key functions, benefits, metrics, and how to get started with a successful team implementation.
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a single team that handles all the processes related to driving revenue. They use specific tools and procedures (e.g. software, change management systems, up-to-date, high-quality documentation, etc.) to improve efficiencies in all departments that impact revenue growth.
Within a sales organization, RevOps teams provide a cohesive revenue operations framework for the entire company, which eliminates contradictory goals and enables a fully integrated approach to sales targets and revenue attainment.
People often mistake RevOps roles as largely tactical. In reality, the people in these positions can see both the bigger-picture strategy and the nitty gritty details. It’s a challenging job, but they’re able to navigate the complexities of acting as strategic partners to the C-suite.
In contrast to an organization with siloed departments, RevOps team structure roles, goals, tools, and daily operations, all fall under a single org — often reporting to a CFO or CRO — rather than splitting similar responsibilities across separate leadership roles. This bridges the gap between teams for more connected operations across all revenue-generating teams, like sales, marketing, customer success, and more.
The RevOps team approach emphasizes unity and collaboration, with multiple revenue-responsible teams coming together — not one taking over — to execute a variety of tasks, including:
Equally important to these job duties are the soft skills that make for an effective RevOps team. Revenue operations team members (and RevOps leaders, especially), enjoy collaboration and have a knack for digging into data to uncover key insights. They can take challenges in stride and remain calm under significant pressure. They also operate and interact with empathy and understand that improving their tools and processes can better empower people to perform at their very best.
Many organizations take a siloed approach ... They use a mashup of disparate systems and processes to manage the revenue cycle, which causes sellers, managers and leaders to manually piece together a picture of everything happening in their pipelines.MARY SHEA, VP, GLOBAL INNOVATION EVANGELIST
Though the two terms are sometimes conflated, RevOps and Sales Ops do differ. While Sales Ops teams do focus on creating efficiencies, they singularly fixate on the sales department alone. They work to improve sales performance, analyze sales data, and formulate strategic plans that free sales representatives to concentrate on selling.
RevOps teams, on the other hand, take a broader approach to generating more gross revenue. They act as a central point for customer acquisition, satisfaction, and churn by collecting data and using it to inform decision-making across the organization. In short, RevOps is the larger, fully integrated efficiency- and revenue-generating umbrella under which other departments — including Sales Ops — live.
It’s no wonder why sales organizations have started ditching more traditional, siloed org charts in favor of the RevOps approach. By implementing an effective RevOps department, companies gain a variety of key benefits, including:
In traditional organizational charts, marketing, sales, and customer service teams may each have unique metrics. Forming a RevOps team allows companies to create a single set of revenue operations metrics that means the same thing to everyone. These metrics commonly include:
As is the case with any worthwhile initiative, implementing RevOps at your organization isn’t as simple as snapping your fingers. You should take a strategic approach to leveraging RevOps to ensure you have a strong foundation moving forward.
While the process may vary slightly depending on your organization’s size, industry, and objectives, there are some basic steps every company should follow as they begin their RevOps journey:
At the onset, you’ll need to identify any weak points and areas of disconnect between your organization’s departments. Start by asking some of these key questions around your revenue journey:
Next, evaluate your analytics and revenue pipeline to make sure you have complete visibility into your company’s health. Restructure positions and hierarchies, as needed, to better suit the RevOps approach (e.g. everyone in operations, tools, and analyst roles fall underneath a single leader).
Then make sure the tools your revenue-generating teams use are working for them. If not, you may need to conduct some research to invest in and provide the proper technologies and processes for a more effective, efficient operation. Once they’re bolstered by the right tools and processes for support, members of your RevOps team can begin working as a cohesive unit.
Implementing a RevOps team isn’t a one-and-done task, but rather a process that should be continuously improved upon. Be sure to schedule periodic meetings to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve strategies, processes, technology usage, and more. Then take action on those findings to optimize your RevOps team and maximize their value.
At the heart of any effective RevOps team is a unified approach to the revenue journey. But even if your organization has the best intentions of implementing a cohesive RevOps approach, they won’t get far without the right system in place.
Outreach’s Sales Execution Platform is a comprehensive, centralized solution that brings clarity to the chaos of various technologies and data sources. It’s purposefully built to support cross-functional revenue-generating teams and can empower your organization to achieve greater revenue efficiency.
Learn more about how RevOps leaders are building revenue organizations of the future, or request a demo today.