How to Build a Revenue Operations Strategy That Will Grow Your Company

Last updated on Friday, October 11, 2024

The old way of running a company involved a sales operation that largely operated by itself: they took leads from the marketing department and attempted to close them, and then accounting and customer success would take it from there. But today’s companies are recognizing the importance of building a holistic revenue operations strategy.

By aligning your sales, marketing, account, customer success, and other teams under new RevOps strategies, you can maximize the performance of all of your teams and increase revenue as a result. But building such a strategy requires a change of thinking – not to mention time and energy from the leadership team.

This revenue operations guide will break down the meaning of RevOps, why RevOps is important and what it takes to build an effective revenue operations strategy from the ground up.

What is RevOps and Why is it Important?

RevOps is a B2B and B2C strategy that aligns siloed revenue teams and unifies goals in marketing, sales, customer success, support, and finance. It creates a singular framework for data sharing, enabling departments to better understand each other’s operations and work processes. To learn more, read our blog that breaks down exactly what RevOps is and why it is important.

RevOps is all about aligning multiple business departments – marketing, sales, finances, customer support, and so on – to operate more efficiently and grow revenue. Historically, all of these departments have been “siloed,” essentially operating independent of other departments.

This is a problem not just for operations; it’s also a problem for gathering data. The data each department gathers should ideally be flowing to other departments as well. Many companies are rightly trying to get better at this. But their efforts are often disorganized and inefficient – not to mention time-consuming. Accuracy and timeliness suffers as a result.

RevOps addresses these problems, ensuring all departments are aligned and sharing data efficiently.

What are the Lifecycle Stages for RevOps?

RevOps is a cyclical process that involves a series of lifecycle stages, each of which plays an essential role in driving revenue growth. The following are the lifecycle stages for RevOps:

1. Plan: The RevOps team develops a strategic plan that outlines the company’s revenue goals, target market, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This stage involves the different departments getting together and analyzing market trends, customer needs and preferences, and competitive landscape. It also includes creating a customer data strategy to ensure that all of the departments have a shared space where they can coordinate, orchestrate, clean, and unify customer data.
2. Acquire: The RevOps team focuses on acquiring new customers through targeted marketing and sales efforts. This stage involves lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales enablement activities to help sales teams close deals and drive revenue growth. Ideally, these departments have access to accurate and complete revenue forecasts, so they can take corrective action on any forecast gaps and market demand.
3. Onboard: The RevOps team focuses on onboarding new customers and ensuring they have a positive experience with the company’s products or services. This stage involves customer education, training, and support to help customers get up to speed quickly and efficiently.
4. Retain: The RevOps team focuses on retaining existing customers and driving repeat business. This stage involves ongoing customer engagement, support, and upsell/cross-sell activities to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV). Finances and operations should be able to use the data that everyone shares to conduct real-time analysis and make sure everything is lining up with the forecasts.
5. Expand: The RevOps team focuses on expanding the company’s revenue streams by developing new products or services, entering new markets, or expanding existing offerings. This stage involves cross-departmental market research, product development, and strategic partnerships to drive revenue growth.

By following these lifecycle stages for RevOps, companies can develop a comprehensive revenue growth strategy that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success to drive revenue growth and improve customer satisfaction.

How to Build a Revenue Operations Strategy Within a Sales Operations Framework

Building a revenue operations strategy should incorporate the lifecycle steps above and should include five steps to ensure you cover everything:

1. Establish goals: To guide all of your teams, you need to clearly define your sales operations goals for revenue. Each department should have specific, actionable goals to achieve, which will help you build out specific steps to get to those goals. There will be overlap with some of these goals, but that’s OK – that’s just a result of better alignment.
2. Align teams: The next step is to align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to ensure that they are working together. This involves establishing clear lines of communication and defining roles and responsibilities.
3. Develop a process: Once teams are aligned, the next step is to develop a revenue operations process. You will need to lay out the key steps in the customer journey, create some workflows and processes to streamline operations, and determine some key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.
4. Leverage technology: Identify and implement the right technology solutions to support revenue operations, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Build a software stack that will serve all of your departments, and not just sales.
5. Analyze data: The final step is to regularly analyze data to optimize revenue operations. This involves tracking KPIs, identifying areas for improvement, and continuously iterating and refining the revenue operations process to drive growth.

Remember, a good RevOps strategy avoids silos, so review the strategy to make sure all departments are properly communicating under your plan. If not, keep reworking it until it does. It’s vital that you unite all departments.

Grow Your Company by Making RevOps the Foundation

RevOps is about more than just your sales department. What makes RevOps so valuable is how it ensures all of your departments are operating in sync to boost revenue. Instead of your sales department taking on all the responsibility of growing revenue, you ensure that your marketing, accounting, and other teams are pitching in as well.

If you want to improve your own revenue operations strategy and start getting valuable insights to make better business decisions, consider reaching out to revVana. They are experts in revenue operations management and specialize in revenue operations, including Salesforce integration, and can provide a tailored solution that optimizes your revenue processes and helps you achieve sustainable growth. Get a demo today.