Last updated on Thursday, November 19, 2020
The advent of e-commerce has shifted customer behavior. They spend more time researching their future purchases and usually have targeted objectives when making these purchases. That is why companies need to deliver excellent service before a customer chooses a competitor or cancels an existing subscription with the company.
This service can be delivered by creating Revenue Operations roles in the company. Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a combination of sales, marketing, and customer success. It creates an environment for predictable revenue forecasting.
The recent rise in the use of the word ‘revenue’ in job roles (Director Revenue Operations, Chief Revenue Officer, and VP Revenue Operations) indicates that more and more companies are seeing the benefits of taking a holistic approach to revenue growth.
This contrasts with having siloed departments that each have their own sets of data, targets, and processes. When each department has to analyze and monitor metrics along with their targets, this might lead to disjointed business goals, miscommunication, or blame-shifting during strategy meetings.
As a concept, Revenue Operations attempts to combine sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure a single truth for attaining increased revenue.
RevOps teams unify processes involved in generating and obtaining sales data, marketing statistics, and customer service data to create a single truth.
Doing this means the different departments that go to market have a unified framework in which to increase future revenue and predict potential periods of churn that can happen due to disconnected sales and customer service departments. For example, a customer service agent might not have a full picture of a customer’s previous purchases because the sales team had not updated their CRM data.
RevOps aligns three main aspects of a company, namely people, data, and processes.
Outcomes related to things like business process innovation, sales planning and compensation, project management, and cross-functional collaboration are aligned with the business needs.
From sales to marketing to customer success, the role of Revenue Operations is to ensure that coaching, professional development, and continuous training is provided across the board. Empowering the workforce in this way has compounding benefits for the business as a whole.
Data quality and management are improved, as is data access when departments are unified. Operational and strategic insights allow for greater confidence in business decisions.
Consolidating the technology stack for sales, marketing, and customer success means better integration, systems administration, and enablement.
Many companies have siloed or separate departments that do not share data. They usually bring their analysis and reports to strategy meetings, and this could lead to miscommunication about revenue objectives and much blame being thrown around about who is responsible for decreased revenue.
RevOps teams aim to mitigate these siloed departments. They could do this by employing technologies that aid the promotion of a single truth and unified data and processes.
The first is employing revenue forecasting software like revVana that has CRM integration, sales bookings management, automation tools, and multi-scenario planning. A single dashboard with a collection of tools makes it easier for unified data sharing.
Next is phone service integration. Sales representatives can record their interactions with potential and existing customers. Managers can easily monitor these calls and correspondence to help align these interactions with revenue targets.
Conversational Intelligence tools can further increase data collection through conversation transcriptions. Managers and members of other departments can easily access these transcriptions on a unified platform.
The sales department can also have a unified Sales Engagement platform with their emails, phone calls, and social media interactions with customers to analyze which strategies amount to closed sales and renewed contracts.
Additionally, the marketing department could deploy automation and marketing intelligence tools to record their strategies. This helps the sales team identify which products or services to focus on. Inversely, marketing teams could gain new insights from the sales team by viewing their sales engagement platform.
As previously mentioned, Revenue Operations is a unified framework for increasing revenue across the organization. There are key metrics to measure and improve to gain those revenue increases.
RevOps teams must analyze interactions with customers.
These include the cost of customer acquisition, customer churn, and renewals.
How much does it cost to attract customers?
The marketing team might spend on an online advertising campaign that could attract 1,000 customers to the company. The cost of the campaign needs to be aligned with the return on acquisitions. The teams can combine sales data to identify which services would attract the most customers.
Next, customer churn and renewals are important.
They indicate which services are popular or unpopular with existing customers and what causes them to cancel their subscriptions. This can be gauged from conversational intelligence tools in customer success.
Companies also need to analyze the bigger picture.
They could calculate ARR and improve revenue forecast accuracy. RevOps teams can use shared data from sales, customer success, and marketing to predict future revenue. They could also identify strategies to shorten sales cycle times and increase win rates.
There is no single method of employing RevOps in a company. One company might decide to reshuffle departments to have sales, marketing, and customer success under one umbrella. Or they could choose to align processes and data on a unified platform.
Companies can determine how to implement the shift in operations by looking at their service or product and customer base.
With combined data and processes, departments sidestep any potential miscommunications. This results in a better company culture where the organizational structure shares a unified goal for revenue growth. Everyone in the company can share in the successes of increased revenue, and there is a new level of transparency with shared data.
With this transparency and communication, there are more opportunities for improved efficiency. The single truth compels departments to collaborate on shared data. This leads to members having a single framework in which to discuss business decisions.
No longer will sales managers make decisions that only benefit the sales team. Any decision would have to be aligned with the single truth of the RevOps framework.
A single framework coupled with shared data increases the company’s accuracy in forecasting revenue. Finance and executive teams receive an accurate and holistic report of sales, marketing, and customer success, which allows them to make decisions for the entire organization, not just one department.
Revenue operations fills a holistic role in a company where sales, marketing, and customer success are under one umbrella.Working toward unified business operations is greatly enhanced with the right technology. For a look into the revVana platform, which gives you a unified view over your CRM and financial applications to ensure revenue growth, contact us for a demo today.
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