In many of the industry-leading and fastest-growing B2B organizations, Revenue Operations, or RevOps, can be seen as the newest functional team.
As of 2020, 58% of B2B organizations had put a dedicated RevOps team in place or were in the process of building one. So what’s all of this buzz around RevOps about?
The goal of a RevOps team is to streamline operational processes and provide alignment across the revenue journey, including Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success and Support. Through this alignment, RevOps allows the organization to put the focus back on the customer experience and build more predictable business growth. In fact, B2B organizations that align their revenue functions grow 12-15 times faster than their peers and are 34% more profitable.
If you already have a RevOps team in place or are thinking of building one, you’re probably wondering what are some key things to keep in mind to be successful. We asked 6 forward-thinking experts from the Systematic community to weigh in on this year’s biggest RevOps trends, and here’s what they had to say:
“New tech stack and a higher demand for RevOps professionals”
Josh Alhat, Operations Manager, Sales at QuestionPro
“The RevOps role is quite interesting and fairly new if I may say that. With the boom in the tech startup, it’s natural that companies will look to bring in newer roles to solve newer problems (adapt!). We’ve seen it with Sales Enablement, and the same would apply to RevOps. It solves a huge problem in the current company setup, breaking down the division between Sales, Marketing, Customer Success.”
Titles including the word “revenue,” like Director of Revenue Operations, VP of Revenue Operations, and Chief Revenue Officer are among the fastest growing job titles on LinkedIn. In the last 18 months, for instance, there has been a 300% increase in listings for VP of Revenue Operations roles.
With more positions in RevOps, comes new technology for RevOps. “The more we keep having new startups in this tech space, they will either be solving a new problem or competing with existing platforms. This sort of increases the tech stack as companies will keep on trying new products or replace the existing ones.”
“Streamlining processes with automation and integration”
Candice Gervase, Commercial Technology Manager at Metabolon
Rajesh Kandula, Senior Advisor, Solution Architect at Ciena
Without robust integration and automation backing up your stack, it is almost impossible for your RevOps team to perform optimally. Organizations need to move beyond the idea that additional applications will solve problems and shift toward a more innovative mindset that orchestrates processes across applications. A unified tech stack allows RevOps to be more efficient by providing transparency across all processes, helping to better allocate resources, highlighting any revenue risks, and increasing a collaborative flow of work across RevOps.
Both Gervase and Kandula agreed that RevOps will lean heavily on automation and integration to streamline processes across all business functions. Not only that, they are also planning on improving efficiency by leveraging automation and integration to make more data-driven decisions. “We are looking at streamlining and optimizing our processes in order to determine what we can automate and better utilize and enhance within our tech stack,” says Gervase. “Particularly in the Quote-to-Cash process—a beginning-to-end overhaul so that we can become more digital, automated, data-driven, and have a shorter sales/contract cycle.”
Similarly, Kandula is looking for “better connectedness with different business functions (which means streamlining business processes and data across cross-platforms/integrations) to get more insights for enabling capabilities like predictive/more what-if/quick period close.”
“A more technical focus to the RevOps role”
Borys Aptekar, Senior Manager, RevOps at Instabase
There’s a lot of new technology in the RevOps space. According to Aptekar, there has been a general lean towards solving with systems—especially in motions like PLG (Product-Led Growth). “Integrating disparate tools and getting consistent data flow requires systems and automation excellence, which is not traditionally what ‘ops’ is necessarily known for,” says Aptekar. What does he mean by this?
“Nowadays, it feels like RevOps is answering for both sides of the equation: ops and tools. There are more and more tools that have ‘RevOps’ and not ‘IT/Systems’ as the intended user persona. This is enabled by lower system complexity (to configure/develop/administer) via increasingly more robust low-code/no-code tool options. So now ‘ops’ is managing the tools to enable processes because they understand the desired business outcome and own the tools in which the process lives. But these new responsibilities also come with their own challenges, like making sure you’re building scalable data structures, managing design/development/release cycles, and avoiding tech debt.”
“Importance of RevOps in providing valuable insights throughout the full customer lifecycle”
Lauren Sanborn, Director of Revenue Operations at CallRail
“A prospect begins its journey with a new company as an anonymous visitor. Over time, prospects become known to the company and continue on their lifecycle through the buyer’s journey—but it doesn’t end there—a customer can turn into a repeat customer, and many businesses hope that will happen. This is the full customer lifecycle. Revenue Operations plays an important role in stitching together that journey and providing value insights to Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success/Support.”
Out of the 2,500 RevOps professionals surveyed by Lean Data and Sales Hacker, 95% agreed that the ability to deliver a consistent and seamless customer experience (pre- and post-sale) is becoming a key competitive differentiator and critical revenue driver for B2B organizations. Having real-time, accurate, up-to-date insights and data will continue to be important, but the ability to cut through the noise and make sense of the data will be where Revenue Operations will shine and drive the most value.
“RevOps’ role in providing product usage data for NRR (Net Revenue Retention) initiatives”
Stephen Farnsworth, Head of Product Marketing, Revenue Operations at Workato
Driving high levels of customer satisfaction, success, and experience should always be a top priority. In 2021, RevOps will be leveraging data like product usage data, insights, and analytics to help guide GTM decisions. In a Mixpanel survey of over 1,000 participants, nearly 80% of respondents said that they used analytics primarily to understand product usage. This data can help you improve user experience and retention, and increase user engagement by providing insights to the core outcomes that are important to customers.
“I’m seeing in SaaS in general that Net Revenue Retention (i.e. retention & expansion) is now the true north star, and everyone is fully focused on it,” notes Farnsworth. According to him, this is “leading to more product-led growth initiatives directed at current customers,” and influencing the marketing strategy to “be more involved in marketing to current customers as opposed to their typical singular focus on new logo pipeline gen. This NRR focus necessitates marketing, sales, and others having access to product usage data, which hasn’t typically been available in the past. Getting that data out of product and IT data warehouses and converting it into a format that sales and marketing can use is a super interesting challenge that lots of companies are dealing with.”
Do you know any other trends RevOps professionals should keep an eye out for this year? Share with your peers by joining the Systematic community now!
