Are you making the most of your customer experience funnel? It’s become clear that having siloed Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to generate revenue is not productive or useful. The gaps between these teams has led to the rise of a new way of thinking about revenue: Revenue Operations (or RevOps). RevOps essentially realigns processes across departments to form a clear business strategy. As its own form of operations, RevOps’ aim is to revolutionize customer experience.
Though the direction of modern revenue processes seems clear, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to adopting RevOps in your organization. Instead, you must consider RevOps as a dynamic journey across your customer lifecycle. By doing so, you can build efficient systems and teams that address existing roadblocks. In order to prep your business for a RevOps strategy, you’ll need to address processes, data democratization, and tool governance.
Getting Started: How to Reorganize Your Revenue Processes
While RevOps encompasses Marketing, Sales and Customer Success, it would be counterproductive to build the RevOps group as a part of these functions. This would disrupt existing processes before you could even fix what’s wrong with them, further complicating the whole system – the goal is to enhance processes, not completely pull the rug out from under their feet.
However, creating RevOps as its own function allows you to streamline your revenue processes by getting a bird’s-eye view of previously siloed data from departments and using it transform your business. Think of RevOps as a lookout for these teams; this function can relieve congestion in funnels and align operational and technical goals, thereby improving the overall customer experience.
Laying It All Out
Franco Anzini, VP of Revenue Operations at Malwarebytes, discussed in detail what a high-level RevOps org structure should like at LeanData’s Ops-Stars conference in November, as well as the group’s overall outlook.
While much of the work of RevOps revolves around tool implementation and administration, it also involves process design and documentation. Essentially, the team is responsible for building the tracks and keeping the trains running on time. Therefore, it makes sense that “church and state” are separate and that the entire RevOps team works independently from the teams they serve. RevOps reports into the organization’s senior leadership — generally a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Operating Officer.
Beneath the CxO is the Head of RevOps, which has three branches: Systems Ops, Sales Ops, and Marketing Ops, each with their own heads and analysts. Hiring people for your RevOps team who understand the ops of other departments will aid the transition to this newer model. RevOps must also consider the types of solutions they’ll use to close any gaps in their tech stack. While there are arguments on both sides of the Build vs. Buy debate, it may be better for RevOps professionals without technical experience to buy a solution rather than building internally, as internal builds require costly IT resources to initially implement and maintain, as well as continuous internal enablement and functional support.
With this organizational strategy, you are creating a team with a solutions mindset, which is incredibly valuable to business as a whole. RevOps turns the focus of all teams back to customer solutions and creates accountability and visibility throughout the customer journey.
Next, Free Up Your Data
Currently, many businesses are facing departmental silos and aren’t utilizing the revenue processes to their full potential. This is where data democratization comes into play. You have already begun reorganizing your teams. By also making your data accessible, you enable those teams to make better business decisions, assign tasks correctly, manage your data holistically, and satisfy your customer better.
Here are three benefits to doing so.
1. Get Rid of Data Blockades
By freeing up your data, your revenue processes will be more fluid and comprehensive. Data was traditionally governed by a business’s IT team, but with a RevOps structure you are relieving your business of further bottlenecks and stop-and-starts.
2. Keep Track of Your Data
Your new RevOps structure enables teams to track data cross-functionally. Without departmental data democratization, rich customer data would stay trapped within separate applications, databases, and tools. By releasing it, your teams can better analyze the data and understand the information across business.
3. Make Data-Driven Decisions
Data democratization gives the power back to your teams. By having access to once-siloed data, your teams can obtain actionable insights. They can now use data across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to make better decisions that favor the company as a whole, inspiring growth.
Take a Step Further With Your Tools
Along the lines of selecting solutions that close the gaps between your tech stack (like automation) is the opportunity to choose and vet vendors that best meet the needs of your growing processes (apps, tech, etc.). Armed with a business systems mindset, your RevOps team can decide whether it’s worth enhancing the current options available or choosing new tools that are beneficial to teams with a 21st century mindset. Having a team with a bird’s-eye view of tools and applications can save your business precious time and resources – also keeping in mind what options work best for data democratization and cross-functional use.
Tackling Problems With Your New Team
Once you’ve built your team, you are ready to take organizational issues head on. During the Ops-Stars conference, Anzini shared three crucial areas your RevOps team should address:
1. End-to-end marketing
2. Clean system handoffs between Marketing and Sales
3. Lead routing SLA between Marketing and Sales
Overall, these three areas center on process optimization. Improving customer experience and retention is not achievable without efficient lead routing and clean handoffs between Sales and Marketing. Justin Tung, Head of Business Systems at Segment, spoke about automations he’s used to optimize the lead routing process at Biz Systems Magic, the first and only conference for Systems leaders. Tung asserts that there’s often a loss of efficiency in qualifying leads, as it can require tedious manual labor that wastes valuable time. By adopting automation, Segment opted to quickly qualify leads through two separate tunnels:
1. Enrichment and scheduling, which turn on as needed; and
2. Top of the funnel (TOFU) routing (data transfer from your MAP to your CRM, eventually dispatched to the correct SDR)
These pipelines enable the right team, either Sales or Marketing, to follow up with the lead quickly, allowing Marketing to focus more on the user (and getting them to Sales) and Sales to focus more on the process and making sure they follow the right motions to convert the lead into a customer.
How RevOps Leads to Better CX and Growth
The need for a change in your revenue process is evident. The next steps are to revamp your org chart to include a RevOps team. With it, your business can run more efficiently by implementing new systems and initiating clear processes between Sales, Marketing and Customer Success (ensuring the long-term relationship with the customer is fruitful as well and brings value).
In the end, the true benefit of RevOps lies with its ability to bring the focus back to the customer – both internally and externally – building further trust between teams, creating fluidity around data, and ensuring that the person using your product gets the best experience possible, driving loyalty and predictable business growth.
