How To Maximise Your Team’s Success Through Revenue Operations (RevOps)

The tech recession continues to see investors walking away from risky investments, generally defined as companies that rarely deliver profit. Compounding matters, fears of a global recession have organisations emphasising objectives that generate revenue above all else.

In fact, the word “revenue” has become such a central focus in the business world that titles such as “chief revenue officer” and “director of revenue operations” are among the fastest-growing job titles on LinkedIn.

This article discusses the concept of revenue operations (RevOps), what it does and how you can implement its practices in your organisation.

What is RevOps?

While experts will often point out the three pillars of RevOps: people, process, and platforms/technologies, aligning different departments and teams is at the heart of a successful RevOps structure. Traditionally, organisations have various departments with their own goals and responsibilities, each with its systems and reporting to their respective heads. For example, a marketing team focuses on crafting campaigns to reach marketing objectives like generating leads, retargeting and personalising content. It can use customer relationship management systems (CRMs), web analytics and other marketing tools.

RevOps aims to bridge the gap between departments, creating a centralised team focused on maximising revenue. Revenue operations software often aids this. Instead of marketing, sales and service departments transfixed on their respective KPIs, RevOps looks to remove these silos to focus on collective goals.

Signs you need RevOps

Not every organisation requires RevOps. A tech startup working on getting its first thousand users doesn’t need revenue operations. However, when that same company reaches half a million users and sees its revenues stagnating, it can be a sign that developing revenue operations is in the offing.

Employees constantly raise clarifications

When employees from different departments consistently feel the need to approach managers for clarifications, that’s a sign RevOps may be needed. To give you a clearer picture, this could occur when there’s a fundamental difference between how a company markets its products and how salespeople push them. The confusion could stem from conflicting messages from department heads, resulting in employees having different interpretations of directives.

You want to scale

Simpler processes worked when a business is in its nascent stages. For example, guerrilla outreach can work to get your first 50 customers. But as the product matures, you’ll inevitably need more progressive strategies to address growth issues, such as improving onboarding and after-sales support.

You’re using too many tools

Too many tools across different teams often result in overlapping functions and multiple data sources. When you have different data sources, you’re working from several vantage points, citing varying truths. RevOps consolidates the acquisition and implementation of tools, managing them from a single perspective. This results in optimised resources and better adoption.

How to implement RevOps

While alignment is at the core of revenue operations, there are three elements to the machine that keep it moving: people, platforms/technology and processes. Here are some ways to maximise RevOps:

Audit your customer journey to identify areas of disconnect between departments 

Start with your existing content. This can include the following:

• Marketing content across different platforms (website, email, social, etc.)
• Sales enablement content (sales scripts, demo and sales decks, email templates, etc.)

During your audit, see if the messaging aligns with the respective buyer’s lifecycle stage it’s designed for, filling in gaps whenever necessary. A good practice is revisiting successful campaigns and sales deals to see which messaging, scripts and pitches you can reuse and leverage.

Next, audit the tech stack used by the marketing, sales and service departments. See if there are any overlaps and if the tools can track all relevant movements prospective customers are making.

Finally, audit the channels available to your customers. Optimise them to have every conversion best practice. This ensures potential buyers can convert seamlessly.

Optimise cross-functional collaboration

When you’re analysing relationships between departments, you’ll start to encounter issues that can include the following:

• Unclear/overlapping responsibilities: When it comes to a vague chain of command, a straightforward solution is to create a clear hierarchy even before the teams are introduced to the collaboration structure. This defines the lead role as early as possible, eliminating any blurred lines of responsibility.
• Competing priorities: Addressing this challenge can be tricky as this is where egos typically come into play. Experts suggest creating and rewarding cross-functional projects. This will entail team leaders regularly huddling to find opportunities to align objectives.
• Context issues: This challenge stems from different departments lacking an understanding of each’s expertise. An excellent way to address this is by showing instead of telling. For example, marketers can listen to sales conversations. This gives them an up-close view of the talking points and how customers respond. This practice helps both teams come up with better solutions that help each other.

As you can see from the last example, there are practical ways you can encourage cross-functional collaboration. When departments have a clear idea of what the reality is for other departments, it’s easier to tailor objectives to benefit the collective good.

Build your revenue operations structure

You don’t necessarily need to build from scratch. You can also restructure existing strategies and workflows to propel your revenue-generating initiatives forward. This can include the following:

• Go-to-market strategy (GTM) – This refers to a step-by-step plan for launching new products or expanding existing products into a new market.
• Sales workflows – These should move prospects through the system while gathering valuable data for your revenue thrusts.
• RevOps dashboard – This can be a project management tool offering transparency and visibility across the organisation for tasks, responsibilities and progress.

Ideally, RevOps strategies follow a 12-month execution plan, giving ample time for individual campaigns to bear fruit before moving on to the next phase. This also enables you to make adjustments when variables change.

Final words

As you can see, establishing a RevOps structure requires a lot of work. But in a volatile economic climate with an increased premium on revenue generation, you can either put in the work or get left behind.