A Guide To Revenue Operations Responsibilities
Job boards have seen a sharp rise in revenue operations titles in recent years, with Head of Revenue Operations and similar roles ranked among the fastest-growing jobs in the country.
But what are the responsibilities of revenue operations? It's all about driving revenue through optimizing efficiency across sales, marketing, renewals, and expansion.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations (RevOps) is an aligned approach to growing predictable revenue across sales, marketing, and customer success by optimizing systems and processes.
Revenue operations teams manage the structures that allow other employees to efficiently and effectively acquire customers and maintain their loyalty.
RevOps is:
- Responsible for building, optimizing, and analyzing the internal infrastructure for generating revenue
- A cross-functional collaborator across go-to-market teams
- A strategic partner uncovering insights in business data to optimize sales, marketing, and CS processes
RevOps is not:
- Just a system admin
- The team selling, marketing, or managing accounts
In other words, RevOps is a systematic approach to operations, not just any one single tool (although RevOps software exists).
What Are RevOps Team Responsibilities?
The key Revenue Operations responsibilities are:
- People: Connecting teams and aligning them around shared business goals and targets
- Processes: Improving operational efficiencies by analyzing and restrategizing processes across various departments
- Data: Aligning technology to present a complete picture of your revenue, business, and activity data
The RevOps team can examine business functions such as automation, integration, workflow management, and reporting to analyze operational performance and develop strategic insights for effective management.
Other revenue operations responsibilities include:
- Forecasting revenue
- Building customer health dashboards
- Sales enablement and training on the CRM and other systems
- Setting up marketing automation software
Is RevOps New?
RevOps isn’t necessarily a new concept, but it’s becoming increasingly essential to meet the demands of today's market.
Due to a number of contributing factors, businesses are shifting from traditional sales operations to multi-functional revenue operations to help improve sales, marketing, and CS effectiveness, streamline operations, expand into new markets, and improve their bottom lines.
Working with sales, marketing, or customer success teams, revenue operations can help identify areas of friction in the buyer's journey and improve the process to increase conversations. By connecting the various functions of a business, RevOps can unify strategies to support overall business goals.
Who Is On The Revenue Operations Team?
There are a variety of revenue operations professionals, and the composition of each team depends on the size and structure of its business, the nature of its products and services, and the complexity of its sales process.
Let's outline some of the important members of the Revenue Operations team and their responsibilities.
Operations Managers
Depending on the size of the Revenue Operations team and other factors, Revenue Operations Managers roles may function differently for different companies and may even be the first team hire.
Operations Managers typically oversee either a team of Revenue Operations generalists or specialists and serve as the primary point of contact between other departments. They’re broadly responsible for delegating high-level tasks across department teams and presenting data insights to company executives.
Revenue Operations Managers usually perform the following tasks:
- Lead and delegate across the revenue operations team
- Identify revenue optimization opportunities such as improving efficiencies, market strategies, and sales processes
- Collaborate with company leaders to analyze, strategize, and implement business initiatives
- Work across sales, marketing, customer success, finance, and other teams to centralize information and data, share insights, and bridge operations
- Control data dashboards and develop revenue forecasts to communicate business goals with teams
- Oversee data and systems administration and support data quality, analysis, and reporting improvement
Sales Ops
Sales Operations teams are responsible for improving the overall productivity of the sales team. Depending on the business, this can mean managing sales data, sales enablement, and buyer opportunity stages as well as strategizing sales with attention to team structures, performance measurables, sales processes, and budgets.
Common Sales Ops processes include:
- Analyzing and developing sales processes to best balance sales team efficiencies and customer experience
- Forecasting future sales based on pipeline, team capacity, and other relevant data
- Managing sales team delegation to various channels, geographic areas, or other sales segments based on data-informed strategy
- Optimizing the process of transitioning new customer accounts from sales to customer success
- Developing and implementing training plans and other content with marketing teams
Marketing Ops
Broadly responsible for lead lifecycle management, Marketing Ops partners with marketing teams to support and optimize long-term strategies, campaigns, and processes.
In addition to creating workflow frameworks for how marketing teams function, Marketing Ops enable marketing technology solutions, report and analyze data, and evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.
Typical tasks include:
- Leading lifecycle management, including uploading lead lists, matching leads to existing customer accounts, lead scoring, and lead qualification
- Evaluating and developing lead nurture processes, outreach campaigns, and re-engagement campaigns
- Overseeing list management for marketing and other teams
- Managing automated marketing integrations and resolving technology debt issues
Customer Success Ops
Customer Success Operations is responsible for tapping into customer data to develop predictive strategies for enabling customer success. They often work on specific projects to identify and troubleshoot issues and improve the value that customers get from services or products. Customer Success also considers customer accounts and aspects such as churn, upsell, or renewal opportunities.
Main processes include:
- Enabling the customer success team by managing data cleanup, communications automation, and tool integration
- Identifying customer churn risks and revenue opportunities in CRM data
- Building customer health dashboards, pulling in metrics from across the tech stack
What Are The Key Metrics For Revenue Operations?
RevOps supports revenue growth by improving GTM team efficiency and productivity. They are not directly responsible for hitting revenue targets.
But you can assess the effectiveness of your RevOps team's efforts by looking at these KPIs:
- Annual recurring revenue: The measure of expected revenue by customers who buy products or services within a given year, most often used by subscription-based business models
- Forecast accuracy: Compares how close actual sales, leads, or other measurables come to projected forecasts
- Cost of customer acquisition (CAC): The total cost of sales and marketing efforts expended per customer acquired, showing whether the company has a profit-viable model
- Pipeline velocity: The rate at which leads move through a sales pipeline
- Sales cycle time: The average number of days a sales team takes to win an opportunity
- Customer churn: Measures how many customers will end a business relationship and the financial loss to the business’s bottom line
Grow Your Business With An Effective RevOps Team
With multiple sales channels, changing consumer behaviors, and shifting revenue models, a Revenue Operations team is more important for business growth than ever.
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