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's it all about, and what are revenue operations responsibilities? It's all about driving revenue through optimizing efficiency across sales, marketing, renewals, and expansion.
With a constantly shifting and unpredictable market, many companies are shifting toward centralized revenue operations to achieve critical business growth. Here we'll uncover how this overarching structure can optimize the stability and efficiency for each department, plus which team members are responsible for what.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations, also known as RevOps, refers to the end-to-end business process of growing predictable revenue across sales, marketing, and customer experience. It’s managing the structures that allow other employees to efficiently and effectively acquire customers and maintain their loyalty. In other words, RevOps is a systematic approach to all aspects of the customer journey, not just any one single tool.
To create a clear path and goal that helps the company earn predictable revenue and expand, RevOps must intersect and unify its marketing, sales, finance, customer experience, and other strategies. 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.
For instance, aligning marketing, sales, and customer experience goals can take the form of improved CRM functioning. RevOps can analyze the current effectiveness of its company’s CRM and create strategies for data management and customer lifecycles that take advantage of the marketing, sales, and customer experience teams’ abilities.
Is RevOps Somewhat New?
RevOps isn’t necessarily a new concept, but it’s becoming increasingly essential in today’s business market. Due to a number of contributing factors, businesses are shifting from traditional sales operations to multi-functional revenue operations to help improve sales and marketing effectiveness, streamline operations, expand into new markets, and improve their bottom lines.
For instance, many modern businesses use multiple sales channels and revenue models such as traditional sales, eCommerce services, one-time sales, and subscriptions. With these varying revenue points, businesses have a greater need for a revenue operations team that can target and optimize each point.
Modern consumer behaviors are likewise shifting, with buyers researching companies and their products more in-depth and considering company values such as social responsibility, sustainability, and transparency. In turn, these shifts influence the way businesses engage with and gain loyalty from customers. Working with marketing or customer success teams, revenue operations can help develop effective strategies that best respond to consumer behaviors and values.
In today’s competitive and data-driven context, researching and analyzing consumer behaviors, forecasting revenue, customer growth and retention opportunities, and other data are further driving the need for revenue operations. 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.
For example, some companies opt to compose a Revenue Operations team of generalists who often have backgrounds across a variety of departments. These generalists have diverse skill sets gained from hands-on experiences and can navigate a dynamic business environment. In comparison, Revenue Operations specialists fill specific gaps in operation needs, such as marketing, sales, or customer success.
Let's outline some of the important members of the Revenue Operations team.
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
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:
- Developing internal guides for customer success
- Enabling the customer success team by managing data cleanup, communications automation, and tool integration
- Identifying and analyzing post-sales customer lifecycle touchpoints
- Identifying customer churn risks and revenue opportunities
- Recording opportunities and notes from customer communications
What Are RevOps Team Responsibilities?
In summary, Revenue Operations is responsible for aligning sales, marketing, and customer success operations across the full customer life cycle. In doing so, it can keep teams accountable and united toward overall revenue goals as well as improve operational efficiency to drive revenue growth.
The key responsibilities of Revenue Operations 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
What Are The Key Metrics For Revenue Operations?
RevOps is tasked with driving revenue, growth, and customer retention. Although there’s numerous metrics Revenue Operations use to strategize business goals, these critical business drivers are usually analyzed through the following key metrics:
- Win rates: The number of closed opportunities won, indicating the success rate of the sales team
- Cost of customer acquisition: 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
- 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
- Renewals and upsells: The rate at which customers renew or increase their services
- Customer churn: Measures how many customers will end a business relationship and the financial loss to the business’s bottom line
- Customer lifetime value: The total value a business receives from its average customer throughout the relationship
- Forecast accuracy: Compares how close actual sales, leads, or other measurables come to projected forecasts
Grow Your Business With An Effective RevOps Team
With multiple sales channels, changing consumer behaviors, and shifting revenue models, Revenue Operations are more important for business growth than ever. To optimize your processes and align your teams across business goals, subscribe to the RevOps Team newsletter and find all the tips and strategies you need to succeed.