9 RevOps Best Practices To Unlock Your Business Growth Potential
More than 60.2% of businesses have dedicated revenue operations, and 11% plan to introduce their own in the next year, proving that the RevOps model is here to stay. These businesses recognize the advantages of establishing a centralized revenue operations team that unites sales, marketing, and customer success under overarching organizational goals. With RevOps best practices in hand, you can streamline your operations to maximize efficiency and revenue.
As your business scales and becomes more complex, consider how revenue operations can support your business growth goals. Below, we'll get into more detail on how it all works.
What Is Revenue Operations?
RevOps is a management approach that supports the processes and systems related to the customer lifecycle and optimizes high-quality lead and revenue generation.
The purpose of RevOps is to increase end-to-end efficiency and performance across all relevant business teams, including sales, marketing, and customer success, by aligning them with overall business goals. It’s responsible for improving visibility between teams by effectively managing pertinent data, systems, processes, and other factors related to the customer lifecycle.
How Does Revenue Operations Work?
Revenue operations have three core components: people, processes, and data. It’s responsible for connecting teams around shared business goals, improving operational efficiencies, and leveraging technology to create a representation of your business and revenue.
Although the structure of your revenue operations team depends on the unique needs of your business, most teams include the following players:
- Marketing: Builds brand awareness, attracts leads, and develops customer relationships through personalized and authentic marketing efforts
- Sales: Engages with leads and customers to build customer relationships and ultimately close deals and sales
- Customer success: Manages retention efforts such as customer onboarding and support
- RevOps leadership: Operations managers responsible for owning the entire revenue process
Working with each of these teams, revenue operations optimizes the customer lifecycle by implementing and improving automation, data management, software integration, workflow management, and training. Revenue operations analyzes various aspects of the GTM engine to generate insights and KPIs about operational performance and revenue that inform overall customer lifecycle strategizing and team alignment.
5 Big Benefits Of A Strong RevOps Strategy
With an effective RevOps strategy, you can bring team members together to operate seamlessly toward shared business goals, driving overall growth and revenue up to three times faster than without. Below, find the key benefits of a strong RevOps strategy.
1. Alignment of Teams
A centralized RevOps team gives your business a unique view of its people, processes, and data, allowing it to spot misalignments and opportunities. By improving communication between teams and aligning them across shared goals, RevOps can eliminate team strategy conflicts and enable interdepartmental support as they work toward specific KPIs, such as building customer loyalty or growing a new product.
2. Breakdown of Data Silos
When teams use different software or databases, they create strict data silos that impose information barriers in the customer lifecycle. RevOps can break down these data silos and integrate analyses and insights across sales, marketing, customer success, and other teams. In addition to filling gaps in customer information, this shared data can enable a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and other success drivers, improving decision-making and informing strategies.
3. Improved Customer Journey and Retention
When teams are aligned under shared goals, they can work together to manage customer interactions and expectations consistently across the customer lifecycle. This translates to the optimization of each step of the customer journey through actions like:
- Aligned brand messaging and voice across teams
- Timely and relevant targeted marketing efforts
- Personalized sales outreach and improved sales processes
- Responsive and rapport-building customer success initiatives
Each of these actions addresses customer needs and can boost customer satisfaction and improve retention, building your business’s positive reputation and driving revenue from loyal customers.
4. More Sales and Revenue
Between e-commerce, third-party marketplaces, and subscription-based sales, modern businesses often employ a range of complicated sales channels and revenue models. RevOps helps manage these innovative functions, provides clear insights into overall revenue, and identifies disconnects in lifecycles.
For instance, RevOps can enact accurate and automatic data flow between sales and finance to ensure that salespeople don’t try to upsell a customer who’s currently behind on payments. With data and processes properly aligned, teams can function smoothly and accurately focus their conversion efforts, ultimately driving more sales and revenue.
5. Predictable Growth
Revenue operations can provide comprehensive and data-driven insights that enable your business to easily predict growth and revenue potential. By integrating technology, using accurate metrics, and synchronizing teams, RevOps allows your business to efficiently anticipate and respond to market changes.
Revenue Operations Best Practices
Effective revenue operations requires strategic management and ongoing efforts to maximize its potential. Regardless of your business model, here are some revenue operations best practices that can help your business streamline processes, boost productivity, and drive revenue.
Ensure Your Data Is Accurate and Usable
Inaccurate data isn’t just a headache; it can lead to frustrated teams, poor customer experiences, improperly executed strategies, and other serious issues within your business. Accurate and accessible data, however, can unlock powerful insights and streamline communication and information across your teams.
To maintain accurate and usable data, ensure your business has systems and SaaS software in place to manage relevant data, such as CRMs, EPMs, and ERPs. Certain apps can impose data-quality standards to guarantee the accuracy, and integrating software together allows for automated and real-time data updates and analysis. Using a RevOps analytics platform, you can create dashboards to help teams visualize and use data effectively.
Understand the Company’s Revenue Goals
RevOps functions as the link between all other business teams and are responsible for aligning them with business goals.
With respect to prioritizing the sales funnel, revenue operations should define business revenue targets and divide them into key metrics of success such as customer churn, customer lifetime value, and cost of acquisition. Define revenue targets based on data such as sales cycle length, revenue growth over time, and other historical data sets.
By understanding goals and defining KPIs, revenue operations can communicate to teams how their work contributes to company goals. For example, cost per customer acquisition helps marketing teams understand the return on investment of marketing efforts and how that relates to your business’s bottom line.
Align Departmental Incentives
Rather than pitting teams against each other, align team incentives toward overall business goals. Marketing should understand they’re responsible for providing qualified leads to sales, sales reps should convert new customers, and customer success must build loyalty and drive retention.
By aligning teams on shared incentives, you ensure that they understand how their contributions impact the business and promote support between departments.
Agree On and Adopt the Best Tech Stack
Whether CRMs, automated marketing software, or other apps, a tech stack can make or break your revenue operations efforts.
While there are many tools that specialize in certain tasks, using irrelevant or simply too many tools can overcomplicate your tech stack, impose unnecessary costs, and undermine your efficiency. For instance, too much automated tech often can’t match the dynamic needs of a small start-up.
There’s no one-size-size-fits-all tech stack, but evaluating your current tools can help you identify functionality gaps and streamline your tools. Keep updated on the latest technology and continually assess your stack to ensure maximum efficiency.
Offer a Solid Sales Compensation Plan
A solid sales compensation plan is an important part of motivating your team, and quotas are the first step in constructing compensation plans. In addition to historical sales data, revenue operations can pull information from customer success about the most profitable types of customers. By analyzing this information, you can create realistic quotas with specific sales goals.
In turn, these quotes can translate to compensation plans that align with your business’s overall goals. Make sure to keep compensation plans as simple as possible while accounting for sales disparities across various products or services.
Provide Effective Sales Enablement Content
Sales enablement content is responsible for providing your sales teams with resources that support conversion goals. This includes buyer personas, sales analytics, sales tools, and other content that helps the sales team engage with leads and customers. Revenue operations may also create and distribute content to sales teams and train them on products and services.
By providing sales enablement content, revenue operations help align sales, marketing, and other teams and ensure a seamless customer journey. For example, marketing can define the business’s buyer persona so that sales can better understand how to engage their customers.
Ask for Customer Experience Feedback
Customer experience is directly correlated with revenue, and creating a customer-centric experience can translate to revenue growth.
To better understand the customer journey and identify opportunities to improve the customer experience, implement a review methodology that leverages revenue operations and your customer success team’s knowledge to collect insights. Implement a customer experience strategy that regularly collects and analyzes information, such as how customers interact with your teams, products, website, ads, and other factors.
You can include feedback from sources such as:
- Online reviews
- Social listening
- Customer feedback surveys
- Customer support interactions
Select Which Metrics to Measure (In Advance)
Metrics are crucial for generating relevant data and evaluating the success of your strategies, but the right metrics to use vary between businesses. While there are many metrics to pick from, consider a few that analyze areas most important for assessing performance and efficiency. Select metrics in advance so you don't miss out on feedback or opportunities.
Some of the top metrics include:
- Annual recurring revenue
- Monthly recurring revenue
- Cost per acquisition
- Sales cycle time
- Customer churn
- Customer lifetime value
- Renewal rate
- Forecasting accuracy
Always Continue to Optimize
A successful revenue operations team can recognize mistakes or failures and adapt to new strategies. Use revenue operations data to gain insights about customer behavior, efficiency opportunities, and process weaknesses to build stronger systems.
Implement RevOps Best Practices
When managed with best practices, RevOps can be a powerful part of your business. By leveraging accurate data, insightful metrics, and unifying company goals, you can maximize the efficiency and growth of your business.
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