An Introduction To RevOps For Small Business
No matter how large or successful a company is, there’s always some room for improvement—just ask Air France/KLM Group, which lost 23% of its revenue in 2021. Enter RevOps for small business, an approach that drives revenue growth by aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service activities. Revenue operations isn’t a magic wand that makes money appear whenever you wave it, but it’s a great way to increase transparency and prevent critical details from falling through the cracks.
At the RevOps Team, we specialize in helping businesses of all sizes maximize their revenue and tighten up their internal processes. We put together this guide to help you understand what RevOps is, why it’s beneficial for small businesses, and how you can implement it in your own organization. So grab a coffee and settle in, because we're about to grow your company’s revenue and increase efficiency.
What Is Revenue Operations?
Many companies have separate departments for sales, marketing, and customer service. Employees in each department go about their business, blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the rest of the office. That’s a problem.
Why? Because it creates little “silos” of people who are focused on achieving departmental goals instead of working together to achieve company goals. For example, customer service may be focused solely on reducing their average call times, while marketing is more worried about improving the company’s email click-through rate.
When sales teams, marketing teams, and customer service teams work in silos, it’s also more difficult to deliver an excellent customer experience. Salespeople tell a customer one thing, customer service tells them something else, and everyone ends up stressed.
At the organizational level, this traditional approach to business also makes it more difficult to maximize revenue and minimize expenses. If employees in one department don’t know what employees in other departments are doing, they don’t have all the information they need to make wise decisions.
The Solution: RevOps
Revenue operations, or RevOps, is a strategy designed to break down interdepartmental silos, increase transparency, and maximize a company’s revenue potential. It does so by integrating the efforts of the sales, marketing, and customer success teams while also ensuring that sales and finance have access to the same data, promoting collaboration.
Is RevOps Relevant For A Startup?
If you run a sole proprietorship, you may not need a RevOps strategy. After all, you don’t have to worry about what other departments are doing if you’re the only person involved in the business. Startups with a handful of employees, though, are likely to benefit.
Here are some signs you should develop a RevOps strategy for your small business:
- Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams aren’t aligned.
- Employees are confused by your company’s workflows.
- Your tech stack is nonexistent or full of bugs.
- You don’t have a CRM system to keep track of customer data.
- You have a CRM system, but no one is using it.
3 Benefits Of RevOps For Small Business
Adopting a RevOps strategy has many potential benefits. It won’t turn your business into a cash-generating machine overnight, but it can help you streamline your marketing and sales operations, eliminate inefficiencies, and increase your revenue over time.
Predictable Business Growth
It’s tough to run a business when you never know how much money you’re going to make from one month to the next. Some industries are even worse than others when it comes to predictability. If you sell Christmas-related products, for example, your team probably works like mad during the fourth quarter and then has much less work to do during the other 9 months of the year.
When you can’t count on a certain amount of revenue each month, it’s difficult to make decisions related to marketing, sales, manufacturing, and product development. After all, you need to keep some money in the bank to keep the lights on and cover other business expenses. You don’t want to spend $50,000 on a new machine in February and have your revenue drop by 30% in March.
A good RevOps strategy allows you to scale your business, resulting in more predictable revenue growth.
Better Team Alignment
Remember when we said silos are bad for business? We meant it. RevOps provides greater transparency, enhancing collaboration and giving team members a more complete view of the business. Here’s an example:
Imagine you have one employee responsible for finding leads and another employee in charge of following up with those leads. Now think about what would happen if they never talked to each other or asked each other questions about their work. Neither one would ever get the feedback needed to improve lead quality or convert more leads into sales, and your revenue would suffer.
A good RevOps strategy uses dashboards and other tools to make sure employees have access to sales, marketing, and customer support data. When everyone is on the same page, they can make better decisions.
Higher Customer Retention
Although RevOps relies heavily on automation, it makes it easier to a add personal touch to customer interactions. For example, your sales team can share information with your onboarding specialist, resulting in a customized onboarding experience for each client.
RevOps also gives team members access to information from past telephone calls, emails, and in-person encounters, enabling them to provide better service. Have you ever had to make multiple phone calls about the same issue, only to repeat the same information over and over again to different customer service agents? What a pain! With RevOps, every team member has a complete view of the customer lifecycle, making it easy to get up to speed within a few seconds of answering the phone.
As a result, one of the main benefits of implementing a RevOps strategy is higher customer retention rates. It costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, so reducing churn helps maximize your revenue and keep your business expenses in check.
How To Implement Revenue Operations
Okay, you’re convinced that RevOps has some merit. Now what? Put together a RevOps team and follow these steps.
Audit the Customer Journey
First, audit every aspect of the customer journey to identify critical pain points. As you conduct your audit, make sure that customers move through the buying process in a way that makes sense. Look for ways to optimize your website traffic and increase conversion rates.
Build and Map Your Strategy
As a quick refresher, a go-to-market team is responsible for bringing new products to the marketplace. RevOps should support GTM members as they determine how much to charge for the product, which marketing channels to use, and which sales strategies are the most effective.
During this stage of the process, create a map to help your GTM with acquisition and onboarding, a dashboard to show bottlenecks or pain points, and task queues to keep track of inbound and outbound sales.
Optimize
RevOps isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach to growth. You need to set up regular meetings, identify bottlenecks, and plan for the continued adoption of the strategy. Your approach isn’t set in stone, so don’t be afraid to make changes based on employee feedback.
Building A Basic RevOps Tech Stack
To implement a solid RevOps strategy, you need a powerful, flexible tech stack. If you’re on a tight budget, start with these three tools and then expand as needed. You’ll have everything you need to capture leads, process sales transactions, and handle every other revenue process in your company.
CRM Software
Customer relationship management software, better known as CRM software, makes it easier to collect, store, retrieve, and analyze data. Since RevOps aims to align the activities of several departments, you need CRM software to give team members insight into what their colleagues are doing. Why? Because it increases transparency, enabling each department to make better decisions.
Here’s an example. If a customer gets behind on their payments, it doesn’t make sense to have your sales team call and try to upsell them on a service plan or product accessory. But what if finance never tells sales that the customer is behind? Your salespeople won’t have the information they need to manage their time effectively.
CRM systems also increase efficiency, one of the most important RevOps objectives. If employees are using four or five tools for different aspects of their jobs, they’re wasting a lot of time. CRM software combines almost everything you need in one place. Salesforce and Hubspot are two of the most popular CRM systems on the market.
Revenue Intelligence Software
Revenue intelligence software makes it easy to capture sales transactions and help salespeople anticipate what their customers need. The right software package may also help you speed up the sales cycle, making your revenue more predictable. Some of your options for revenue intelligence software include Revenue.io, Hubspot Sales Software, Salesforce, and SalesLoft.
Project Management Tools
Project management tools provide a big-picture view of what’s happening with every project in your company. Instead of wondering how a project is going or worrying that a colleague will miss an important milestone, team members can use these tools to delegate tasks, set deadlines, estimate project costs, and identify potential pitfalls.
If you don’t have some type of project management tool in place, check out Asana or Basecamp. monday.com also offers project management tools as part of its all-in-one platform.
Metrics To Measure RevOps Success
Once you implement your RevOps strategy, it’s important to assess the results so you can determine if you need to make changes. Make sure you keep track of these metrics:
- Revenue growth vs. churn: Revenue growth tells you how much revenue increased or decreased within a certain time frame. Churn tells you the percentage of customers who stopped using your product during a specific period.
- Customer acquisition cost: CAC describes how much money you spend to acquire a new customer.
- Customer lifetime value: CLV, also known as net customer worth, helps you estimate how much money you’ll bring in from each customer for as long as they maintain a relationship with your business.
- Conversion rate: CVR tells you what percentage of visitors took a desired action when visiting one of your web pages. That desired action could be clicking a link, signing up for a free trial, downloading a free e-book, or making a purchase.
Join the RevOps Revolution
If you’ve been struggling to align your sales, marketing, and customer success efforts, now is the time to map out a RevOps strategy and encourage your team members to embrace it. The RevOps Team is here to support you at every step of the implementation process, so subscribe to our newsletter for valuable tips, tools and techniques.