Revenue operations is a rising star in the world of business. Often defined as a business process that drives predictable revenue by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success, revenue operations is a newer function that Gartner predicts will exist at 75% of the world’s highest growth companies by the year 2025.
Through streamlining operations and prioritizing the customer experience, revenue operations helps to combat revenue growth stall and counter the silo mentality. It exists to prioritize the full customer lifecycle and does so by equipping teams with insight into their unique journeys through product usage data and analytics. Revenue operations staff often exist in multiple departments, from enablement to insights teams.
With its rapid growth and impressive capabilities, it is increasingly necessary to have a revenue operations team in 2022 and beyond. But in spite of the growing reputation of RevOps, teams may still experience difficulties when it comes to implementation because it demands change to routines they are used to following. This brief guide outlines three different ways a rev ops team optimizes sales processes to help you overcome inertia and make the case for RevOps at your company.
1. Revamp Existing Sales Strategies
Whether they’re looking at your company’s website, reading a whitepaper, or signing up for a sales demo, buyers aren’t evaluating the performance of your company’s marketing, sales, and customer success teams in isolation — they’re experiencing it all as a holistic journey.
Revenue operations brings all of your company’s functions together and makes it easy to deliver these integrated customer experiences. The team’s ownership of critical sales technology and analytics makes it a natural catalyst for alignment. Successfully implemented, rev ops teams can bring marketing, sales, and customer success together to agree on shared goals — and the processes that will help them meet those goals.
With agreement established across the revenue teams, revenue operations further improves sales strategies by surfacing critical performance data and pinpointing areas for improvement. Rev ops help marketing, sales, and customer success see the same data in the same way, building a more consistent and unified view of revenue team performance across the business.
By bringing revenue teams into agreement on shared performance metrics and goals, the revenue operations team drives the alignment needed across sales, marketing, and customer success to deliver the seamless end-to-end experiences that buyers have come to expect today.
2. Set Accurate Sales Goals
The revenue operations team makes the data that matters visible and accessible. With this improved insight, revenue teams can see what they are trying to achieve and understand how their efforts play a part with greater clarity. RevOps also standardize metrics across the company, laying the groundwork for revenue teams to set shared goals and strategize with each other on how to achieve them. Setting realistic goals and then later assessing how revenue teams met or missed these goals helps further optimize processes.
Improving the accessibility, clarity, and accuracy of important performance data paves the way for better planning in the future, as well. Understanding the state of the business helps revenue teams pursue the best deals and adapt to shifts in market dynamics with more agility. With improved forecasts, businesses with rev ops teams are better equipped to make strategic decisions and seek out new revenue opportunities when the time is right.
3. Optimize the Sales Tech Stack
A central charter of revenue operations is to take the disparate toolsets of sales, marketing, and customer success teams and combine them into one harmonious whole that allows for accurate reporting, analysis, and forecasting. RevOps can also introduce new technology that empowers revenue teams to work more efficiently and effectively. Three categories in particular — automation, sales enablement, and intelligence — offer tools that aid RevOps teams in improving sales processes.
Automation
Automation helps sales reps engage with leads, log deals, and follow-up faster by smoothing out the process and allowing reps to do tasks smoothly. Within the automation category resides technology like automatic data entry, task schedulers, chatbots, billing, and more. Automation is not for individual duties; it optimizes processes on a holistic scale. Beyond just a single app, the process of automation can manifest in a unified tech stack that provides transparency, allocates resources, illuminates potential revenue risks, and increases collaboration between departments.
Sales Enablement
Sales enablement — or the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training they need to effectively engage buyers — acts as a bridge between revenue teams. With its plethora of functions, SE reduces friction in the sales process for reps, allowing them more time to focus on what matters: their customers and revenue.
Enablement is increasingly viewed as a core partner for any successful rev ops team. Rev ops can also bring enablement practices to other departments to increase their learning and improve their performance through effective training. Combining sales enablement with rev ops means that there is a sustainable focus on customer experience as interdepartmental teams are united by similar training, tools, and goals.
Intelligence Systems
AI-based software systems are a popular approach to analyzing data and determining how to engage leads. RevOps has the advantage of presenting the perfect nexus point for different intelligence systems to meet and provide teams with unique strategies to increase their success rate. One such tool is revenue intelligence, an AI-fuelled process that provides real-time data to customer-facing reps. By analyzing sources like content downloads, deal progression, answer rates, and conversation analytics, AI identifies trends that can maximize revenue. Revenue intelligence increases sales productivity as reps can analyze buyer behavior and directly identify which contacts are likely to respond.
Under the umbrella of revenue intelligence, deal intelligence software analyzes data across customer-facing teams, then gathers it in one place to make it available for everyone in the company. Deal intelligence provides insight on engagement with prospective buyers, making the process clearer for the RevOps team on who to contact and how to adapt their communication style. Internally, deal Intelligence breaks down the barriers between teams by coordinating information and standardizing business metrics. As a result, sales and marketing alignment increases from this collaboration and transparency. With better sales and marketing alignment, the right customers can be engaged more frequently.
The world of sales is constantly changing, and so are the needs of buyers. With their expertise in setting strategy, forecasting business performance, and integrating sales tech stacks, RevOps teams are perfectly positioned to prepare sales and marketing teams to engage customers. By optimizing sales processes, rev ops teams ensure that revenue teams are better prepared for future changes and know how to channel their growth and productivity into actions that are fulfilling for their customers — and their company.
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