Revenue Ops - Maximize your revenue

Revenue Operations Goals

Revenue Operations Goals for a Great New Year

  • Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

It’s been a crazy year! For some, that may be an understatement. Tons of change, tight deadlines, and an unpredictable business environment make company growth and optimization even more challenging. With you in mind, we created some helpful revenue operations goals to make the new year special!

Improve your lead conversion process

Closing deals is exciting. It’s what everyone on Slack is talking about, and it keeps the lights on in the building. But what about the leads? An unsung hero that usually goes under the radar or, even worse, forgotten. This lack of attention to the top funnel results in poor lead quality, which translates to lots of extra work for sales and missed opportunities!

Improving lead quality is not magic. It starts with a well-thought-out plan and the commitment of your entire team. Then, with a strategic mission in place, you will be ready to implement a funnel that nurtures leads and captures vital information. There are multiple paths you could go down with this process, and they should all involve customized automation and efficient use of technology. If this sounds ideal, but you need help figuring out where to start, Revenue Ops LLC is here to help. 

Build a client education plan

How are you currently connecting with your customer base? Do you only hear from them when something goes wrong? You’re not alone if you can’t answer either question or are just too busy to think about them. Too many companies put so much effort and resources into getting their clients and so little into keeping them. Not only do existing customers cost less to maintain than finding new ones, but happy ones will tell others about how great you are. They can be your best sales reps!

A significant step to building this dynamic customer relationship is an engagement plan. That may sound complex and overwhelming, but it can be as simple as a monthly email focused on company updates. Regular communication is a perfect way to keep your customer base informed and excited about why they chose to buy or work with you. If this is already something you do, ask yourself how you can improve your engagement. Maybe it’s a blog or customer focus group. Then, commit to improving your customer relationships in the new year. 

Integrate Salesforce with important applications

Is something missing from your Salesforce implementation? Could you save time by connecting it to another system? Salesforce has created an ecosystem where external applications can integrate into an existing Salesforce instance. For example, you can gather feedback from your clients with your favorite survey application without worrying about transferring the data. Or, you can arrange for calls made through the Teams telephone software to be logged to the corresponding account automatically. Maybe you could streamline the billing process by creating a workflow to send a physical invoice to a client with the click of a button.

Integrations can transform the way your business operates and make your life way easier. But, of course, the setup will take time, and we strongly recommend having an expert lead the implementation. So don’t be shy if you have questions about what this could look like for your team.

Optimize and automate the customer onboarding journey

The start of any relationship is always exciting. You’re setting expectations and likely figuring out whether it will be long-term. The customer onboarding process is not much different. It’s a crucial time when both parties are laying the foundation for how the journey will play out. Unfortunately, one wrong step or missed email can lead it down the wrong path. So use the new year to improve customer onboarding and eliminate the possibility of human error.

A great way to do this is through intelligent automation. For example, by using a closed-won email journey that automatically fires when an opportunity hits a specific status, you will know that your customers are receiving the necessary information. Plus, by taking advantage of an email platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the 2023 customer engagement plan we discussed above will be a piece of cake. Sounds good? Our team has plenty more custom ideas to share!

How is this year going to be different?

The end of the year can be a time for reflection and looking forward to what’s to come. Unfortunately, that can bring lofty goals which quickly become unattainable such as reducing the sales cycle, drinking less caffeine, doing a cartwheel, etc. In addition, high expectations contribute to added stress for the individuals tasked with achieving them. Often these goals are abandoned because of more pressing matters.

That’s where Revenue Ops LLC comes in. Our experienced specialists will collaborate with you to create a scope of work and then lead the strategic implementation. By working with a team like ours, you can have peace of mind that you will achieve your revenue operations goals for the new year. If you have questions about how to maximize your revenue or want to hear more about what we do, feel free to schedule some time to talk!

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Improve Your Bottom Line

Five Ways Revenue Ops LLC Improves Your Bottom Line

  • Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Sly and the Family Stone said it best, “different strokes for different folks.” Just like people, every company has unique needs. Maybe your sales cycle is very long, there is a disconnect between marketing and operations, or your customer relationship management (CRM) system isn’t satisfying your expectations. Businesses have areas of improvement that, when addressed, can unleash a wave of success.

Revenue Ops LLC embraces this reality when helping clients optimize growth. Our team of experienced consultants takes an individual approach with each project, crafting a plan of action to improve your bottom line. From mapping your revenue roadmap to helping you identify new opportunities, Revenue Ops LLC is committed to boosting your business performance. 

Improve Your Technology Stack

The technology your business relies on should be your best friend. It should work the way you expected from the beginning. But often, that’s not the case – these expensive tools are either not meeting your expectations or are not ready for the growth your team envisions. Deciding on what to do next can be challenging and requires in-depth technical experience. The cost, time, effort, and expertise required can make it impossible to handle internally. The Revenue Ops LLC team has specialists with first-hand knowledge of the tech landscape and how to help you move toward growth. They will do the heavy lifting while your team focuses on what they do best.

Maybe you know exactly what technology your business needs, but you don’t know how to make it happen. For example, your team just decided that Salesforce is the CRM that fits your growth needs, but you want to get up and running as soon as possible. Here is where Revenue Ops LLC comes into the picture. Our specialists will meet with your team and create an action plan that aligns with your goals and requirements. Consultants will work with your company during the implementation to educate and prepare your staff for success. It’s worth noting that Revenue Ops LLC not only works on Salesforce installations – we specialize in SalesLoft, Google Analytics, and Zapier, to name a few. Check out our technology page to get a complete rundown!

Map Your Revenue Operations Roadmap

Clear and attainable goals have proven to increase both individual and team performance. They provide a measuring stick on a weekly/monthly basis and create invaluable intrinsic motivation. So why doesn’t everyone utilize them? The simple answer is that it’s pretty challenging. Effective goal setting demands a thorough understanding of your team’s data and an accurate view of the journey ahead. Before you set anything in stone, you should have a firm grasp on the critical factors – sales cycles, lead conversion rates, cyclical tailwinds, etc. – that will heavily influence the goal. After that, getting the input of those whose job is to hit the goal is vital. If this process sounds overwhelming, we might know a team that can help.

Just as crucial as practical goal setting is a clear map of how to reach them. There are few things worse for a sales team than setting lofty goals and having no tangible roadmap to reach the destination. What is the team going to do each week/month? How specifically is that any different from what is currently happening? Where do you want your business to be next year, and how do you get there? Having the answers to these questions will change the way your year plays out. Getting where you can be confident in your roadmap takes time and expertise. It should involve a deep dive into your data and a complete understanding of the current business environment. Working with an experienced consultant will remove any guesswork and provide you with the skill the project demands.

improve your bottom line

Full Funnel Optimization

The customer journey is the most critical path for any business. After all, why does a company exist if not for the consumer? But too often, certain stages of the journey become the sole focus while others are severely neglected. This common phenomenon leads to high churn, employee turnover, and a dissatisfied customer base. All of which points to poor business performance and a dangerous path forward. Sorry, that was dramatic but very realistic. 

So, what would Revenue Ops LLC do in this situation? Good question. First and foremost, a top to bottom business breakdown is where they start. Next, you need to clearly and concisely understand your strengths and weaknesses. This involves specialists with years of industry experience working closely with your team to develop a comprehensive picture of your company’s current situation. We need to know what the data is saying! With this crucial information, the next step is implementing the necessary changes aimed at funnel optimization. Our goal is to bring lasting change that allows for sustainable growth and consistent customer satisfaction. We apply a holistic approach that centers around your team. 

Improve Processes Through Wise Automation

Are you unhappy with your lead conversion numbers? Do manual processes take up chunks of your team’s workday? Suppose you answered yes to any of these questions, or it’s been a while since you examined your business’ overall operations. In that case, you likely could benefit from working with a revenue operations consultant. The goal of improving processes starts with harnessing data. We will identify the stages of a specific process that need improvement based on the numbers.

While automating everything is the simple, trendy answer, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one. All too often, over-excited teams with good intentions will go overboard with Salesforce automations, creating a complicated system that is harder to use than before. At Revenue Ops LLC, we pride ourselves on creating streamlined processes that use automation to enhance the user experience. It should be something that reduces time and is easy for users to adopt. Determining when and how to make the appropriate automation demands the experience of years in the “trenches” combined with technical know-how. The bottom line is that you need a team that has done it before.

Improve Your Bottom Line

Bringing in an outside consultant is never an easy decision. Where do you start and who do you go with are just the first questions you need to answer, not to mention the cost of everything. Revenue Ops LLC knows where you’re coming from and has designed a no-strings-attached discovery session to make your life easier. It’s a great opportunity to get your questions answered and see if our plan fits your business. 

RevOps is a journey based on optimizing your team for growth, and you must have cohesion plus impeccable communication with anyone you bring in to help. If any of the areas mentioned above hit home, or you just want to talk, schedule a time right now

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Demystifying RevOps

Revenue Operations Doesn't Have To Be Scary

  • Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is often associated with mysterious, vague, and even ominous connotations, but that doesn’t need to be the case. The term simply focuses on aligning your sales, marketing, and finance functions. No tricks; only treats here! Let’s demystify RevOps.

So what is the role of RevOps consultants? Revenue operation specialists act as neutral parties who review your business operations from a systems-thinking perspective to make decisions that will drive growth. They work closely with your internal team to create an individualized plan and lead the rollout of the necessary changes. Let’s take a look at some examples of RevOps in action.

Salesforce Implementations That Make You Shake Your Boo-ty

Salesforce is a must-have for companies looking to grow and maintain sanity. This customer relationship management (CRM) system can do virtually everything. In addition, its marketing and customer service capabilities are pretty remarkable. 

But, before you can utilize it, you must implement it. Salesforce implementation entails a ton of experience and technical know-how, which is where we come in. The role of consultants is to create a plan of action that aligns with the customer’s goals and then lead a seamless implementation. The team at Revenue Ops LLC is known for smooth Salesforce rollouts thanks to effective communication and impeccable attention to detail. We pride ourselves on answering all your team’s questions and instilling confidence in the system.

Spooky Good Strategic Consulting Support

Is your company missing its sales targets? Or are you struggling even to set realistic goals?

Understanding RevOps can help! Practical goal setting starts with harnessing the power of data and combining it with an in-depth review of the current business environment. Before any benchmarks are finalized, these two areas must be thoroughly considered. 

Goal setting is just the first step since it’s the driving force of the results. Talented operation consultants can help you see potentially overlooked opportunities and chart the path forward. 

Demystifying RevOps Managed Services

Managed Services That Will Scare Your Problems Away

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone on-call who can quickly troubleshoot things when they break? By partnering with a RevOps team, you can have peace of mind knowing that you’re not alone in times of trouble. A group of experienced specialists who have a detailed understanding of your infrastructure can quickly jump into the fire and work to resolve the issue at hand. As a result, you can finally put those fears around a technical problem causing your business to shut down to rest.

But it doesn’t end there! You can also leverage managed services to tackle complex projects or business needs you’d like specialists to handle. Rely on experts to make your life easier and push your company forward!

Squash Your Goals With Revenue Ops LLC

Partnering with a RevOps team can revitalize your business and unlock untapped growth opportunities. We will demystify RevOps and help you strategize and implement a plan to maximize your revenue.

The journey with Revenue Ops LLC starts with a no-strings-attached discovery call. During that session, we’ll discuss your objectives and current operations and address any questions or concerns you might have. Then, suppose you decide to move forward. In that case, a team of dedicated specialists will work with you throughout the process – from creating the scope of work to implementing the procedures and technology. 

With Revenue Ops LLC, you’ll get a team focused on communication and creating lasting improvements. Are you interested in hearing more? Contact us.

Implementing Salesforce Successfully

Things to Think about before Implementing Salesforce

  • Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Effective Salesforce rollouts require a well-crafted plan and careful execution. Implementations are intricate and demand a thorough knowledge of how the system works. As with everything, experience is vital to a smooth integration. This post is not meant to scare you but to equip your team for the journey ahead. Read on to learn more about what you should consider before implementing Salesforce. 

Salesforce is a powerful system that provides users with unparalleled capability. The tool is a must-have for any company looking to grow and stay connected. It’s so much more than your parents’ CRM – it’s a customer service tool, a help center, a marketing platform, etc. But as the saying goes, “with great power comes a great implementation.”

What Does Integration Look Like?

Like the kid in school who is friends with everyone, Salesforce plays well with external applications. From Dialpad to Adobe, you can easily access hundreds of apps through the Salesforce system.

Before you start the implementation, we recommend mapping out a complete list of integration needs. Make sure you know what you want and how the systems will communicate with each other. 

Pro Tip: Actual integrations take time and require technical expertise. While the DIY spirit is admirable, it usually doesn’t end well here.

How To Train the Team

Salesforce is not an autonomous vehicle; it requires someone to drive it. The driver here is your team, and as it takes time to learn how to be a good driver, Salesforce also has a bit of a learning curve. Therefore, helping users with best practices and terminology is crucial. The two questions you want to answer are:

  1. How are we going to train everyone? 
  2. Where can users go if they have questions?

It’s just as important to have an internal team trained and motivated to use Salesforce as it is to have the tool. Depending on your capacity, training can consist of anything from a series of teamwide meetings focusing on how the platform works to mandatory completion of Trailhead units. This Trailhead curriculum is a free resource created by Salesforce to educate users. It’s a great tool to introduce newcomers to the Salesforce ecosystem. In addition, training allows your team to get up and running on the platform quickly.

Your team should create a working vocabulary and an outline of best practices. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but an internal resource will help answer questions and reinforce standard operating procedures. It may sound like tedious work, but you’ll thank us later.

professional businesspeople

Internal Salesforce Resource

Who is going to be your Salesforce “person?” Who will be responsible when questions, problems, or recommendations arise? While Salesforce is an independent and self-sufficient application, you still need someone internally to oversee the day-to-day operations.

There are a few determining factors when assigning this responsibility. For example, an admin may be a good idea if you’re looking at running a large-scale operation with 50+ users. Admins usually come with a series of certificates and a wealth of knowledge about how the system should run. At the bare minimum, though, you will need someone internally who is comfortable setting up new users, editing fields, and ideally working with Flows. In addition, you’ll find an internal resource who can quickly troubleshoot and answer questions to be very efficient and productive.  

Choosing the Best Salesforce Implementation Partner 

Similar to the dating landscape, there are many options for finding a consultant to lead your implementation. On Google alone, you’ll find the names of 100+ businesses that say they are the best. This process can be confusing and frustrating unless you know what to look for in a partner. Arguably, experience and communication are the top qualities of a capable partner.

Has the company implemented Salesforce before? This is probably a good question when evaluating any business but so crucial here. A lot goes into implementation, and you really need to trust that the company knows what they’re doing. Before making a decision: 

  • Reach out to their references
  • Check their Salesforce Certifications
  • Read their case studies, if available

Communication is often overlooked, but it’s the key to any healthy business relationship. Because of the technical requirements and the level of customization of each Salesforce system, you must be comfortable with how the consultants communicate with you. For example, making sure the system works the way you planned and getting all your questions answered promptly are communication considerations. 

The Salesforce platform can transform your organization. But, before that can happen, the tool must be implemented appropriately. Getting to that place can be an uphill battle if you’re unprepared. Therefore, a comprehensive plan that outlines what happens before, during, and after the implementation is critical. In addition, working with the right consultant will make the transition as smooth and easy as possible. 

Our Revenue Ops, LLC team is committed to providing the best experience possible. We have a tried and true system for Salesforce implementations that starts with a complimentary discovery meeting to discuss your needs. Then we map out a plan with specific tasks and timelines to strategically incorporate Salesforce into your operations and tech stack. We take the time to review project progress and address any questions throughout the process.

If you want to discuss how we can help you to implement Salesforce successfully, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Schedule a free discovery session

Salesloft Solutions Partner Program

What the Salesloft Partner Program Means to Us

Salesloft recently announced a Solution Partner Program for companies that recommend and implement Salesloft tools to maximize revenue for their clients. We are thrilled that Revenue Ops LLC has achieved Select tier status within this partner program.  

We are excited about formally partnering with Salesloft. We’re very comfortable with the platform. It is our sales engagement software of choice when we’re working on improving our clients’ workflows.

This partnership uniquely positions us to have access to Salesloft resources. We are particularly excited about experiencing cutting-edge product feature releases. Salesloft is committed to providing enhancements that reflect current sales process trends. And, we’ve found them to be really good about responding to customer feature requests since they’re based on real-world use cases. 

We’re looking forward to being privy to future integration and implementation opportunities. We appreciate that improving an operational process does not necessarily mean installing completely new programs. Sometimes existing programs just need a little boost to make them more useful. Integrations enhance our strategic approach when developing the technology and workflows for our clients because it saves time when we implement existing applications to complement new software. It also streamlines the training and onboarding process. 

Ultimately the most significant benefit of this partnership is transferring all of these perks to our clients. So when you work with us, you can be confident that you’re receiving the highest level of service. 

Best Features of Salesloft

We think the biggest and best benefit of Salesloft is that it allows small but mighty teams like us to operate like a large, Fortune 500 company. There might be strength in numbers, but sometimes less is more. 

Thanks to the robust and intuitive nature of Salesloft, we can communicate at scale with our prospects and customers. These days, resources are scarce just about everywhere, and there isn’t enough time in the workday to accomplish everything we need to do. But, if we invest a little time in building relationships with our contacts by defining audience segments, configuring some preset messages, and establishing a reasonable distribution frequency, we can maintain top-of-mind exposure effectively and efficiently.

Salesloft provides the tools we need to automate our communications along with a high degree of personalization and customization. As a result, we can interact with our contacts strategically and regularly. In addition, Salesloft offers one-to-one SMS messaging capabilities and custom videos so that we can engage in direct but less invasive ways.

Salesloft also makes it easy to connect and scale our operations through integrations. Therefore, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when implementing new technology. Salesloft integrates seamlessly with a number of sales and marketing applications, including Salesforce.

As a Salesforce partner, we combine data from our CRM and sales engagement activities to paint a clear picture of our interactions. And we use the data to evaluate our tactics and optimize them accordingly. 

Salesloft Select Partnership

Salesloft Improves Our Operations

Salesloft is designed to help sales representatives be productive and focus on their regular sales tasks. They don’t have to be bogged down by mundane administrative tasks because Salesloft automates and synchronizes tasks like recording conversations, scheduling meetings, and designing and distributing reports. 

Sales representatives feel more organized and aware of their responsibilities. Salesloft makes it easy for them to understand where their contacts are within the sales process. And they can easily plan the next steps and follow-ups so that nothing falls through the cracks. 

From a customer experience perspective, Salesloft enables customer service representatives to stay on top of renewals to maximize revenue. Avoiding missed opportunities goes a long way to ensuring recurring earnings and maintaining customer satisfaction. In addition, positive experiences with customer service help to extend the customer lifecycle.

Why Salesloft

When considering a sales engagement platform, it’s impossible to ignore Salesloft. It’s a market leader, and for a good reason. Salesloft focuses solely on optimizing business development opportunities and streamlining the sales cycle.

We at Revenue Ops LLC are intentional about aligning with market leaders. Salesloft is recognized by G2, Forrester, and TrustRadius. We help our clients maximize their revenue and scale their business by working with best-in-class products.

We are an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping clients improve their performance. We apply our deep knowledge of CRM systems like Salesforce and sales enablement tools like Salesloft to optimize sales potential by stimulating and tracking customer interactions. Learn how we can help you implement a strategy to improve revenue operations and maximize your growth.

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Sales Enablement vs. Sales Operations

The Difference Between Sales Enablement and Sales Operations

Sales enablement, sales operations…sounds pretty similar, right? It’s actually pretty easy to confuse the two. Here are the most significant differences between sales enablement and sales operations. 

The key difference between sales operations and sales enablement is that sales operations focuses on the operational efficiency of the everyday business processes involved in selling (i.e., order management, forecasting). In contrast, sales enablement experts work directly with other teams to increase adoption within the organization by providing content, training, and support for their customers. 

Note: operational or technical account managers are a part of sales operations, whereas account executives or senior account managers can be considered as part of sales enablement even though they may not have direct reports under them. This distinction becomes more evident when they have a dedicated individual responsible for overseeing the training, onboarding, and support of their accounts.

Sales Enablement Roles and Responsibilities

  • Create, manage and distribute content
  • Train internal stakeholders on their products or services
  • Partner with marketing for campaign support
  • Develop supporting collateral to help internal teams sell better

Sales Operations Roles and Responsibilities

  • Order management
  • Forecasting
  • Technical account management
  • Classifying and adding new accounts
  • Workflows and approvals (pipeline development)

How are these roles similar? Both are responsible for creating, training, managing, and distributing the company’s product awareness. Plus, a good sales operations team should have a solid understanding of how sales enablement efforts directly relate to actual sales. And vice versa: sales enablement directly impacts operational efficiency when done correctly. For example, sales engineers can identify issues in your software and escalate them before customers contact the sales team.

Focus on What’s Best for Your Business

This distinction between sales enablement and sales operations matters because it helps each team focus on what’s best for their business.

Sales enablement focuses on delivering an engaging customer journey. Therefore the team works closely with marketing to provide content through email drip campaigns, interactive guides, and personalized user experiences.

On the other hand, sales operations will work closely with other teams like finance to identify opportunities for process improvement, including automating order management or improving forecasting accuracy.

Drive New Business Growth

Both roles are vital for driving new business growth – yet both still require additional tools to help them become even more efficient at their jobs (or turn you into a unicorn).

Sales Enablement: If you’re working on sales enablement, then the first thing you need is CRM. CRM gives your team one place to manage all of their customer interactions and information, including marketing campaigns, email drip programs, account plans, product launch schedules, and more.

Sales Operations: If you work in sales operations, then the next thing you’ll want after CRM is analytics. Salesforce Analytics Cloud lets you track company-wide trends so you can benchmark how much business your reps are driving overall vs. other companies in the industry. In addition, it comes with pre-built reports that help you visualize data to improve quotas or forecast accuracy.

Operations + Enablement = Sales Growth

These two roles work together to drive new business growth. But the right tools can take them from good to great.

The best part about having both solutions? You can use them together to measure shared metrics across the company. Here’s a quick example: Sales operations wants to track the number of demo requests made by reps, and sales enablement wants to track the number of demos completed. But instead of each team creating their own copy of these KPIs, they can simply create a custom report in Analytics Cloud that uses both sets of data – which means less time spent tracking down information and more time for analysis and action.

So if you’re trying to figure out how best to spend your budget this year, remember that there are two distinct yet equally important roles when it comes to driving business growth. Sales enablement focuses on customer engagement while sales operations helps teams become more efficient at their jobs – so make sure your tools reflect those priorities!

Best Tools to Consider

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud: The sales management platform that helps salespeople and sales operations teams become more efficient at selling.

2. Salesforce Analytics Cloud: The analytics platform that lets you measure and benchmark your company against other businesses in your industry and identify opportunities for improvement.

3. SalesLoft: Fully-automated outbound prospecting software that uses AI to generate personalized email campaigns, manage prospects from cold outreach all the way through to close.

4. InsideView: Helps sales and marketing teams quickly discover new prospects, prioritize them based on fit, and generate targeted lists for outreach.

5. HubSpot Sales: A platform that lets you manage all your contacts with automated workflows that easily move prospects through the funnel. It also makes it simple to create custom reports that help teams understand their data in context with overall company performance.

6. HubSpot Marketing: The marketing automation platform allows marketers to personalize each customer’s journey by integrating email, social media, paid advertising, and more.

7. Zapier: A web tool that makes it easy to build your own automated workflows between all of our apps without having to write any code.

8. FullContact: Helps sales reps quickly connect with new leads by automatically updating their contact profiles based on social media activity.

9. RingLead: Lets companies link contact data from third-party databases into Salesforce so they can get a complete view of not just who their existing customers are but also who they’ve had conversations with in the past (and might be interested in reaching out to again).

10. Rapportive: Allows you to see LinkedIn profiles within your inbox so you can make connections based on shared contacts.

The best software solutions for your business will depend on the size of your team and how you work together within each role (sales enablement vs. sales operations). However, most companies can benefit by having access to both types of tools because they focus on different aspects of growing revenue. With this distinction in mind, you can be sure to develop a complete and well-rounded sales stack that will help you increase your ROI and become a unicorn.

We at Revenue Ops LLC are happy to help you navigate sales operations and sales enablement software options and choose the right tool for your business. Let’s discuss your goals, obstacles, and vision to get started. 

Schedule a free discovery session

How Sales and Marketing Automation Improves Operations

Sales and Marketing Automation

It seems that we’re all doing more with less these days. There isn’t enough time and resources – human, material, capital, etc. – to do everything we need or want despite our best intentions. That’s when we might turn to technology to help us out. I’m specifically talking about sales and marketing automation. Creating a system that manages fundamental sales and marketing tasks takes us out of the weeds and makes us more mindful of and intentional with our customers.

We generally rely on automation to manage repetitive functions, including email communications, social media promotions, and digital advertising campaigns. By alleviating some of the responsibility of this work, we can focus on attracting and serving customers.

When it comes to automation, the best advice we can offer is to ask yourself this question: “Even though we CAN automate something, SHOULD we automate it?”

While the ability to create automation allows a marketing team to increase the amount of work that can be done without drastically increasing headcount, if we over automate the system and don’t have a solid understanding of how all of the automations interact with each other, there could be unintended consequences which could have a negative impact on the relationship we have with our prospects. For example, message fatigue can occur when too many messages are automatically sent to contacts.

Instead, by being thoughtful about what we’re looking to automate and why, we can ensure that the journey we’re building for our contacts is personalized and takes into consideration the types of messages they want to receive, along with a reasonable frequency for outreach.

Ideally, contacts will receive a customized journey through a mix of automated messages and manual touchpoints, leading to increased engagement and higher conversion rates. In addition, the marketing team will extend its reach and bring in more qualified leads by automating the appropriate tasks.

Automation and CRM

We can automatically send contacts to Salesforce, our customer relationship management (CRM) system, for the sales team to follow up accordingly. For the sales team to handle the vast quantity of leads assigned to them from marketing, we need to provide them with the tools to follow up adequately. Therefore, we can leverage sales enablement tools that allow the sales team to use pre-built, customizable templates to distribute personalized messages and content to prospects at scale. And, those communication activities can be automatically sent to the CRM, so the sales team doesn’t have to update contact records manually. 

The level of detail that we capture and share is outstanding. For example, our sales and marketing automation gives us visibility into what sales messaging is working best since we can track distribution quantities, opens, and click rates for each email campaign. In addition, we use dynamic fields to automatically help us personalize messages to the prospects, allowing us to send relevant messages at scale.

We enroll all of our prospects into a cadence, which automates the outreach timeline and notifies the sales rep when it’s time to complete a step like making a phone call or sending an email. In addition, the email templates in our system have dynamic tags embedded in them. As a result, the sales reps only need to press a few buttons to drip out thousands of emails from their inbox, one-by-one, instead of taking the time to send them individually. All that time saved allows them to focus on more revenue-generating activities.

Benefits of Sales and Marketing Automation

One of the most significant benefits of using a sales enablement tool is that the sales team can spend more time on high-value parts of their job, like building relationships with prospects and clients. All the while, the business still collects the necessary data and analytics needed to make data-driven decisions to optimize revenue. 

Generally, the sales staff feels more productive, which contributes to job satisfaction. Happy employees lead to higher employee engagement and retention numbers. The team feels successful as they’re helping boost ROI because they have the time to engage in revenue-driving activities instead of spending inordinate amounts of time manually entering data into a CRM system.

When our marketing and sales activities are automated, we can trust that our data and reporting are accurate and reliable. The system records when activities are taking place and schedules the next steps accordingly, thereby removing a lot of the manual work and eliminating errors.

From an administrative perspective, it’s easy to create reports and dashboards that show what types of activities the sales team members are doing due to the automation and whether it’s positively or negatively affecting sales. In addition, we can closely monitor what communications resonate well and adjust the messaging that the sales team relays.

From a marketing perspective, we can measure efficacy based on the first touch, even touch, and last touch attribution models. This framework allows us to see what marketing tactics work best to get the prospects in the door, which marketing activities they interacted with while in the prospect stage, and their last action before closing the deal. This information allows the marketing team to streamline their messaging to eliminate what isn’t working and double down on what is.

See how we helped Soil Connect improve its sales operations with automation.

Are you interested in improving your operational efficiency and maximizing revenue? Then, schedule a free consultation with one of our sales and marketing automation experts to learn how to implement automation the right way.

Schedule a free consultation

Sales Enablement Software for your Sales Team

Consider Some Sales Enablement Software for your Sales Toolbox

An effective sales enablement strategy requires a team effort to optimize revenue by providing timely, personalized resources, such as valuable content and relevant educational materials, to potential clients or customers throughout their buying journey. In addition, your enablement team may be responsible for creating deliverables such as case studies, sales scripts, and onboarding programs, so you’ll want to equip them with the right sales enablement software to serve your clients’ needs best.

A wide variety of sales enablement tools are readily available, but you’ll want to evaluate several options to ensure a good fit with your sales team.  

Zendesk Sell

Key features: 

  • Offers contact, content, and performance management capabilities as well as content delivery and presentation tools.
  • Automatically tracks customer interactions.
  • Minimizes administrative works by managing tasks such as logging sales activities, organizing and storing contact details, and coordinating lead follow-ups.

Integrations: Slack, Squarespace, and Mailchimp

Pricing: Monthly subscription model

Users: Companies with 20 to 250 salespeople

Seismic

Key features: 

  • Systematically recommends relevant content to sales reps so that they can leverage the most effective materials at every phase of the buying process.
  • Customizes collateral according to the sales rep’s position and the products they sell.
  • Offers archiving, automated publishing, collaboration tools, content delivery and discovery, audit trails, and more. 
  • Great mobile experience.

Pricing: Monthly subscription; prices vary

Users: Large companies; clients include IBM, Verizon, American Express, and Philips

Highspot

Key features:

  • Organizes large volumes of content to share internally.
  • Offers content management, full-text search, text editing, collaboration tools, performance management, presentation tools, and more.
  • Provides sales and marketing leadership with insights into content usage and tracks closings by asset.
  • Recommends key content to reps so the most relevant resources are utilized in the buying process.
  • Features an email help desk, 24/7 live support representatives, phone support, videos, and in-person and online training.

Integrations: More than 50 platforms

Pricing: Subscription-based

Salesforce

Key features:

  • Offers its own cloud-based apps — innovative software as a service (SaaS) solutions, like Sales Cloud, which provides various tools to assist in content management and performance analytics.
  • Helps with workflow creation, contact management, opportunity tracking, customer engagement tools, and a mobile-ready dashboard.
  • Equips marketing teams with unique features, including social media integrations, marketing leads monitoring, and email integration. 

Integrations: More than 2,500 other software options

Pricing: Several pricing plans are available based on required services

Users: Large and small companies

HubSpot

Key features:

  • Provides marketing automation software, email marketing, customer service tools, and more.
  • Features an intuitive user experience.
  • Offers free CRM software and other tools to sales teams.

Integrations: More than a hundred apps and web services

Pricing: Free tools on a limited capacity; subscriptions start at $50 per month and scale up based on business requirements

Sales Enablement Software Experts

This list represents just a handful of sales enablement software options that are currently on the market. We at Revenue Ops LLC are happy to help you navigate them and choose the right tool for your business. Let’s discuss your goals, obstacles, and vision to get started. 

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Crafting a Sales Enablement Strategy

Previously, we did a deep dive into the differences between sales enablement and sales optimization. Now, let’s talk about what it actually looks like to flesh out a sales enablement strategy and how it can help your organization. 

As consumers become more informed, sales representatives have to be responsive and provide a personalized experience for their prospects and clients. A sales enablement platform should make it easier to minimize the amount of time the team spends on repetitive tasks and maximize the time spent on meaningful activities that drive revenue.

It’s helpful to create a customized plan to meet the business and technological needs of the sales team. These five steps are the key to a successful sales enablement strategy.

Analyze Your Goals

It’s crucial first to understand what you’re trying to accomplish with a sales enablement platform. What problems are you looking to solve, and would implementing a new technology help to bridge the gap?

What activity metrics are most closely aligned to the success of the sales team? For example, what activities are taking a lot of time to accomplish but aren’t driving ROI? Also, what constitutes a realistic bar for measuring success for the team? 

A good sales enablement platform will help decrease the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks and help your team reach the activity goals that have proven to drive revenue. Knowing what’s important to your team will lead you towards the type of sales enablement software that you should consider implementing.

Some different types of sales enablement software include sales content management and sales coaching/productivity software. Sales content management allows sales reps to easily access and share relevant content with their prospects, along with helping you to measure what content is driving prospect activity. Coaching and productivity software allows reps to accomplish more activities, but to do so while still personalizing their conversations and allowing their manager to offer guidance on how to have valuable conversations with prospects.  

To understand which type of software would be most helpful, you need to talk to your team. So that’s step two in this process.

Talk to the Team

Who knows better about the challenges that the sales team is facing than the sales team themselves? The reps have their boots on the ground, and they’re able to quickly identify the major pain points that are hindering their success.

Spend some time talking through the knowledge transfer gaps between the content that the marketing team is providing and how easily the sales team can find the content that they’re looking to share in a short amount of time. Is there software that can make sharing content and measuring effectiveness easier for both parties?

You can make a list of the pain points that the teams are facing and a wish list of items or functionality that the team wishes were in place. Next, you’ll use this information to create a set of requirements and use it to evaluate each tool’s capabilities.  

Create a shortlist of various software options that could solve the team’s issues and set up a demo for the team to get their feedback on the user interface and the technological capabilities. You want to be sure that you’re only considering software that fits within your budget requirements. It does no good for the team to see the capabilities of something that is beyond reach.

 

Crafting a sales enablement strategy: successful-professionals-looking-through-online-ideas-for-their-business-project

State Your Case

To pitch this investment to the Chief Financial Officer, you must show the value of implementing this software to the organization. Why is this software, tool, etc., worth implementing and integrating into the existing technology stack? 

To demonstrate ROI, you’ll need some hard facts. Research the software and put together a presentation that shows the expected outcomes and potential gains that could be realized by implementing this sales enablement software. You should consider qualitative and quantitative data, and leveraging those customer stories from your sales team that talk about the pain they’re experiencing will make a compelling case for taking action.

Discuss the current benchmarks for the team, and outline the plan for measuring the efficacy of this investment. Next, create realistic SMART goals that show the C-Suite that you’re confident in the tool’s capabilities and demonstrate the value it will bring to the company. Finally, present a realistic budget request based on the system that best meets the team’s needs and secure approval to move forward. Be sure to include the one-time implementation costs for the software, in addition to any recurring software costs in the budget proposal.

Once you confirm approval, it’s time for the implementation fun to begin!

Make an Implementation Plan

Once you’ve selected the technology you want to implement, work with an implementation partner like Revenue Ops LLC to develop a plan for implementation, integration, and training.  

A suitable implementation plan will allow time for discovery so that the implementation partner can learn all about your current processes and incorporate them into the new workflows that they’re developing for the team, including the new sales enablement software.  

The next step for implementation is the build phase, where the new assets are configured to meet the customized needs of the team. It’s prudent to solicit feedback after the assets are built to satisfy the requirements and the team’s expectations. After the building phase is complete and the new technology has been deployed, user acceptance testing ensures that the software works as designed and anticipated. You’ll want to iron out any bugs before going live.

Before going live, the users will be trained on the new software and processes and educated about how this will help make their jobs easier. Since they’ve been included throughout the discovery, selection, and implementation process, the team will hopefully be extremely excited about the changes and embrace the new technology.  

Finally, it’s time to go live and deploy everything to production. After the go-live, allow some time to monitor how the deployment is progressing. Make any changes necessary to smooth the process. After that, sit back and watch the magic happen!

Measure the Outcomes

Simply put, track success. Constantly evaluate where there’s a visible improvement, successes and how to capitalize on those. Be sure all reps are adequately trained on the new software and processes, and monitor their usage to ensure proper adoption.

Create reports and dashboards to track those critical KPIs identified in your SMART goals, and communicate the results to your team and the C-Suite. Is the new software helping you to meet the goals you set forth? Since you’ve taken the time to vet the software properly, create the appropriate processes, and understand the actual pain points of the team, you’ll see some dramatic improvements after implementation.

Plan Your Sales Enablement Strategy 

Planning a sales enablement strategy will prove valuable to your business and teams, as it will help you increase productivity and maximize ROI. In addition, by removing barriers between the sales and marketing teams, new strategies will open new avenues between sales reps and content creators. 

These five steps are the key to a successful sales enablement strategy:

  1. Analyze Your Goals
  2. Talk to Your Team
  3. State Your Case
  4. Make and Implementation Plan
  5. Measure the Outcomes

Our team at Revenue Ops LLC are sales enablement software implementation and integration experts. We can help you analyze different software options for your company, understand your current practices and systems, and determine the best technological fit for your organization. Schedule a discovery call to speak with one of our consultants to get started.

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What Is Revenue Operations?

What Is Revenue Operations?

Are you wondering, “what is revenue operations?” But, more importantly, are you curious about how revenue operations can help you improve your business productivity and maximize growth?

Listen as Heather Davis Lam explains how she transitioned from musician to revenue operations expert. Profiles in Persistence is a podcast that discusses the challenges and successes entrepreneurs and small business owners experience as they build their businesses. Guests not only share their real-world stories, but they impart nuggets of wisdom based on their areas of expertise. Learn how Heather’s company, Revenue Ops LLC, can help you streamline your operations to maximize your revenue.

Conductor of the Internet

Heather is a former musician who started a music business with no business experience. So, inevitably, she decided to go back to school to earn an MBA and a Masters of Science degree in marketing. Incidentally, she ultimately ended up in the technology space. 

As disparate as these two disciplines seem, it wasn’t too much of a leap for Heather. She applied the idea of music – a series of notes in a particular order and balanced by rules/conventional wisdom to strike a harmonious chord – to her work with technology. Her technical work involves the coordination of principles and best practices for processes to function and integrate. And, just like an orchestra, each ensemble member needs to know his/her part and the components of the entire system or band to contribute exactly what is needed at exactly the right time.

After working in various sales roles within different organizations for several years, Heather noticed a pattern. The sales team was generally in charge of the people, processes, and technology within a company. However, she believed that an independent team should manage the decisions for an entire operation instead of one particular group. As she researched this issue, she came across the term revenue operations (RevOps).

Composer of Revenue Operations 

Heather saw an opportunity with RevOps. It’s a relatively new concept, but she wholeheartedly believes in its efficacy. This strategy supports the alignment of the sales, marketing, and finance functions and the assignment of a neutral team of people who can review the operations from a systems-thinking perspective to make decisions that will drive revenue for the entire business. Hence Revenue Ops LLC was born. The team at Revenue Ops LLC helps other companies implement revenue operations tactics.

Change is what drives Heather’s business forward. Factors like COVID and remote work have impacted data accessibility and visibility requirements. Companies need to break down silos that create blind spots and operational inefficiencies. They turn to RevOps experts to help implement new technology, build new processes, and/or organize data and analytics so that teams can do their jobs more effectively and productively.

Heather plans to grow and scale Revenue Ops LLC while continuing to help her clients succeed. They practice what they preach. Expanding the technology stack, streamlining processes, and monitoring data to make strategic decisions is as much an internal goal as it is a client objective.

Experiential Advice

“If you’re doing things that are scary to you, you’re growing.”

Heather encourages aspiring entrepreneurs not to be scared of being scared. And, she encourages business leaders not to be afraid of failing. It’s important to try new things to continue to improve. You can use data and analytics to show your results and monitor your growth.

“If you’re properly measuring what’s happening and you’re using the right technology so that you’re spending less time on doing manual work and more time on actually working with your prospects, then you’re going to be able to really build your business and make it stronger and better and faster so that way you’re going to be able to bring in that revenue that you need to bring in.”

Learn more about what revenue operations is and how  Revenue Ops LLC can help you maximize your revenue.

 

About Revenue Ops LLC

Revenue Ops LLC is an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping clients improve performance. The ultimate goal is to streamline workflows so that our clients can make data-driven decisions that maximize revenue. We apply our deep knowledge of CRM systems like Salesforce and sales enablement tools like Salesloft to optimize sales potential by stimulating and tracking customer interactions.

Learn how we can help you implement a strategy to improve revenue operations and maximize your growth.

Start with a free consultation

 

 

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