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Improve Revenue Operations by Consolidating Your Data

How Consolidating Data Can Improve Revenue Operations

Listen to Heather Davis Lam explain how consolidating data can improve revenue operations, also known as RevOps. Authentically Successful is a podcast hosted by Carol Shultz that features experiences from founders and executives. Heather is the founder and CEO of Revenue Ops LLC, a revenue consulting company. Before becoming a revenue operations expert, she was a professional musician. Eventually, she was introduced to Salesforce and never looked back.

Heather manages a lean but nimble staff who are just as passionate about data and efficiency as she is. Their natural ability to optimize workflows internally is the key to successfully helping other companies improve their operations. Heather promotes professional development and mentorship among her staff by pairing team members together so that they can learn and grow from one another. 

Revenue Operations At Work

RevOps is a strategic approach to managing business operations. Revenue Ops LLC works with companies to leverage their people, processes, technology, and data to scale their business.

According to Heather, small and medium-sized clients who want to improve revenue operations usually start with a core technology platform, namely a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, like Salesforce Sales Cloud. As a cloud-based program, access is easily managed for users according to individual needs. In addition, users don’t have to download or install the software. 

Once the core system is implemented, other tools are inevitably added to enhance the CRM. Clients get excited about marketing automation opportunities and sales enablement utilities. Programs like Pardot and Salesloft are native complements to Salesforce.

Revenue Ops LLC always offers a training component after an implementation. Training workshops are customizable according to the client’s goals and resources. Some clients want to be as independent as possible. While other clients don’t want to touch the system once it’s set up. There are managed services packages that provide a bank of hours each month for support. It’s a straightforward ticket system that gives users access to a professional team member/dedicated representative who will troubleshoot issues or guide them in expanding the system’s capabilities.

Heather lives and breathes the idea that you can do more with less.

“We’ve been able to create efficiencies within our own business and also help others create those same efficiencies within their business. So, that you can work with more of a lean team and be able to really maximize your ROI because you’re not having to spend all this extra money on either projects that could be automated or by having new people added to your headcount to do these projects that you were doing manually before. We’re here to help out.”

Listen to the entire interview now.

 

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.

Schedule A Free Initial Consultation

How Does Marketing Automation Help?

How Does Marketing Automation Help?

You understand the purpose of market automation is to minimize the mundane and administrative tasks for marketers so that they can focus on fulfilling customer wants and needs. But, you also have to appreciate how the fundamental characteristics of marketing automation help businesses achieve their company-wide strategic goals. Knowing what to expect can go a long way in ensuring that marketers use the system productively and take advantage of all it has to offer.

There’s no shortage of marketing automation tools for marketers to consider. And, by and large, they all offer similar features such as personalization, lead management, analytics, etc. Pardot and HubSpot are just a few examples of marketing automation platforms.

So, the determining factor for your marketing automation software of choice may come down to personal preference or how well the provider applies the principles that their tool is designed to support. Nonetheless, let’s review how the utilities of marketing automation help companies.

Overall Efficiency

 If you invest in a marketing automation tool, it’s not unreasonable for you to expect to see an immediate improvement within your operations. When technology automatically handles menial tasks that would otherwise require a human to manage, you can expect to see quick results and virtually no errors.

One of the most common marketing functions you might want to automate is social media management. For example, you could use an automation tool to post a tweet every time your company starts a live stream. For businesses that frequently manage a large volume of social media posts across multiple platforms, a tool like this would be extremely beneficial.

There are a number of basic marketing tasks that could easily be preprogrammed. You can even automate complex workflows if you have the skills and resources. 

Broad Scalability

As your organization grows, its needs will, too. So, all of your resources will have to adapt to the increasing size of your business.

Fortunately, any capable marketing automation software will be able to scale alongside the business. So it can accommodate organizations at any point in its lifecycle and adjust as operations expand and/or teams restructure.

It’s unlikely that an organization will outgrow its market automation software. More often than not, limiting factors have to do with the other resources and services that you use. So rest assured that your software will be able to adequately handle the dynamics of your email volume, social media promotions, data capacity, etc.

Precise Reporting

Because all of the functions are automatic, the reporting about the marketing activities is very reliable. As a result, you’ll have access to insightful data that will help you understand your audience.

Suppose you ran an automated social media campaign. You can review detailed performance metrics to evaluate the type of posts that your followers found most engaging so that you can continue to deliver content that interests them.

In addition to messaging, you can also optimize your publishing schedule. For example, it would be best to publicize your content when your audience is likely to read and respond. Your marketing automation tool will be able to analyze your posts by day and hour so that you can schedule them accordingly.

And there are a variety of other marketing elements that you can assess to optimize your promotional strategies. 

How does marketing automation help?

Conversion Rate Maximization

No matter how many leads you have, this number won’t mean much unless you strive to convert them to loyal customers. It can be challenging to manage a large number of leads — even for large, resourceful companies.

You can use marketing automation software to track your leads and develop an understanding of their browsing and buying activity. The more you observe about your users’ behavior, the more effectively you’ll be able to target them.

By extension, this will allow you to maximize your conversion rate. You increase conversions by effectively communicating the details about your products, services, and offers in a timely manner.

Time Management

Your marketing team usually has other obligations to handle aside from actually implementing marketing campaigns. One of their core responsibilities is conducting research. Since automation allows them to minimize the amount of time they spend managing a campaign, they can allocate more time toward developing customer personas and assessing market trends. This work can positively affect conversion rates as well.

Ideally, marketers will also have time for their own professional development. Staying current on industry news, attending relevant training workshops, and participating in conferences and events enhances performance individually and collectively. The benefits ripple throughout the organization sooner or later.

Return On Investment

You probably don’t have a limitless marketing budget, so it’s in your best interest to get the most out of every dollar. After all, your cost efficiency plays a significant role in maximizing your return on investment.

Saving money is just as important as saving time. Keep in mind, there are two sides to revenue — income and expenses. It’s prudent to pay attention to both sides of the equation when trying to maximize revenue. As revenue specialists, we find that increasing sales and reducing costs is far more effective than focusing on one or the other.

Marketing automation helps in this effort because it’s inherently designed to apply the least amount of resources to optimize sales opportunities.  

Sales Alignment

If you think marketing automation supports only marketing functions, you’re mistaken. You can help out your sales team by automatically maintaining a steady flow of prospects. Moreover, you can warm the leads for them through a targeted stream of marketing communications that will help qualify the contacts based on interests, urgency, and other useful criteria. And if you’re an over-achiever, you can include valuable interaction data when you send the leads to your sales team so that they can personalize the conversation right from the start.

Oftentimes, sales and marketing teams are perceived as being at odds with each other. However, that doesn’t have to be the reality. When each group understands the needs and capabilities of the other, they can work together to achieve common goals.

Marketing Automation Help

If the idea of automating your marketing tasks excites you, but the thought of actually doing it intimidates you, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Revenue Operations experts are here to help!

Our team of experienced and certified consultants who specialize in marketing, sales, and customer experience strategies works with companies and teams to maximize revenue. We apply our deep knowledge of operations management, technology, and data analytics to improve business performance and drive growth.

As a Salesforce Partner, we’re very familiar with Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation solution. But, as trusted advisors, we pride ourselves on taking a fresh approach to each of our projects. As a result, we ultimately leverage the appropriate technologies that adequately satisfy short-term and long-term business objectives.

If you need marketing automation help and are ready to take your business to the next level, schedule a free discovery meeting with one of our experts.

Schedule A Free Consultation

What Is the Purpose of Marketing Automation?

What is the Purpose of Marketing Automation?

It seems like everyone in the business world is talking about marketing automation. If you find yourself wondering “what is is the purpose of marketing automation” when you hear people talking about it, we’re here to demystify the practice.

Technology has revolutionized the world of marketing, and one of the latest developments is quickly becoming a mainstay in the industry. If technology tends to intimidate you, don’t worry, marketing automation is not as complex as it may sound.

Consider this your definitive guide to the world of marketing automation. We’re going to cover what it is, how it could benefit your company, and what you can do to start using it.  

Marketing Automation Defined 

If you want to understand marketing automation, you need to think about the concept of automation itself. 

Automation in its purest form uses technology to complete simple tasks, and we’ve been using it for centuries now. Factories could be considered our first foray into the world of automation, and as technology has improved, automation touches nearly every modern industry. 

Marketing automation uses software and other web-based services to execute and manage marketing tasks. Essentially it can take over nearly any manual and repetitive task so you can focus on your high-value work.

A social media management tool you use to schedule posts or automatically follow people who tag your company is considered a form of marketing automation. A program that sends out email newsletters and deletes subscribers who don’t open messages is another example of automating marketing tasks.

You can leverage marketing automation tactics to handle repetitive tasks, but it can also help improve your entire sales and marketing strategy.

As marketing automation becomes more sophisticated, it can do more with predictive analytics and strategy. For example, business-to-business software like Pardot can deploy marketing landing pages to bring in more leads and sort through lead pipelines to determine the best ones to pursue. It can even generate reports that can tell you how your campaigns are performing.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Now that you understand how marketing automation works, we can start talking about how it can help your business. 

You may not see the point in investing in a conventional marketing cloud if things are running fine in sales and marketing. However, businesses that truly want to innovate and grow need to spend their time developing an automation strategy.

Want to know why we recommend that every business gets into automation? Once you appreciate the purpose of marketing automation and all of the good it can do, you’ll wonder why you’ve taken so long to get started.

Save time with marketing automation

Save Time

How much time do you think it takes to deploy a simple email and social media campaign about a sales promotion? It may not seem like it would take a lot of time to send out a few emails and post a status or two, but the truth is that deploying a campaign can take a lot longer than you’d think.

One of the main benefits of automation is the time it gives back to your employees. Now employees will be able to spend most of their time on more important tasks while your automation programs handle menial work.

Who will be around to make sure emails and social posts are deployed at the right time? Do you know who will decide the best customer lists to use and the proper targeting for ads?

A person would have to spend a few hours determining send times and audience segmentations. However, a marketing automation program can manage all of that in a matter of minutes.

Personalize Your Marketing Message

Personalization is an essential factor in the marketing world. If you want to resonate with today’s consumers, you can’t take a generic approach. Everyone wants to feel like businesses and companies are producing things specifically for them. And leaning into a personalized approach to marketing could do wonders for your lead pipeline and sales numbers.

It would be impossible for one person or even a team of dedicated people to manage personalizing content for hundreds or thousands of contacts. Luckily for us, the right automation software can handle it.

Marketing personalization can be as simple as adding someone’s first name to a greeting on a newsletter. However, once you collect more data, things can get much more advanced. Imagine being able to push relevant information about promotions and special offers to people with a history of buying your products and services. Think about what you could do if you could automatically send people messages that let them know they still have items in your cart. The right software can do all of this and more!

Improve Strategy

How do you currently measure success with your marketing programs? Seeing sales numbers go up might be nice, but it doesn’t give you insight into what specifically is working with your current campaigns.

If you want to improve your marketing work on a more granular level, automation is a must. You’ll be able to gain deep insight into campaign performance and get specifics into what’s performing well.

A typical Google Analytics dashboard can give you basic information about bounce rates and time spent on pages. However, it can’t provide you with information on how to run a practical A/B test to improve your next round of ads. In addition, the dashboard won’t have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) that can show you demographic information around your best customers.

The beauty of modern automation programs is that you don’t just get a lot of data and analytics. They’ll also help you process the metrics into valuable insight and help you figure out what to do next by making data-based recommendations.

It’s Time to Bring Automation to Your Business

The purpose of marketing automation is to enhance operational efficiency to ultimately maximize revenue. Marketing automation isn’t a “fad” in the industry; it’s the next stage of evolution for marketing. The combination of automation and AI can help your business improve every aspect of your approach to marketing and sales.

Getting started in automation is virtually a requirement, but it’s even more critical to ensure that you manage everything the right way. Finding the right automation partner can do a lot to set you up for success. Fortunately for you, we’re here to help your company every step of the way.

Do you have questions about how marketing automation could help your business? Are you ready to start working with a trusted automation partner? Contact us today to discuss how your company can use marketing automation the right way.

Schedule A Free Consultation

How Talent Optimization Experts Implement a Revenue Operations Strategy

Watch episode 1 of the Rev Ops Roundtable. Our special guest is Michelle Joseph, Director of Client Acquisition & Success at Cedalion Talent and Co-founder of Thrive Collective. We discuss successes, challenges, and advice for those looking to implement a Revenue Operations strategy and Michelle’s experiences when setting this up for her own work.

Getting Started with Rev Ops

In this discussion, Michelle describes how she and her team overcame the challenges of starting a business. She says their main problem was organizing and managing prospects. They knew they wanted one centralized tool that would scale with them as the business grows.

Rather than storing customer data in a Google Sheet and relying on Slack to communicate with team members and then cobbling the tools together, they felt Salesforce would provide the functions that they wanted, and then some. But, the idea of implementing the software and trying to manage the backend, all while trying to develop the talent optimization business, was daunting. 

Like many startups, finances were limited, but Michelle recognized her limitations with technology. It’s not just a matter of installing the program; users have to be trained, the system has to be customized according to unique workflows, and the backend database must be maintained and secured properly. These tasks were beyond their skills and interests.

Revenue Operations Experts

After hearing horror stories about freelancers not setting up systems satisfactorily, Michelle was cautious about working with the right team of professionals. The opportunity costs of losing or disappointing customers were not something she was willing to pay. Nor did she have the desire to reverse engineer any problems that might crop up later on.

Working with Revenue Ops LLC was a no-brainer. The Salesforce implementation was fast and efficient. Now they’re looking ahead to segmenting their audiences and creating and automating custom flows to distribute personalized and consistent messaging to contacts regularly.

Michelle’s advice: Get it done right the first time.

Rev Ops Roundtable Episode 1
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About Revenue Ops LLC

Revenue Ops LLC is an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping our clients improve performance. We do this by focusing on three primary pillars:

  • People and processes
  • Technology
  • Data and analytics

Our ultimate goal is to streamline workflows so that our clients can make data-driven decisions that maximize revenue. We apply our deep knowledge of customer relationship management (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 revenue operations strategy to maximize your revenue.

Contact Us

Marketing Automation vs. Marketing Operations

Marketing Automation vs. Marketing Operations: What's the Difference?

We know that the world of marketing can move fast, but sometimes, it seems like it can move a little too fast. Remember when SEO was the next big thing in marketing, then it was social media? Tech has done a lot to transform the industry, and it has recently given us a few more transformative and helpful innovations: marketing automation and marketing operations. 

Not sure what the difference between the two is? Don’t worry, a lot of people have the same problem. Each practice can complement the other, but they have some very distinct differences.

Let us be your guide to the growing world of marketing technology! Read on to learn everything you need to know about the difference between marketing automation and marketing operations.

Marketing Automation Defined

When people talk about marketing automation, they’re not talking about one single thing. In truth, marketing automation could be considered a blanket term for all of the software platforms and technology people in marketing and sales use to bring in leads, spread their message, and essentially, do their jobs better.

In fact, we’d bet that some people reading this are using marketing automation tools at work and may not know it yet.

Do you use Pardot or Marketing Cloud to send emails or distribute leads to your sales team? Is HubSpot your main platform for updating website content and managing social media? Congratulations! You’re a marketing automation expert, and you didn’t even know it!Marketing automation can do wonders for generating leads, measuring analytics, and managing different stages of your marketing funnel. With the right tools, you can score prospects, distribute targeted content, nurture leads, and more.

Marketing Operations Defined

Now that you have all of these amazing tools at work, you’re going to need someone who can do more than just ensure that they’re being used properly. You’ll need someone who can develop processes, implement new technology, and help analyze the effectiveness of your overall marketing strategy to enable you to scale your business. This is where marketing operations come into play.

Marketing operations, also known as marketing ops or MOPs, is the backbone of the marketing team. The Marketing Ops team develops consistent processes to ensure repeatable results, proper integration of all of the tools used by the marketing team, and reliable data collection so that data-driven decisions can be made to increase business.

The MOPs team creates the necessary automations to allow the marketing team to do less work but have a greater reach. The data and analytics gathered and analyzed provide the entire company a transparent view of the efficacy of their marketing activities. Data and analytics collected through appropriate technology and processes implemented by the marketing operations team will be a valuable resource to draw upon when planning and budgeting. They assist leadership with measuring progress against marketing goals.

 

marketing automation vs. marketing operations

Marketing Automation vs. Marketing Operations: What Do I Need Most?

 The answer to this question is simple: you’re going to need both. 

Marketing automation can do a lot to transform the way your business views marketing. You’ll be able to work efficiently, and you’ll have the tools you need to truly bring your marketing game to the next level.

However, if you want to use your new tools correctly, you’re going to need context and insight into the data you’re gathering. A strong marketing operations plan can help ensure that you’re using your tools the right way, and it will let you know if any improvements can be made.

It’s also important to note the significant role both practices can play for revenue operations, also known as RevOps.

Bringing in money is only half of the picture, so those in revenue operations understand how important forecasting and growth are to the company. Marketing automation and operations are both critical to success and provide a solid foundation for setting important company goals around revenue.

Tips For Getting the Most Out of Both

As you can see, marketing automation and marketing operations go hand in hand. Marketing automation comprises the tools and processes used to scale up marketing activities while the marketing operations team implements and drives those systems.

Now that you know the difference between both practices let’s dive into how you can get the most out of them at work.

Prep Your Content Strategy

You might be ready to invest in automation and strategy, but is your content plan ready for the change?

Lead-nurturing programs are the bread and butter of marketing automation. In order to have a stellar lead-nurturing program, you’re going to need different kinds of content that can help people at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Take the time to think about your current approach to content before investing in either operations or strategy. Think about your current content calendar and whether you have the internal resources needed to produce content regularly.

Encourage Cross Collaboration

Marketing operations is one part of a larger revenue operations strategy, which seeks to break down the traditional silos between the sales and marketing teams, improve communication, and increase effectiveness.

By implementing the right technology and processes, the entire marketing automation system will drive the front half of the revenue operation strategy, increase the effectiveness of the entire sales and marketing funnel, and improve ROI.

Get Started Now

Marketing operations and automation can be what you need to truly transform your current approach to marketing. When you have the power of tech on your side, anything is possible in sales and marketing!

You’re going to need an expert in marketing and revenue to help you launch the next stage of your business. Luckily, we’re here and happy to help. Reach out to us today, so we can make a plan for your company.

Maximize Your Revenue

How Does Revenue Operations Drive Better Value?

How Does Revenue Operations Drive Better Value?

There has been considerable talk in the business and financial worlds about how revenue operations drives better value when companies use it to create a more streamlined approach to lead management and revenue enhancement. While the concept has been around for a while, its use has only recently come into full effect thanks to platforms like Salesforce and Salesloft that make it easier for companies to implement a revenue operations strategy.

The key is understanding what revenue operations is, how to use it to maximize your revenue streams, and what value it brings to organizations. We’ll examine each of these points and more, so you can understand why revenue operations is valuable to your company.

What Is Revenue Operations?

In a traditional business, the customer service, sales, and marketing teams do their own thing with minimal connectivity. If there’s connectivity among them, it’s cursory at best, and their efforts probably aren’t coordinated.

The marketing team generates leads and nurtures them until they’re ready to speak to sales. The sales team identifies customer needs and presents ways to solve those challenges. The customer service team helps with retention and keeps the customer happy and satisfied with the provided products or services.

The Revenue Operations team (aka RevOps) brings all of these groups together cross-functionally to form a cohesive unit that works together to drive conversions and provide an excellent customer experience. The Revenue Operations team primarily focuses on three key pillars – processes, technology, and data/analytics.

Bringing Teams Together

A Revenue Operations team’s strength lies in their ability to see the entire system and how each piece – Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success – fit within it. The head of the Revenue Operations team is responsible for creating the vision of a single business view with shared goals and revenue targets. They coordinate with the heads of each department to ensure that the strategy developed for revenue operations aligns with the goals for each team and the company.

 The head of Revenue Operations then shares these strategies with members of their team, who include liaisons that regularly interact with each functional group. These liaisons are responsible for keeping the lines of communication open between the functional groups and Revenue Operations. This arrangement allows for data and ideas to be shared easily.

Platforms such as Salesforce and Salesloft make data collection across teams easy and provide a high degree of visibility into prospect and client interactions with the entire company. Each functional group is responsible for key performance indicators (KPIs), including annual recurring revenue (ARR), the number of leads generated, customer turnover rate, and customer lifetime value.

Processes Designed to Bring Everything Together

Team connection and data collection can only go so far, but processes developed to bring these two aspects together create a successful revenue operations strategy.

The goal of revenue operations is to make sure all teams work together from the beginning, when a customer considers purchasing a product thanks to marketing, closing the deal with sales, and then customer service successfully renewing and upselling products or services.

The Revenue Operations team assists each functional group by mapping processes and documenting procedures that can be shared with other functional groups or used as training materials. These processes ensure that team members follow repeatable processes and achieve consistent results.

Processes help maintain cohesion from one team to the other and ensure that everyone understands what the other groups are doing. Processes create accountability across the teams and streamline revenue growth, so you see benefits like increased upsells, better customer retention, and shorter sales cycles.

All of these add value to your teams and your company. Don’t underestimate the importance of processes in revenue operations. Collaboration and data collection can only go so far unless there are processes in place to coordinate everything into a cohesive unit.

Difficulties Implementing Revenue Operations

Revenue Operations as a concept has been growing significantly within companies of all sizes, as stockholders start to appreciate the value and importance of developing a coordinated cross-functional strategy. However, since there isn’t much information readily available about revenue operations best practices, there have been some obstacles.

One of the biggest problems is companies treating revenue operations as an experiment. They want to try it out, but they don’t invest the time and money into the resources needed to make it successful.

They may create the team but not invest in the technology stacks necessary or develop the processes required to meet KPIs. If you treat revenue operations as an experiment or as a proof of concept, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You need to go all-in when it comes to revenue operations. There are services available to help you develop your revenue operations strategy, like Revenue Ops LLC.

Another barrier is centralizing and organizing clean data. As we mentioned before, data collection is one of the most important aspects of RevOps. With the ever-growing number of technology platforms utilized within companies, vast quantities of data are collected on prospects and clients who are interacting with your company. However, if you don’t properly analyze the data, you can’t use it to make the data-driven decisions that move the company forward.

Finally, some companies treat revenue operations as sales operations. Many companies believe that revenue operations and sales operations are the same, but they’re not. Revenue operations offers a holistic approach to business operations to fill in the gaps between sales, marketing, and customer service. In contrast, sales operations focus primarily on the processes, technology, and analytics most important to the sales team.

Value of Revenue Operations for Companies

The primary value of having a dedicated Revenue Operations team for your organization is efficiency. Since the RevOps team has visibility into processes, procedures, and technology utilized by all cross-functional groups, they can quickly identify redundancies and streamline operations.

Other benefits include increased ROI due to targeted prospect and customer interactions. Since connected systems like Pardot, Salesforce, and Salesloft all share data and reveal different insights, the company can provide personalized messaging at the right time to prospects and customers. This experience leads to increased conversion rates and improved customer retention.

The ability to analyze data and make timely, data-driven decisions is also a fantastic benefit realized by companies that implement a Revenue Operations team. Since RevOps has fully integrated its technology systems, established standardized processes and procedures, and built reports and dashboards to analyze the entire sales and marketing funnel, detailed reporting can be created. So various teams can be agile and responsive to quickly changing market conditions.

Value Goes Beyond Revenue

While the ultimate goal is to improve revenue, a revenue operations strategy does an amazing job of creating goodwill and building morale among the sales, marketing, and customer service teams.

Start Your Revenue Operations Journey Today
Revenue Operations is becoming the norm for business-to-business companies that want to create more revenue and build a trusting and cooperative core team. Your competitors are working hard to get their revenue operations up and running, so you should too.

There may be infighting and corporate animosity among the teams because they see themselves as internal competitors. It’s hard to create a team atmosphere when there’s little communication among the core teams.

Your revenue operations strategy instills a sense of unity and camaraderie. The success of one is the success of all. The organizational culture shifts from a “me vs. them” mentality to an altruistic mindset. The entire group shares in both the corporate successes and learning opportunities.

Revenue operations provides accountability. If one team underperforms, the others are there to offer support. There’s no relishing of defeat, but instead a desire to see everyone grow and succeed for the company.

Management can see how the team dynamic changes even after the first few weeks of adopting a revenue operations strategy. The teams generally become collaborative and comfortable with sharing constructive feedback. Productivity is positively impacted when there’s a mutual appreciation for different perspectives.

The Revenue Operations team is the impartial glue that holds the various groups together and helps them realize their true potential.

Revenue Ops LLC can help you develop your revenue operations strategy from start to finish. Our team of certified experts will work with you to solve your most pressing business challenges and help you develop everything you need to bring your business to the next level.

If you’re interested in learning more or would like to talk to one of our revenue operations specialists, please contact us today.

Sales Ops: Becoming More Strategic

Sales Ops: Becoming More Strategic Infographic

Sales Operations – what is it, and what does it mean to you?

Sales Operations, also known as Sales Ops, is a general term that refers to processes, technology, and activities that support the sales team and enable them to sell more efficiently and effectively. While Sales Ops has been part of the sales process for many years, it has only recently been recognized as a strategic powerhouse within the Revenue Operations function, helping to support and define the sales strategy.

Sales Ops is generally comprised of processes, technology, and data and analytics. Sales Ops professionals use these three pillars to create a strategy that makes it possible for the sales team to increase revenue while minimizing costs and streamlining tasks to complete more work with less effort.

Salesforce, the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, surveyed nearly 6,000 sales professionals as part of their “State of Sales” report. They took some of that data and created a companion piece, “Trends in Sales Ops,” which is meant to help emphasize the growing importance of the Sales Ops function and help others understand its strategic importance.

This infographic contains some of the key metrics contained in that report highlights some of the ways that Sales Ops is becoming more strategic within organizations. The Sales Operations job description is expanding and there has been increased involvement in the following areas since 2019:

  •  Sales Strategy Planning
  •  Sales Performance Analysis
  • Sales Strategy Coordination
  • Sales Technology Management
  • Sales Training Management
  • Cross-functional Workstream Management 

Why is this important? Roughly 78% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, but a whopping 59% of customers say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company. It’s important to unify and empower the various functional groups to create a uniform and organized customer experience. You can achieve this by involving all of the relevant parties in the process. 

Sales Ops is becoming more strategic. 81% of Sales Operations professionals say that sales technology needs have changed. 89% say Sales Ops plays a critical role in growing the business. 85% of sales professionals agree that Sales Ops is increasingly strategic.

Sales Operations Demystified

Understanding the increasing role of Sales Ops within your business is critical to increasing your revenue. We are a team of strategic revenue operations experts who help our clients maximize their revenue through process improvements, technology enhancements, and meaningful data analysis. We are well-versed in sales enablement tools, marketing automation solutions, and digital analytics applications. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more about our services or schedule a free initial consultation.

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Creating a Revenue Operations Strategy

Creating a Revenue Operations Strategy

The key to growing and building your business is implementing a revenue operations strategy. However, many people are still learning about what revenue operations means and how it can impact their businesses as a whole.

Revenue operations is about creating alignment between teams, optimizing your technology systems, and surfacing data and analytics so that you can make data-driven decisions to grow your business. It doesn’t matter if you have an ecommerce store or brick and mortar locations. If you have a digitally enhanced business, optimizing revenue is vital to growth.

Learn about the key concepts needed to create an effective revenue operations strategy.

What Is A Revenue Operations Strategy?

Traditionally, teams like sales, marketing, and customer success operated more in a silo, and each had their own responsibilities, goals, processes, and technology to apply. These departments would occasionally interact, but in general, they would act as separate entities.

The lifecycle of a consumer is far different now than it was only a few years ago. Purchasing a product or service, especially something of high value, isn’t a quick decision. And, prospects have a high expectation in regards to the level of personal service they anticipate to receive from your company.

Revenue operations, also known as RevOps, breaks down the walls between departments and allows your company to have a 360-degree view of your prospects and clients. A revenue operations strategy is a plan for how your company will interact with those prospects and clients at every stage in the buyer’s journey and provides the prospect with a seamless, personalized experience that helps to increase revenue, reduce the length of the sales cycle, and increase customer loyalty.

Creating Your Revenue Operations Team

The first step is to create a Revenue Operations team. One important item to note when deciding where to place this team in your organization is to whom the team will ultimately report. The RevOps team should be independent of the sales and marketing teams, as priorities for the business should not be influenced by one group or another. RevOps needs the ability to prioritize projects based on what would be best for the business as a whole, not just what is desired by a particular team.

The RevOps team utilizes systems thinking concepts to analyze how the entire company’s departmental systems work together to create a larger overarching system, which takes a prospect through the entire marketing, sales, and customer success cycles. They are responsible for understanding how all of the parts interrelate and how the larger system functions over time. Consequently, they can prioritize the work that will make the largest positive impact on the business.

Team members generally consist of a leader, like a Director of Revenue Operations or a VP or Revenue Operations, along with various team members who specialize in operations for specific business areas. These specialists might include a Manager of Sales Operations, a Customer Success Operations Specialist, or a Marketing Operations Manager. These specialists act as the primary liaison between the Revenue Operations team and the company’s respective functional groups yet work together to create strategies that will help the functional groups accomplish their goals while still keeping how the larger system functions in mind.

Business Process image. Shows a man surrounded by words that build business processes, like develop, design, investigate, analyze, implement and test.

Develop Critical Business Processes

The management team works with each core group to provide data sharing processes, insights into how each team impacts the other, and how they can leverage data to make each group more efficient.

Technology such as Salesforce and Salesloft provide the groups with the information they need without being overburdened by work and data collection. These platforms collect the data and have processes within them to provide the right information to each team.

These processes allow sales and marketing to work together to improve the processes for each, such as research and data for marketing conversions and which channels yield the best customers.

Implement Needed Technology Improvements

Technology plays an important part in the RevOps strategy. It includes the primary customer relationship management (CRM) platform, like Salesforce, marketing automation tools like Pardot, and various other sales enablement, communication, and analytics software like Salesloft and Drift.

The goal for the RevOps team in regards to technology improvements is to keep things as simple as possible. They want to minimize the amount of time spent adding data into these systems and maximize the amount of time that the end users can spend on more fun aspects of their job.

Integration and automation are key here. Regardless of the number of platforms needed, they want to develop a system to automate menial, repetitive tasks and combine platforms into a very simple user interface for the end users.

They also want to get the end users away from using spreadsheets and instead leverage the power of the integrated tech stack to bring visibility to the data to begin to build that 360-degree view of the customer, regardless of how they interact with the company.

For example, suppose a prospect filled out a form on a website, sent an email directly to a salesperson, and called the company’s main phone line. In that case, the team would want all of that information to flow through their systems into a central repository in the CRM. That way, whoever is responding to the prospect can understand all of the prospect’s actions and reply appropriately.

Moving data from spreadsheets into a cloud-based CRM also helps break down the silos of information between departments. Now, a member of the sales team would have real-time information about actions a prospect is taking with various marketing materials and can use that information to tailor their responses to the prospect to provide a personalized experience that speaks directly to their interests.

Develop and Share Departmental Processes

Process maps are a key part of a revenue operations strategy. They help you to think through what you’re doing at each stage of the process, what the entrance and exit criteria are for each stage, and surface any redundant processes that may have developed organically over time.

Each functional group should be tasked with mapping out their processes and defining the entrance and exit criteria for each stage. These processes should explicitly state who is involved in that step and also what technology is being used.

Once the process maps have been created, a Revenue Operations team member can work with the functional group to eliminate redundancies and develop an efficient system to move prospects or clients through their section of the funnel. This might involve adding or eliminating some technology, requiring specific data at a certain step to account for dependencies, or eliminating stages in the process that create unnecessary work.

The Revenue Operations team member will also work with the rest of their team to map out how each functional groups’ system works together and identify bottlenecks, gaps, or dependencies that need to be addressed.

Collect the Data and Determine KPIs

Data is the backbone of the RevOps strategy. The team needs to determine what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and figure out the effect that changes have on the system. Each of the tech systems that they’ve integrated gathers all sorts of data, from the job title and location of an incoming lead to a major pain point a company is experiencing.

The Revenue Operations team will help the functional groups develop and build reports and dashboards that show some of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Platforms like Salesforce, Salesloft, and Tableau can be used to visualize the data and help executives at your company understand what’s happening so that they can make data-driven decisions to drive the business forward.

KPIs can include metrics like the number of new leads created this month, the percentage of leads converted to opportunities, new versus renewal revenue generated this year, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. How is this data trending, and what does the forecast look like against the company goals?

The management team should have a process for reviewing KPIs regularly. Some KPIs are best to view on a daily or weekly basis, while others are best analyzed during a monthly pipeline review. If the data isn’t trending in a favorable direction, the team can determine whether they need to pivot and alter their strategy to change the trend from negative to positive.

Benefits of Revenue Strategic Consulting

You now have the information you need to create a RevOps strategy, but what’s the benefit of doing it? The RevOps strategy impacts every area of your business and allows streamlined communication and accountability between sales, marketing, and customer service.

Data collection lets you see the direction your business is heading, so you can predict growth and make investments in technology and other areas. You see how the strategies impact each group and can make changes for better optimization.

The goal of the strategy is revenue growth, which you will ultimately see reflected in increased sales and higher customer retention rates, which both lead to increased customer loyalty. You can improve revenue without bringing in additional people or resources.

In this day and age, things change quickly, and to stay relevant to your prospects and customers, you need to be able to change right along with them. Your RevOps strategy will allow you to stay agile and afford you the visibility into what’s changing when it’s changing, and why so that you can make the best decision to continue to grow your business.

However, not all companies have the resources or personnel on hand to build out a revenue operations strategy. That’s where a revenue operations consulting firm, like Revenue Ops LLC, can help. Our certified industry experts can help you develop necessary processes, implement or optimize technology, and develop the data and analytics needed to maximize your revenue.

Revenue Growth Is Your Future

If you want to grow your business, then you need to optimize your current revenue operations model. A revenue operations strategy provides this not only by increasing your sales and conversions through prospect and client personalized communications but by streamlining your tech stack and visualizing important data so that you can make the decisions that are right for your business.

If you want to learn more about revenue operations strategies or talk to us about how we can help you by becoming an extension of your team, explore our website, or contact us directly at contact@revenueopsllc.com.

How to Maximize Revenue with Technology and Automation

Who doesn’t want to make more money? Many companies miss out on the opportunity to fully maximize their revenue, because they’ve underutilized the ability to automate processes via technology.

However, just because a process CAN be automated, doesn’t mean that it SHOULD be automated.

So, how do you figure out how and what you should automate, and what the effect will be on your bottom line?

HOW CAN YOU AUTOMATE SOMETHING, IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS?
Why do people take their cars to a mechanic? Because the mechanic is an expert on the complex systems involved in making the car work as it should. In order to have an opportunity to automate your business processes via technology, you need to fully understand the process end-to-end, where all of the decision points are, and how changes in one part of the system will affect other sections.

What is the easiest way to visualize these business processes? Create a process map!

You don’t necessarily need lots of fancy symbols or expensive software to create one – they can be as simple as a few text boxes in a PowerPoint presentation, like this example that shows how an Account Executive may handle a new business demo lead that has been assigned to them from a Business Development Representative:

Basic Account Executive Process

Remember – it doesn’t need to be pretty, as long as it clearly communicates the information and decision points for the entire process. Once you have a process mapped out, you can visualize inefficiencies in the system, and determine if there’s an opportunity to automate part or all of the process.

Now that we know how the process works, how do we figure out what to automate?

WHY AUTOMATE, IF IT DOESN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM?
When it comes to utilizing automation for maximizing revenue, problem identification is key. What is the pain point that you’re trying to solve for, and how do you expect automation to solve for it? Working through a problem solving framework will help you to identify the issues, people involved, and determine and implement a solution. What do those steps look like?

  1. Problem Identification: What is the biggest pain point, who is involved, and which systems?
  2. Brainstorm the Solution: Research the system capabilities, and brainstorm potential solutions.
  3. Make Predictions: What will happen, either positive or negative, if you implement the solution?
  4. Test Your Ideas: Build a prototype, and test it in a sandbox. Does it behave as expected?
  5. Evaluate: Was the solution effective, and did it solve the problem? What went right or wrong?
  6. Present Your Results: Present to the stakeholders, and seek feedback. Are any changes necessary? If so, start back at step 1, and run through the problem-solving framework again.

Just because you can automate a process, doesn’t mean that you should. We don’t want to automate for automation’s sake! However, the tool you choose is just as important as the problem you’re trying to solve.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU USE THE WRONG TOOL FOR THE JOB?
Have you ever tried to cut a tomato with a claw hammer? Rather than getting uniform tomato slices for your sandwich, you just wind up with a squishy mess. Does that mean that the claw hammer wasn’t a good one? Nope. Was the tomato bad? No again. So why didn’t things work right when we tried to put them together?

It’s simple. The claw hammer was the wrong tool for the job.

The same thing goes when trying to choose the right piece of business technology to automate marketing processes.

Using the live chatbot on the corporate website to try to send a complex series of nurture emails to a prospect will most likely result in disaster. However, Pardot’s Engagement Studio is a solution that’s just right for the task!

Pardot’s Engagement Studio allows marketers to build responsive, intelligent, lead nurturing programs that engage prospects at the right time during their customer journey. At the click of a button, you can create steps to complete an action, set a trigger to listen for a specific event, or create rules to determine which path a prospect should take.

In the Engagement Studio program, you’ll be able to see how prospects are moving through each step, and ensure that the right actions are taking place at the perfect time.

Now that we’ve determined the problem and how to choose the right solution for implementing a solution, we need to measure the impact on our revenue.

WHAT TYPE OF ROI DO WE EXPECT TO SEE?
There are two main types of data benefits that we may see once an automated technological solution is implemented – qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data seeks to describe a topic more than measure it, and may include items like increased customer satisfaction, and what a prospect’s attitude might be.

Quantitative data is structured and statistical, focusing on verifiable numbers instead of feelings. Prior to implementation, be sure to collect benchmarks to compare changes against. This will allow you to determine whether you’ve seen a positive or negative impact on your ROI due to the automation.

Now it’s time to make a data driven decision! Keep the following in mind:

  1. Metrics are not enough – collect the right metrics. Ensure that you’re collecting the metrics that will allow you to make data driven decisions.
  2. Having more metrics is not always better. Don’t get number paralysis – focus on the important metrics that take a reasonable amount of time to collect and analyze.
  3. Don’t make value judgments on volume metrics. Quality over quantity is critical here.
    Don’t assume the numbers tell the whole story. The most important part of sharing metrics is the story you tell to make sense of them!
  4. Understand that your metrics may change over time. Good metrics now don’t always equal good metrics later. Re-evaluate the metrics you’re gathering and analyzing regularly to ensure you’re looking at the most relevant numbers.

MAXIMIZE REVENUE WITH TECHNOLOGY AND AUTOMATION
So, how can you make more money with technology and automation? By getting to know your processes and procedures, you can eliminate unnecessary steps, and automate steps to decrease the amount of necessary manual work that needs to be done.

You also have a problem solving framework at your fingertips, to employ whenever you see a pain point arise. Now that you understand how to determine the right tool for the job, you can more fully utilize your technology stack to the company’s benefit.

And finally, we are also able to measure the effectiveness of any automation and technological changes via qualitative and quantitative analysis, which will allow you to make the best data-driven decision for your company to maximize revenue.

To learn more information about Engagement Studio in Pardot, visit Trailhead, and check out the Pardot Engagement Studio for Pardot Lightning App badge.

We can help you maximize your revenue with technology and automation. Our experienced and professional consultants are at your service to design the business you want. Learn more about how we maximize revenue for our clients.

Why Should Sales Care About Marketing Automation?

“Why should sales care about marketing automation?”

As the Director of Institutional Sales Operations at The Princeton Review and with 7+ years in the sales and marketing operations industry, this is a question I’ve been asked time and time again.

I usually answer this question with a question: “Do you have large amounts of unqualified leads being assigned to your sales team, forcing them to waste time qualifying them?”

If the answer is yes, my recommendation is simple — the sales team should be working with the marketing team to develop a lead nurturing program, so that incoming prospects will be more qualified and in a buyers frame of mind prior to being turned over to the sales team.

IMPROVE LEAD QUALITY
“Why are my sales reps getting so many unqualified leads from marketing?”

This is a question no marketing team wants to answer.

Sales teams love receiving leads, but they hate working unqualified ones, as it’s a huge waste of time. They would much prefer to have all prospects who are sent to the sales team be ready to buy immediately. Preferably, they’re the perfect customer with lots of money, too.

While that’s a great dream, let’s come back down to reality.

If the sales team is only getting 100% qualified leads, then the criteria for what should be sent from marketing to sales is a bit too strict and should be relaxed. On the other hand, if the sales team is receiving a huge amount of completely unqualified leads that don’t want to have a sales conversation, we have a lead nurturing problem.

So what can we do about this?

Let’s take a closer look at the marketing funnel, and what it should accomplish.

MOVE PROSPECTS THROUGH THE MARKETING AND SALES FUNNEL
A basic marketing funnel has three parts.

  • Visitor: A prospect has interacted with our company, but we don’t yet have any other personally identifiable information on them except for IP address.
  • Marketing Lead (ML): We have been provided with some personally identifiable information, like an email, about the prospect. However, they are not ready to engage in a conversation with the sales team, or they don’t yet meet the criteria for passing a lead to sales.
  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): We’ve obtained enough information about the prospect to meet our criteria for passing a lead to the sales team, and the prospect is potentially ready to engage in a sales conversation.

Various methods will introduce prospects to different parts of the marketing funnel. For example, you may have a section on your website where people can sign up to receive notifications when new blog content is posted. They’re only signing up using an email address, so they enter the marketing funnel as a Marketing Lead (ML). However, in some of your blogs, you reference a piece of content that includes a feature comparison tool for your product. The feature comparison tool is a gated piece of content, so on the form, the prospect provides some additional information about themselves, like their name.

In general, those seeking information about different product features may be exhibiting buying signals, and it may be close to the right time to put those prospects in touch with the sales team. However, if you send those prospects immediately to sales, they might not be ready to have that conversation yet.

CREATE A PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCE
Nurturing leads will help move the prospect smoothly through the marketing funnel, allowing the prospect to learn more information about your company, and warming them up to be open to having a conversation with the sales team about your product.

It also allows your company to slowly gather more information about the prospect via progressive profiling, and allows the company to build a more complete picture about the prospect so that the sales team can have a personalized conversation with them.

THE MOMENT MY SALES TEAM STARTED CARING ABOUT MARKETING AUTOMATION
My sales team is now completely bought in on the value of marketing automation, but it wasn’t always that way. It took some time to show them how automated lead nurturing could actually help them.

To get their buy in on this new process, the marketing team started by meeting with the sales team to discuss the goals for a new nurture plan, and what they were looking to accomplish after the prospects had completed the nurture program. This alignment help us identify the criteria required for sales to have a productive conversation with the prospect, and allowed marketing to map out a logical customer journey that we could support with various pieces of collateral.

Once the plan was approved by both sides, the marketing team got to work building this in our marketing automation platform, Salesforce Pardot.

HOW TO NURTURE LEADS IN PARDOT
Engagement Studio is the perfect tool for nurturing leads. What process did the marketing team take to create an Engagement Studio program for nurturing these leads?

  1. We started by creating a segmentation list in Pardot that was used for enrolling prospects into the Engagement Studio nurture program.
  2. From there, we created and identified lists in Pardot that contained prospects that should not be receiving this Engagement Studio program. We used this list as a suppression list.
  3. Next, we used completion actions on each Top of Funnel (ToFu) or Middle of Funnel (MoFu) form that we decided should be included to enroll prospects in this nurture program, which added the prospects to your newly created segmentation list.
  4. We then created the email templates that would be sent to prospects at specific stages during the nurture process.
  5. Create a new Engagement Studio program. Add your lists, both enrollment and suppression.
  6. Identify the business days and hours that you wish to send the emails from Engagement Studio, select the time zone, and determine whether you’d like prospects to enter the program more than once.
  7. Then it was time to start building out the Engagement Studio program, using our enrollment and suppression lists, email templates, and email sending criteria (this is the fun part).
  8. Finally, once we completed the Engagement Studio Program, we made sure to test the program in the Test tab to ensure the program worked as we envisioned.
    In this Engagement Studio program, the marketing team nurtured leads via a series of emails which contained calls to action (CTA) that asked the prospect to download additional content. The marketing team utilized progressive profiling to gather additional information about the prospect during this journey, and if the prospect completed the entire program, they were assigned to the sales team for further follow up.

The sales team was extremely pleased with the prospects being assigned to them, as these prospects already had a good understanding about the company and what it could do for their business, and were interested in hearing about what those next steps in the buying process looked like. The sales team also could spend more time on the qualification calls speaking to the prospects about their specific pain points, rather than wasting time gathering basic information like their company name, as that information was already gathered during the nurture process.

INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY AND CLOSE MORE DEALS
Nurturing leads with Engagement Studio will help marketing provide sales with qualified, highly engaged prospects who are ready to have a sales conversation. By nurturing the leads, the marketing team can ensure that prospects have received appropriate information prior to a sales conversation and have taken actions which demonstrate buying signals. The sales team will spend less time trying to gather basic information in order to qualify prospects, and instead can spend their time having quality conversations with prospects instead.

So, why should sales care about marketing automation? It will help improve their lead quality, accelerate the marketing and sales funnel, drive personalized experiences, and ultimately, help them close more deals.

To learn more about how to build Engagement Studio programs in Pardot to qualify leads, visit Trailhead and check out the Pardot Lead Nurturing for Pardot Lightning App module.

We can help you align your sales and marketing teams. Our experienced and professional consultants are at your service to design the business you want. Learn more about how we maximize revenue for our clients.

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