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, sales, marketing, and customer success teams worked in silos. Each team had its own goals, processes, responsibilities, and technology. While departments interacted occasionally, they mostly operated independently.

Today’s customer journey looks very different than it did a few years ago. Buying a product or service, especially a high-value one, takes time. Prospects also expect a high level of personalized service from your company.

Revenue operations, or RevOps, breaks down barriers between departments. It gives your company a complete view of prospects and customers. A revenue operations strategy outlines how your company engages buyers at every stage of the customer journey. The goal is to create a seamless and personalized experience. This approach can increase revenue, shorten the sales cycle, and improve customer loyalty.

Creating Your Revenue Operations Team

The first step is building a Revenue Operations team. This team should operate independently from sales and marketing. Business priorities should not be driven by one department alone. RevOps must prioritize projects based on what benefits the company as a whole.

The RevOps team uses systems thinking to analyze how departments work together. Their goal is to improve the full customer journey across marketing, sales, and customer success. They evaluate how each part of the business connects and performs over time. This allows them to prioritize projects that create the biggest business impact.

A RevOps team usually includes a leader, such as a Director or VP of Revenue Operations. The team may also include specialists for different business functions. Common roles include Sales Operations Manager, Customer Success Operations Specialist, and Marketing Operations Manager.

These specialists act as liaisons between RevOps and each department. They also work together to create strategies that support team goals while improving the overall business system.

Develop Critical Business Processes

The management team works with each department to improve data-sharing processes. They also provide insights into how teams affect one another. This helps departments use data more effectively and improve efficiency.

Tools like Salesforce and Salesloft give teams access to the information they need. These platforms reduce manual work and simplify data collection. They also help deliver the right information to the right team at the right time.

These processes help sales and marketing work more closely together. Teams can improve research efforts, increase marketing conversions, and identify which channels produce 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 an important part of a revenue operations strategy. They help teams review each stage of the process and define entrance and exit criteria. They also uncover redundant processes that may have developed over time.

Each functional group should map out its processes and define the criteria for every stage. The process should clearly identify who is involved and what technology is used.

After creating the process maps, a Revenue Operations team member can help streamline workflows. They can remove redundancies and improve how prospects or clients move through the funnel. This may include adding or removing technology, requiring specific data at certain stages, or eliminating unnecessary steps.

The Revenue Operations team also reviews how each department’s process connects with others. This helps identify bottlenecks, gaps, and dependencies that need attention.

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.