What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?

Aug 25, 2021

In this article, we will define what Revenue Operations (RevOps) is and why it is so important to an organization's success.

You may assume Revenue Operations is just another buzzword to replace a common business function, but the truth is, RevOps is so much more than a new department or role.

What is Revenue Operations?

Revenue Operations is a methodology that unifies go-to-market ops functions into one team.

What does that mean for your organization? Instead of siloing Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, Success Ops in separate departments, RevOps brings them together with the core purpose of driving strategic optimizations throughout the customer experience.

Revenue operations teams strive to improve the buying experience, accelerate decisions, reduce friction — and above all — drive revenue.

What are the Go-to-Market Ops Functions (and why should you unify them with RevOps)?

Operations professionals across the customer journey are jointly responsible for the customer's journey from awareness to being a successful lifetime customer. While there are many functions one can attribute to operations, below are four main go-to-market operations functions that are unified under RevOps:

Sales Operations

As the name suggests, sales operations are implementing an operational process in a company that improves its ability to sell a product or service successfully. For example, sales operations may include strategic planning and forecasting for the current quarter or year, sales compensation administration, information gathering about trends and competitors, or identifying new possible markets.

Marketing Operations

Marketing operations is responsible for the data, insights, tools, and processes that enable marketing strategy, including analytics, customer experience software, and CRM. For example, marketing operations may create a customer acquisition plan based on data, implement it across your touchpoints and measure its success in real-time with a dashboard that gathers the insights you need to make better decisions about what works and what doesn't.

Customer Success Operations

The success operations team is responsible for optimizing the post-purchase customer experience by measuring and tracking the customer's experience with the product. The customer success team may provide hands-on support and services to help their customers get the most out of their products.

Finance

From a revenue operations perspective, Finance plays a pivotal role in determining an effective pricing strategy, and occasionally, managing sales compensation administration. They are not steering the customer journey, but their actions and insights can help inform RevOps' approach to revenue growth.

Why unify with RevOps?

It's not hard to see why these distinct parts of the business should be unified — especially because they have similar overarching goals. They all strive to increase revenue while reducing churn.

Unfortunately, their competing processes, siloed knowledge, and misaligned KPIs often erode the customer experience.

Unifying your GTM ops functions will allow your organization to prioritize the most impactful initiatives to improve the customer experience and grow revenue.

What are the benefits of adopting RevOps?

According to Boston Consulting Group, B2B tech companies that have adopted the RevOps model reported significant benefits.

On the marketing side, organizations reported at least doubling their ROI on digital marketing.

Sales teams saw a 10% to 20% gain in sales productivity and reported a 10% increase in lead acceptance.

Customer success teams enjoyed a 15% to 20% lift in customer satisfaction

Last but not least, organizations experienced a 30% reduction in overall GTM spend.

With clear gains in efficiencies and outcomes, it's no surprise that RevOps roles and opportunities are growing at a faster rate than Sales Operations and other ancillary functions.

What problems do RevOps teams solve?

At all times, RevOps professionals have one question top of mind:

"Where are we leaving money on the table?"

More often than not, RevOps will find opportunities for revenue gains in one of three areas: Process, Platform, and People.

Process

The RevOps team is responsible for optimizing every process throughout the customer experience. That includes evaluating whether the group should pare down the tech stack, automate processes (such as sales compensation payroll), and establishing a refined data entry standard.

It doesn't matter to RevOps if you tell them, "this is how it's always been done." They've already sharpened their spear and are laser-focused on optimizing processes to generate more revenue.

Platform

Siloed data and asynchronous systems are often at the foundation of a poor customer experience. RevOps teams will strive to unify data and systems to a single source of truth for teams across marketing, sale, and customer success to reference and act upon.

For example, if quality leads are slipping through the cracks during the hand-off from marketing to sales, RevOps will work to merge the systems so that sales and marketing can jointly manage incoming leads.

People

The people across your revenue functions — sales, marketing, and CS — must cooperate and knowledge share to fully realize revenue potential. It's not uncommon for departments to hoard certain information out of fear, distrust, or simply a lack of policy.

RevOps teams will establish links across departments and create feedback loops to improve their respective functions.

Where should you start?

Change is hard, and activating RevOps at your organization takes more than hiring a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and calling it a day. Above all, you need data. Clean, unified, and contextual data that your teams can count on to inform their every decision.

Call us biased, but one of the most impactful ways to kickstart your RevOps function is by transforming your approach to sales compensation.

Poor processes and disjointed systems have long hampered sales compensation. As a function that sits at the periphery of the key ops functions, sales compensation is an ideal starting place to clean up your data feeds and to create change that cascades across your organization.

Ready to activate RevOps at your organization?

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