RevOps challenge: Assessing the maturity of your RevOps capabilities

In short: Do you know if your organization is ready for RevOps or not? And if not, do you know what you should work on to increase your readiness?

If you're already using RevOps, do you know whether your getting the most out of it? According to research from Standish group '45% of technology’s features are never used'.

Developing the RevOps capabilities that complement your Revtech setup will increase the proportion of functionality that is used and the value the business creates from using it, by up to 20 - 40%. But first, you have to assess your RevOps capabilities. Keep reading to learn how we do it.

In the first post of this series, we described how sales is dependent on Revtech for success. Many companies spend large sums on revenue technologies, without thinking about whether they will use all its functionality and what else they need to develop to get the most value from it.

This results in very low usage rates. For example, Gartner reports that Martech (marketing technology) has a very low, 23% usage rate, i.e. only 23% of its functionality is ever used, Microsoft similarly reporting Office 365 to have a 20% usage rate and SAS reporting CDPs (customer data portal) having a 17% usage rate.

Companies are paying for technology, but they aren’t getting many of the benefits from using it. Revtech is no different.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

At 180ops, we believe there is no point in buying Revtech if you don’t develop the complementary RevOps capabilities – the bundles of complementary processes, data, technology integration, roles, collaboration, work systems and governance, that you need to use all the revenue technology's functionality – at the same time. Just buying Revtech without developing the necessary complementary capabilities will lead to low adoption rates, even lower usage and a lack of customer success.

To solve this problem, we have developed a simple, but powerful RevOps capability maturity model – Revenue Builder – to assess the current maturity of your RevOps capabilities, the desired maturity you will need to get all the value from your Revtech, and the gap between them that you will need to cross.

HOW DOES THE REVENUE BUILDER MODEL WORK?

The Revenue Builder model contains three types of capabilities.

1. A small number of ‘foundational’ capabilities, that lie at the core of how RevOps creates value.
2. A similar number of ‘multiplying’ capabilities, that as their name suggests, multiply the ability of the foundational capabilities to create value. The more they are developed, the more value that is created from RevOps.
3. And a larger number of ‘differentiating’ capabilities that help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and create a transient competitive advantage. The differentiating capabilities are designed to be customisable, so that they can be aligned to your business strategy.

Assessing your capabilities using Revenue Builder is quick and easy. Team members involved in RevOps – whether as everyday users, suppliers to it or customers of it – complete a short assessment that asks them to score the organisation’s current capabilities and its desired capabilities, and to provide further information about what supports RevOps, what hinders it and who else is involved in it.

This provides the data to identify the gap between the current and desired capability maturities, the ‘capability deficit’. It also provides rich contextual information about other RevOps requirements, constraints that support or hinder it and collaborators that need to be involved in RevOps.

Our experience, gathered over decades working with sales, shows that developing your RevOps capabilities in parallel with implementing Revtech, and facilitating the change associated with it, will drive a 20-40% increase in the value created from your revenue technology investment.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT?

Once we know where you stand as an organization in terms of your readiness, capabilities, desired state and the capability gap, we can identify packages of capabilities that should be developed. We can define how these should be arranged in transition states maximizing the value creation and we can organize them in a visual implementation roadmap based on the widely used Three Horizon model. We will dive deeper into all of the above in our next newsletter.

HOW TO ASSESS YOUR REVOPS CAPABILITIES – THREE TAKEAWAYS:

If you want to assess your RevOps capabilities:

1. Customise the Revenue Builder assessment so that it is closely aligned to your business strategy,
2. Identify who should take part in the Revenue Builder assessment and get them to complete the assessment. A minimum of 20 completed assessments are required for analysis, but the more completed responses the better.
3. Analyse your current and desired RevOps capabilities, and identify the capability deficit. Capture details of other requirements, constraints and collaborators. These will be essential when planning the implementation roadmap.

Arrange a call with us to see how we can help you get all the value from your your Revtech.

This newsletter is written in collaboration with one of our extended team specialists, Dr. Graham Hill. He brings in 30+ years of experience working for blue-chip consultancies such as KPMG, Price Waterhouse and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as an Interim Head at Toyota and Huawei Technologies and as an independent strategy consultant.

Graham has been closely involved in the evolution of customer value management for over 30 years. Starting with CRM in the 1990s, he pioneered Customer Experience Management in the 2000s and Complex Service Systems Design in the 2010s. More recently, he has been involved in projects implementing Decisioning-as-a-Service, Journey Orchestration and Conversational Commerce.

Graham is the founder of Janus spv., a boutique consultancy specialising in customer value management for corporate clients.

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