What is Revenue Operations (RevOps), and why does your business need it?

While digging into your favourite marketing, sales, or business resources this year, you may have seen a significant rise in the mention of RevOps. RevOps is the common term for Revenue Operations. It’s a process for optimising those business decisions and strategies that directly impact revenue generation.

The emergence of the RevOps approach began with B2B research firms theorising fixes to misaligned teams across the revenue funnel. It was later popularized by early adopters of the new ‘Chief Revenue Officer’ title in the early 2010s. Subscription-based businesses saw the vision of a RevOps team; after 2014, there was an explosion in popularity. Today, countless Slack groups, podcasts, LinkedIn influencers, and blogs speak to its increasing importance in B2B.

As Forbes put it, “Revenue operations was created as an “end-to-end process of driving revenue, from the moment a prospect considers a purchase (marketing) to when you close the deal (sales) to their renewal and upsell (CS). The result of this orchestration is faster growth and more profit.”

Top B2B tech companies that leaned on revenue ops to accelerate their growth experienced significant benefits, including 10% to 20% increases in sales productivity, according to Boston Consulting Group.

The benefits of using RevOps include increased collaboration and more predictable growth and forecasting. The data shows that companies that align their departments and functions outperform those that don’t. Public companies with RevOps functions saw a 71% higher stock performance than those without, according to research by Forrester in 2019. Forrester also concluded that companies using RevOps principles saw a 19% growth increase and 15% higher profits than those who continued with a more traditional business model.

RevOps brings everyone together — from marketing, sales, service, customer success, and finance — around three shared pillars:

Process, Platform, and People.

Each pillar is a foundational building block upon which the next pillar is built. When you have each pillar properly defined, you can achieve focus, clarity, and accountability throughout your organisation.

Pillar 1 - Process: You need to make sure you have the right processes in place to create a culture of collaboration. RevOps activates uniform processes to foster accountability and trust within your organisation. As your teams work together to convert prospects into raving fans, you will begin to see additional benefits such as shorter sales cycles, improved retention, and a higher volume of upsells.

Pillar 2 - Platform: Having accurate information is the key to success in any situation. Within your organisation, you must connect and align your technology to provide a clear and accurate story around your revenue pipeline. By providing a single source of truth, individuals can identify how they, directly and indirectly, impact the pipeline.

Pillar 3 - People: The third and final pillar is the People responsible for bringing together and managing your process and platforms. Depending on an organisation’s size, RevOps will create a specific RevOps team or distribute the responsibilities of RevOps among your existing team members.

Traditionally, businesses have struggled to effectively bridge the goals of disconnected internal teams and their related technology stacks and systems. Sales and marketing departments may have previously worked with parallel procedures and processes, leading towards divergent goals. This harms a business's revenue potential: It risks data disconnect, wasted time, and an increasingly difficult decision-making process across and between departments.

RevOps attempts to tackle these issues by delivering increased transparency and information sharing; data in one department is made available in another. This transforms a lone-wolf approach into an ethos driven by departmental collaboration, which contributes to predictable and shared growth.

When hiring for a RevOps role, customer focus is imperative. As we’ve mentioned before, the shift to a RevOps focus is ultimately about driving a more seamless customer experience and strengthening customer relationships. Anyone in a RevOps role needs to have a knack for empathising with customers and putting themselves in customers’ shoes. Their customer-centric approach will be a crucial component of RevOps success in your company.

You may not be at the point of building out a separate RevOps function and hiring the positions above to drive it – and that’s okay. Most businesses start by hiring operations roles within the revenue-driving functions: marketing, sales, customer support.

If you’re writing a RevOps job description, it’s likely you realise that your company’s top-line growth could benefit from unified marketing, sales and customer success teams. You may have also noticed that data across these departments aren’t quite in sync or that there are inefficient processes in place that are slowing down business results.

Equally important to these job duties are the soft skills that make for an effective RevOps team. Revenue operations team members (and RevOps leaders, especially), enjoy collaboration and have a knack for digging into data to uncover key insights. They can take challenges in stride and remain calm under significant pressure. They also operate and interact with empathy and understand that improving their tools and processes can better empower people to perform at their very best

So when making a conscious choice to implement RevOps, do your research and choose the right candidate. Contact Beagle Talent to learn more about how we can help and why so many of our clients retain our services.