Aligning sales, marketing, and customer service under revenue operations is crucial for achieving a unified approach to revenue generation and management. It ensures a seamless customer journey from initial awareness through to post-sale support, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, and it also boosts productivity by reducing redundancies and accelerating workflows.
Unifying these functions under a revenue operations framework can present some challenges, however, particularly in organizations where these functions have traditionally operated in silos. Skill and technology gaps, misaligned goals, and cultural resistance are common roadblocks organizations run into when trying to achieve revenue team alignment.
But don’t fret, because we’ve got a guide to getting it done. We’ll explain the stakes, and then go step by step laying out the roadmap to rev ops success.
What is Revenue Operations, and Why Should B2B Companies Care?
Revenue operations, or RevOps, is a strategic integration of sales, marketing, and customer service operations within a B2B organization. Its primary aim is to drive growth and operational efficiency by aligning goals, strategies, and data across these key functions.
Here’s why organizations that haven’t yet embraced revenue operations should consider it seriously:
- Enhanced Data Visibility and Management: RevOps centralizes data from sales, marketing, and customer service, eliminating silos that hinder access to actionable insights. This consolidation helps you leverage data more effectively, providing a clearer view of the customer journey and enabling data-driven decision-making.
- Increased Operational Efficiency: By aligning the strategies and processes of different departments, RevOps streamlines operations, reduces friction, and optimizes resource use across the organization. This leads to smoother operations and can significantly lower costs.
- Improved Customer Experience: With a unified operational approach, your organization can offer a more consistent and engaging customer experience. Aligning teams also means that customer interactions are more cohesive, which can enhance satisfaction and loyalty.
- Strategic Decision Making: Integrated data and insights provide a comprehensive view of the business landscape, empowering you to make strategic decisions that anticipate market changes and align with overarching business goals.
- Better Team Alignment and Communication: RevOps fosters a culture of collaboration and transparency, aligning teams around common goals. This not only mitigates the challenges of miscommunication and misaligned objectives but also enhances workplace morale.
The bottom line: RevOps streamlines processes, improves efficiency, and sets up organizations for success in generating predictable revenue.
Ready to embrace RevOps? Here’s how you can get started:
Step 1: Setting Up a Revenue Operations Team
The right RevOps team structure, with the necessary roles filled and goals and objectives well-defined, is essential for setting the revenue team up for success.
If you already have separate sales, marketing, and customer success operations teams, a good move in the right direction is to establish a role for the Head of Revenue Operations. The person in this role will work closely with other department heads and the leaders of each team to achieve goal alignment, identify tools and technologies needed to support revenue growth, and make ongoing improvements to optimize revenue team performance.
Other functions of revenue operations include:
- Data Management: Cleansing, structuring, and providing visibility into data across multiple sources.
- Account Identification and Insights: Identifying in-market accounts and delivering actionable insights for revenue teams.
- Predictive Scoring: Utilizing historical and real-time data to prioritize sales and marketing efforts on the most promising accounts.
- Data Enrichment: Continuously updating account and contact records with comprehensive B2B data.
- Analytics: Offering deep insights into go-to-market performance and the value contributed by marketing.
- Orchestration: Delivering targeted messages and content across various channels effectively.
All of these are essential for aligning sales and marketing efforts to maximize conversions, increase win rates, and drive revenue growth efficiently.
Step 2: Aligning Sales, Marketing, Customer Success
Once an organization has defined their revenue operations team and structure, the next step is to align sales, marketing and service with these operations. This generally begins with
- Establishing revenue team goals that are aligned with the organization’s goals
- Getting all members on the same page understanding how those goals can be reached
- Deciding how success will be measured
- Determining what tools and processes team members require.
The best way to align departments under revenue operations, however, is to unite them under a single source of data.
Data sits at the very heart of revenue operations. And the way data is traditionally made available to revenue teams is often frankly unhelpful: it’s incomplete, inadequate, outdated, and siloed.
Scattered throughout your data sources are precious insights into buyer behavior, sales and marketing performance metrics, customer satisfaction indicators, and more. RevOps depends on this data to make sure that revenue generation activities are successful, and to identify where gaps and opportunities for improvement lie. This same data is critical to sales, marketing, and customer success for understanding the buyers’ journey, measuring outreach performance, determining upsell opportunities, and driving other decision-making processes.
That’s why the first step a newly minted RevOps team should take is enabling revenue teams with technology that brings all data together in a platform that makes it all available and actionable by setting up the following revenue operations tools.
Step 3: Implementing Revenue Operations Tools
Here are some of the most popular revenue operations tools. You probably already use some of these tools, but they don’t always share data. The last solution we list can fix that problem.
Customer Relationship Management platforms (CRMs)
CRM (customer relationship management) systems such as Salesforce or HubSpot allow companies to manage customer relationships and track leads throughout the entire sales process. These platforms also provide insights into customer behavior and can be used to target customers with relevant messaging.
Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs)
Marketing automation helps streamline campaigns by automating emails, ads, social media posts and more. This allows businesses to save time by cutting down on manual tasks while still creating personalized experiences for their customers.
Incentive and Compensation Systems
Studies have shown that organizations that include ABM-centric measurements — like sales volume or customer satisfaction ratings — for incentivized compensation tend to have better financial performance.
By implementing these types of tools within a well-defined revenue operations framework and making them available across all functions of the go-to-market team, B2B companies can achieve greater efficiency, which leads directly to increased revenue.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
CDP stands for customer data platform. CDPs bring together all your data from the various platforms in your tech stack. It creates a single source of customer knowledge, which helps you deliver consistent sales and marketing messages, and gives revenue teams to insights such as:
- What your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like
- Accounts you might not know about that are in-market and ready-to-buy
- The websites, keywords, and topics your buyers research most
- The signals your buyers give off when they’re ready to buy
Step 4: Setting up Automation
Sellers spend most of their time — 72%, to be exact — on non-selling activities. Instead of focusing on moving buyers through their journeys, sellers are stuck manually updating CRMs, trying to prioritize their tasks, and reaching out to buyers that aren’t in-market.
Automation tools can save sales reps time and improve efficiency by streamlining repetitive tasks such as data entry, updating contact information, and segmenting customers by leveraging artificial intelligence. Marketing uses for automation include sending out emails or enrolling contacts into nurturing campaigns when certain criteria are met.
Automated workflows also improve data accuracy by eliminating human error. Companies should ask their technology vendors about the automation available to them, and take advantage of it as much as possible.
Step 5: Gathering Metrics and Analyzing Results
Measuring efficiency is one of the most important steps, so important, in fact, that the process is never-ending. Regularly tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer retention, sales conversion rates, upsells/cross-sells, and average customer value, companies can gain insight into how effectively their teams are working together and identify areas for improvement.
In addition to measuring efficiency, businesses should also keep track of the cost and benefits associated with implementing a revenue operations strategy. This includes considering costs such as software licensing fees, staff salaries, and training costs, and seeing how it measures up to benefits like predictable pipeline generation, shortened buying cycles, increased customer satisfaction, and ultimately increased revenues. Companies should consider both short-term and long-term costs when evaluating the ROI of any new investments they make in their revenue operations strategy.
To make sure these calculations are accurate, businesses should use tools such as reporting dashboards to track KPIs over time. Industry-leading revenue platforms come with dashboards that can provide real-time insights into how well revenue teams are performing so that adjustments can be made quickly if needed.
Additionally, companies should regularly review customer feedback to understand how customers perceive their products or services and how they rate the quality of the support they receive. Gathering data from multiple sources enables organizations to accurately assess their current performance levels and make the necessary changes for future success.
