Jenn VillaSignificant changes are coming your way— and fast!
The good news is, your business is growing. The bad news is, you're not sure if you're ready for everything that comes with it.
As you're watching all the pieces are falling into place, maybe you realize you have no processes in place to keep the ball rolling.
Or perhaps your company lacks the insights it needs to make thoughtful, data-driven decisions moving forward.
Whatever the case, crap is about to hit the fan if you don't develop some systems and set your team and your customers up for success soon.
Your answers lie in adopting a revenue operations (RevOps) mindset for most businesses in these shoes.
What is Revenue Operations?
Revenue operations is ... to drive company growth by operationalizing the experience throughout the customer lifecycle, from prospect to delight.
Whew. That was a mouthful. Did that clear things up or make it worse?
Let's break that monster definition down. It's the strategic coordination of your internal teams (marketing, sales, and service) to better help the customer, which ultimately leads to more revenue!
Because let's face it, whether your teams work across the country or the office, it's hard to build bridges between departments. Let's understand why.
Friction in Hand-offs & Individual Team Goals
Three giant gears run your business: your marketing, sales, and services teams.
- You market to your desired audience and pull in leads, which are then handed to sales.
- The sales team takes these leads and nurses them into customers before passing them off to an onboarding contact and the service team.
- From there, the service team answers customer questions and supports long-term account management.
If that sounds like a long journey, it's because it is!
Think of all the hand-offs a single person goes through, from initial exposure with your brand to becoming a long-term customer. If you don't understand where there might be friction and if that friction is good or bad, it will result in customer disengagement and potential revenue loss.
Bad friction hurts your employees, too: In addition to customer friction during department pass-offs, all three teams are often working independently in terms of their own sets of goals and priorities— instead of working together to achieve broader company and revenue goals.
The proof is in the data. According to the 2019 Leandata State of Revenue Operations Report, 78% of the 2,400 companies surveyed said that consistent revenue growth is challenging. This same study found that 40% reported misalignment between marketing, sales, and service.
What Does the Misalignment Look Like?
Small differences in your departments' processes and goals can be causing larger ripple effects throughout your entire organization.
Your marketing team may have captured data about the lead that never makes it into your salesperson's hands— since the teams are utilizing or connecting to their customer relationship management (CRM) platform differently.
This could make closing the deal more arduous for the salesperson and frustrating for the customer, having to repeat answers to questions they were already asked. Or it could mean a missed upsell opportunity come time to sign the agreement, with not understanding the full scope of the prospect's pain points.
Similarly, a salesperson who builds a great connection with the customer may shock the newcomer by "abandoning" them after passing the relationship off to service, triggering lost trust in your brand at a crucial stage when familiarity and comfort matter most to avoid buyer's remorse.
These are just a few examples of the disconnections RevOps strives to realign.
Reducing Negative Friction & Drag
The concept of revenue operations was created to help reduce negative friction points like these and the drag in growth acceleration that comes with them. We say here negative friction because we firmly believe that friction is an unavoidable and sometimes positive experience. It's the negative friction that's truly hindering the customer experience that needs to be minimized.
RevOps aims to bring your business's marketing, sales, and service sectors together to create a genuinely effortless customer experience by building bridges between all internal teams. It's about finding and fixing your business areas where the disconnection occurs between your various teams, causing stark siloes and operational inefficiencies that slow down your company's revenue pipeline and profitability.
The Goals & Roles of RevOps
When you hire someone to come in and help you with RevOps, this team's goals are focused on better unifying your sales, marketing, and customer service teams to provide more predictable revenue.
To do this, a Revenue Operation team often:
Empowers the Silos
A RevOps team assesses the silos across your organization and integrates them, rather than breaking them down. This often involves identifying silos like marketing, sales, and service and building the integrations for better collaboration, central communication hubs, real-time data sharing, and smoother operations.
It may mean examining, restructuring, and optimizing your customer life cycle components to create a more effortless UX. It could be streamlining your internal operations with shared processes, correctly linked technology, accountable execution, and repeatable automation.
This is also about operationalizing internal people to improve the employee experience so that your teams feel empowered to support the customer experience fully.
Leverages the Right Tech, the Right Way
Revenue Operations looks for overlaps in tech and addresses data silos rather than adding more tools and ambiguity to a company's experience. That means cutting out unnecessary tools and software— choosing the best tech stack for the job without overlap or extra spending and costly disconnection between platforms that require manual entry and lead to data inaccuracy.
Instead of letting the technology you always used pave the way, RevOps begs you to choose tech based on your needs exclusively and use it to maximize your processes. It's about shaping tech around company operations versus forcing operations to fit into existing tech. That means building processes around the way you need things to work, not around the way a piece of software says it should work.
Sets Realistic Expectations
RevOps addresses change management with realistic expectations and milestones versus imposing change without or vision or understanding the consequences. This team strategically looks at goals and stakes them with progress markers, processes reinforcements, and significant shifts that will lead to higher revenue gain.
Backs Up the Big-Picture Operations Strategy
RevOps gives recommendations from the whole machine's perspective versus narrow-minded adjustments that can cause a ripple effect of issues down the line. While inside each department, it can be hard to see the bigger picture of company goals. A Revenue Operations team is there to take it all in and advise without bias.
Upholds Broader, Holistic Values
Revenue operations care about your customer experience, revenue, and brand promise versus singular vanity metrics. While individual silos can get caught up tracking their metrics for success in marketing, sales, and customer service, it's a RevOps team's job to worry about the customer and financial state of your operations.
Makes Sure All Departments Understand your Brand Messaging
Misalignment often occurs when various departments aren't on the same page regarding your brand messaging. Your marketing team has carefully curated a specific tone of voice and visual image of your brand, yet sales and service are often missing crucial elements.
Your brand's consistency matters with every touchpoint with every customer.
RevOps assistance can foster synchronicity between your teams to create a cohesive experience throughout your customers' life stages. This may mean educating all teams on your marketing guidelines or hearing your sales and service teams' expertise to rebuild or restructure your holistic approach. It's about getting everyone on the same page about your company's essentials and how you communicate them.
Outsourcing Your RevOps
It can be hard to get started with Revenue Operations or finding the right partner you can trust to accelerate your organization's revenue drag for long-term results. For those looking for a hand-on team for the job, our RevOps experts can start from the ground up, building the foundation for better marketing, sales, and service cohesion and act as your remote revenue operations team for as long as you need us.
Check out our approach here.