“Revenue Operations (RevOps)” is the new shiny toy. Every few years, new terminology is thrown around: growth marketing, RevOps, Inbound Marketing, Dark Social, Demand Generation, etc. Marketers and sales professionals will complicate a theory, repackage it so it can be simplified, and then sell it. That’s why you need consultants, right?!
RevOps Defined
In its simplest terms, RevOps aligns sales, marketing, and customer success. It’s about aligning the people, the systems, the processes, and the data to build a predictable revenue stream. It is easy to define but only possible to execute with leadership sponsorship.
Let’s dive a little deeper into RevOps
Revenue operations is a relatively new term that encompasses many different functions in a company—for instance, sales, marketing, customer success, product, finance, etc. RevOps can be used to describe both the people who work on revenue and the department that focuses on improving revenue performance.
All about the alignment of people, systems, processes, and data
Revenue operations takes a holistic approach to revenue generation – from lead generation to sales processes to renewals and expansions.
Think of each department as a system. Marketing has a system, and sales has a system. RevOps is the system that connects marketing to sales and sales to customer success. You could think of it as “the glue” that holds everything together within an organization’s revenue functions—from lead generation to renewals.
Revenue operations focuses on improving business performance with processes and technology. This can help you grow your revenue, improve customer experience and reduce business costs.
For instance, to improve the sales process: Revenue operations can help you increase conversion rates by optimizing the website navigation or personalizing content based on user behavior (e.g., search history). RevOps will lead to better engagement and higher conversion rates, ultimately leading to improved sales performance.
Revenue Operations ensures the company’s entire sales process, from lead to close, to renewals, runs smoothly. This means ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned; that the sales process is aligned with the buyer journey; that it’s aligned with the marketing process; and that it’s also aligned with the customer success process.
Revenue Operations is a team sport -it relies heavily on cross-team communication and collaboration to accomplish its goals. The RevOps team should work closely with every part of the organization: sales, marketing, customer success, and support teams, to ensure that they’re all working towards the same goal: revenue growth.
RevOps looks at the entire revenue funnel. It’s responsible for the sales process, including all the activities required to bring new business. This includes defining a strategy, creating a roadmap to achieve that strategy, implementing processes that support growing the business and managing those processes, measuring progress against plans, and putting any necessary corrective actions into place if you fall behind schedule.
The RevOps team is also responsible for managing your pipeline. Essentially, they ensure there are always enough opportunities moving through it at each stage of your sales process so that you can hit your target growth goals month after month.
RevOps focuses on building replicable processes. It is a process-oriented role. The RevOps professional should be able to replicate the process and scale it as needed. By doing so, the RevOps team can train new personnel on the system, who will then be able to reproduce the same results everyone else is getting in other parts of your company.
It’s not just sales or marketing—it’s about improving the entire revenue funnel.
Conclusion
In short, RevOps is about improving business performance by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success. It’s a cross-functional team that looks at the entire revenue funnel from lead generation to renewals and expansion – while working closely with all departments in an organization.
