The Revenue Operations Guide

How You Can Maximize Your Organization’s Revenue Potential By Leveraging Process, Platforms, and People

flawless-inbound-revops-flywheel-line(no hands) (1)

What is RevOps (Revenue Operations)

Your business is growing, and you might be finding that expansion has brought some new issues to the forefront. Whether it's departmental rifts, too many tech platforms among teams, or scattered goals across your business it can be difficult to know where to start dealing with these problems.  

Revenue Operations (known as RevOps) is a business function that strives to drive revenue through optimizing operations. RevOps aims to align sales, marketing, and customer service teams to work with each other towards a unified company goal.  

Essentially, RevOps aims to streamline processes creating efficiencies between departments by sharing data to prevent siloed teams. This RevOps strategy operationalizes all systems to turn your daily operations into revenue.   

Placing revenue as the common goal for sales, marketing, and customer service teams supplies a focal point for everyone to plan toward and measure against.

 

Why Do You Need Revenue Operations?

Simply put – you need RevOps if you want to align your departments and maximize your revenue potential. But of course, there are specific pain points that organizations experience which can be solved through Revenue Operations. Below are some common issues organizations face that are solid indicators they need a RevOps strategy:  

  • Using Excel as a CRM is becoming too time-consuming and manual 
  • Leads are falling through the cracks between marketing and sales  
  • The sales and marketing teams are generally disconnected and compete with each other 
  • We’re not able to leverage contacts we already have in our database 
  • It’s difficult to track which marketing channels are working for us 
  • The marketing activities we do are too manual and not valuable to individual leads 

So how does RevOps help to solve all of those problems (and more)? RevOps allows you to create a competitive advantage by adapting to change and creating strategies to find opportunities within your business that will promote growth overall. With the right pillars (read more about these below) in place, RevOps:  

  • Builds processes for every stage in your customer journey, ensuring all contacts in all stages of the buyer journey can be a valuable revenue source.  
  • Uses a single platform (or set of well-integrated platforms) to complete an entire customer journey, keeping departments connected and providing quality data and analytics. 
  • Connects departments and keeps teams aligned around shared processes and goals - with everyone pointed towards the goal of revenue generation, you’ll build efficiency to keep up the good work. 
  • Leverages a user-friendly platform for sales, marketing, and customer service, which provides opportunities for automation, integration, and customization. 
  • Ensures the tracking of data from a single source of truth to provide accurate, actionable insights and to boost accountability. 
  • Relies on the right team members to manage and optimize the overall strategy and analytics to keep the business focus on maximizing revenue potential. 

The Three Pillars of RevOps

Revenue Operations is built on three foundational pillars: People, Platforms, and Process. Each pillar plays an important part in a successful Revenue Operations strategy.

1. Process

In order to build an organization with integrated departments and an excellent customer journey experience, you need a solid set of processes in place. With the right processes, your team will be able to collaborate to bring expectational customer experience and continuously grow your revenue. Plus, with defined processes in place, accountability, forecasting, and reporting will all be optimized.

2. Platform

The second key pillar of Revenue Operations is the platform. Your platform should provide a single source of data across your departments.  Platforms such as HubSpot streamline your revenue operations and optimize your tech stack by consolidating all of your departments' required tools and functions in one platform. If your company has multiple platforms for multiple departments/business functions, the key to success is to seamlessly integrate your platforms so your teams can effectively share processes and data. In the end, the goal of the platforms pillar is to create efficiencies and save you money and the hassle of having too many platforms that don’t work together for your success.

3. People

Any successful business operation needs the right people to maintain and optimize it in order to be successful. Whether you have a dedicated RevOps team or your existing team members are taking on the responsibilities, change management will be critical in ensuring your team is successful in their adoption of RevOps. With set KPIs attached to your Process and data coming from your Platforms you can help your team better understand their objectives and achieve their goals. 

HOW DO I START?

Getting started with Revenue Operations can be intimidating, but if you stick with the three pillars, and follow the steps to get each solidly in place, you’ll be off to a good start! Here are a few steps you can use to begin planning your journey to RevOps:

1. Look at what you have

All of that data you’ve been collecting and your tech stack, bring it to the forefront. Take stock of what skills you have on your team, what type of data has been collected (and note what data wasn’t collected), and what platforms you’ve been using for what purposes.  

Once you have everything collected, start thinking about how it's all working for you. Are teams using different systems that don’t align? Is your tech stack integrated, or are applications disjointed? Do you have the data you need to make the right business decisions? 

This audit will show you what you have and what’s missing so that you can start to form goals.  

2. What can you do?

What stories is your data telling you? What observations have you made about your operations? The next thing to do is take your analytics and create a strategy: 

  • Find what you need in the short term to fill gaps in services. You may need to add a staff member to the team or outsource your website rebuild to jumpstart your RevOps goals. 
  • Find redundancies and create efficiencies. If you’re switching to RevOps because your sales, marketing and customer service teams are siloed then you are likely to find some redundancies. Turn your inefficiencies into opportunities by consulting with teams to build processes that work better for your business rather than a single team. 
  • Streamline your tech stack! Use programs that work for your team and speak with each other to save your staff time and frustration moving work from one platform to another. 
3. How can you do it?

Now that you’ve done an audit and identification to create a RevOps strategy it's time to build a plan and processes that will focus your teams on the goal of driving revenue. Here are a few ways that you can build processes that will help you achieve your goals: 

  • Consider using HubSpot in your tech stack. HubSpot has capabilities to automate processes, talk to other programs in your tech stack and support your revenue operations strategy.  
  • Build a data collection and analysis plan that follows up on bottle necks you’ve found in your audit. This way you won’t miss a beat making sure that your leads are followed up on, clients are delighted, and staff have the resources to deliver a superior customer experience. 
  • Create Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that map out a path for your sales and marketing teams to generate qualified leads. 
  • Adopt a task system for your internal operations to track progress on projects.
  • Automate what you can so that staff can focus on growth. Create workflows and automate your lead follow-ups all while tracking the process and looking for opportunities for further efficiency. 
4. Put those plans into action!

After you’ve crafted a data informed plan with ambitious achievable goals put it into action! Be clear with your teams about the strategy and be sure to answer all questions fostering an environment of learning and growth. Provide training to fill in knowledge gaps and a feedback system so your staff can let you know if there are further opportunities for efficiency. 

Remain adaptable. As your plan is implemented there will be new ideas and information that your company can implement to stimulate growth. By keeping an open mind and listening ear your operations will transform into a streamlined approach that drives revenue.

5. Measure and adjust accordingly

Optimization can take many forms in your RevOps strategy. Pay attention to your metrics and evaluate progress and goals regularly to make sure that you are versatile and adaptable.  

Check-in with your teams regularly to see where efficiency can be created. Create new targets and measure their success against historical data.  

Data is your most important tool, the more data you can collect to inform your strategy, goal setting, bottle necks and opportunities for growth the better you can be. Applying Revenue Operations as your system for growth will allow you to optimize, unify your teams, and create an environment of collective learning and growth that will drive revenue pushing you into the future.

Choosing a RevOps Agency Partner

If implementing a RevOps strategy (and everything that goes along with it, like CRMs and automation) is something you’re ready to take to the pros – consider an implementation partner. RevOps agencies, like Flawless Inbound, use systems like HubSpot to build efficiency into processes and revolutionize siloed teams . Implementing a strong data governance plan, evaluating your data and collecting data to measure progress on your goals points teams in the right direction giving everyone the information they need to orient your business towards revenue generation. By empowering your team to work together you will drive revenue and deliver a superior customer experience and product.

Get Started on the Path to Success with RevOps Today

How would it feel to have a dedicated team of B2B experts as your RevOps partner? Find out by contacting us today.