Revenue Operations

I was recently interviewed by Salesforce for the 360 Blog’s 13 Ways Revenue Leaders Can Drive Growth in 2022. Though what the author chose to include was ultimately about artificial intelligence, I think about Revenue Operations, or “RevOps” more and more about my own business these days, and how cross-departmental alignment can drive growth for Forcery’s clients. 

RevOps is a relatively new professional discipline. It’s a novel way to think about operations, technology and organizational hierarchy in a holistic way.  You may notice very successful sales managers or hands-on financial professionals taking on titles like “CRO.”  This is fairly modern innovation within the C-suite.  At its core though, RevOps is all about alignment, and identifying efficiencies across teams, systems and processes that contribute to overall company revenue.  RevOps the barriers between the artificial siloes created around different tools, workflows and teams.

RevOps builds cross-disciplinary efficiency

My resolution this year is really generate a deeper understanding and improve  our end-to-end customer lifecycle, and double down on Revenue Operations. I want to at our revenue funnel holistically, all the way from lead generation to sales to customer success.  Teams don’t always speak the same language, and often aren’t motivated by the same KPIs.  Marketing, Sales and Customer Service success can be interpreted as totally different things in an organization.  This can cause cross-departmental friction, internal inefficiency and limit the earning potential of business functions working towards a common goal. 

RevOps for Teams:

As a practitioner of marketing automation primarily as a MarTech-minded Salesforce consultant– I talk a lot about aligning marketing and sales.  In practice though, I see company initiatives often siloed across departments, especially in business-to-business (B2B) enterprises. We may invest in marketing initiatives and spend a of human or monetary capital measuring marketing attribution.  Or, we might do the same thing around sales, building out sales cadences and measuring performance strictly on Sales performance metrics. Similarly, customer feedback can also exist in a vacuum, with companies measuring CSAT or NPS scores as a standalone metric of business success.

However, each of these initiatives represents only one facet of performance, which isn’t necessarily aligned with success metrics of other teams.  Some companies still define marketing success by “reach,” or impressions (the number of times an ad is viewed), and other firms by a conversion.  The definition of a Marketing “conversion” might only be a subset of Sales “leads.”  Sales may not care about conversions, as they may be skewed by promotions, discounts, contest or other Marketing-motivated levers.  Marketing might only care about Sales Leads if they can tie them back to Marketing efforts (which salespeople are rarely incentivized to do).

Operations, assets and tech tools naturally begin to pull in their own direction, but business success is a sum of its parts.

Similarly, Customer Success teams might think that some Marketing or Sales efforts are counterproductive to customer “satisfaction.”  Marketing and Sales often over-expose potential customers to too many touch points.  While these practices may be positive levers in a Marketing funnel or a Sales pipeline, they can diminish customer loyalty and lifetime value (LTV), reducing potential profit and growth.

RevOps Technology:

I think the biggest disconnect that Revenue Operations can solve is through technology platform. Data is siloed by the platform used as well as the team it support.   Marketing may be operation out of 1st party platforms (think analytics, advertising and social tools),  Sales out of a CRM, and Customer Success out of an experience management platform, all without a single, centralized platform or unified definition of success. 

Just as with teams, different tech definitions of success create inefficiency.  An Analytics platform might measure a customer interaction one way, a CRM might use a different method to measure the same touchpoint, and an accounting tool have a third definition for this as well.  Saas technology tools notoriously add features, and try to eat into market-share of adjacent businesses.  As a result, they don’t easily integrate with one another. 

If you’ve tried before, getting analytics data into a CRM and in to an ERP or accounting tool is notoriously hard.  Even with the proliferation of different data integration services and tools, every businesses single-source-of-truth will be different.  For example, how do you contrast an email open rate’s influence on the number of times a customer makes a purchase?  Aligning these metrics can prove daunting. And yet, standardizing success metrics between technologies is a core component of Revenue Operations.  Deal Acquisition cost, lifetime value (LTV),  customer satisfaction + loyalty (measured by CSAT and NPS scores) are all quantifiable KPIs, and they must be standardized across all technologies and assimilated into all business functions.

RevOps Resolves a House Divided

As companies grow, the division of labor requires breaking up business functions in to different processes and teams, supplemented with different kinds of tools.  However, this inevitably creates a divide. As teams and tools grow, they no longer speak the same language.  Furthermore, the customer’s own journey becomes a disjointed and potentially unfulfilling process. 

Revenue Operations tracks customer experience across the entire lifecycle of a prospective opportunity, and facilitates communication between support, sales and marketing, tied back to how each team actually operates, and efficiently contributes to revenue across that lifecycle.  RevOps may sound intuitive, innovative or obvious,. But to actually reap alignment benefits, significant independent resources should be allocated specifically for Revenue Operations.