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The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Maximize your organization’s revenue potential with full-funnel accountability.

How companies approach revenue has forever changed. 

So let’s dive into the basics of Revenue Operations. What it is. Why it was created. And, more importantly, how you can start taking steps to implement it in your organization.

What is RevOps?

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a business function that aims to maximize an organization's revenue potential.

How? RevOps drives full-funnel accountability through the alignment of Marketing, Sales, and Service across your organization’s process, platform, and people.

When properly implemented, RevOps helps an organization rewrite internal operations, improve client acquisition, empower client delight, and establish a company culture focused on driving revenue.

Imagine for a moment that revenue isn’t just a byproduct of a great service or product. Instead, revenue is the result of your Marketing, Sales, and Service departments acting as one powerhouse growth team.

That growth team's mission? To relentlessly drive revenue to grow your business.

Why was RevOps created?

Revenue Operations was developed so that business leaders could stop hoping for revenue and start operationalizing it across their entire company. 

Traditionally, organizations worked in siloed departments with disparate missions, disconnected customer experiences, and disjointed analytics. In theory, one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing, and money was being left on the table. 

The rise of Revenue Operations came from a few core needs. 

  1. Marketing Technology became increasingly important in the business landscape. 
  2. The management of operations across Marketing, Sales, and Service needed to be more efficient and unified.
  3. The customer experience demanded more connectivity and more personalization at scale.

All of these needs arose as a way to solve for customer experience discontinuity, operational inefficiencies, and a lack of clarity into the bottlenecks and opportunities for revenue generation in the business.

What problems does RevOps solve?

As Forbes put it, “Revenue operations was created as an “end-to-end process of driving revenue, from the moment a prospect considers a purchase (marketing) to when you close the deal (sales) to their renewal and upsell (CS). The result of this orchestration is faster growth and more profit.”

So the next question is: do you know if RevOps would help your business? 

Ask yourself if you’ve said any of the following lately...

 

“Our process isn’t working!”
RevOps builds processes for every stage in the customer journey to create a consistent and delightful experience for prospects moving through the customer journey.

“Our data and tools are a mess!”
RevOps addresses messy data and overlapping tools by activating a single entity to oversee the data and tools used to track the flow of revenue through the business.

“The team is disjointed. No one is working together.”
From crappy MQLs, to poor client onboarding experiences, disjointed teams are a major momentum killer. RevOps breaks down department silos and infighting by shifting the focus away from individual departments to a collective mindset that looks at the revenue flow throughout the entire company.

The 3 Pillars of RevOps

RevOps is founded around three pillars: Process, Platform, and People.

Each pillar is a foundational building block that the next pillar is built upon. Only when you have each pillar properly defined can you achieve focus, clarity, and accountability throughout your organization.

Pillar 1 - Process

 
 

You need to make sure you have the right processes in place to create a culture of collaboration. RevOps activates uniform processes to foster accountability and trust within your organization. As your teams work together to convert prospects into raving fans, you will begin to see additional benefits such as shorter sales cycles, improved retention, and a higher volume of upsells.

Pillar 2 - Platform

 
 

Having accurate information is the key to success in any situation. Within your organization, you must connect and align your technology to provide a clear and accurate story around your revenue pipeline. By providing a single source of truth, individuals can identify how they, directly and indirectly, impact the pipeline.

Pillar 3 - People

 
 

The third and final pillar is the People responsible for bringing together and managing your process and platforms. Depending on an organization’s size, RevOps will create a specific RevOps team or distribute the responsibilities of RevOps among your existing team members.

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How do I start implementing Revenue Operations?

According to SiriusDecisions, B2B organizations that implement aligned revenue operations (RevOps) will be best positioned to thrive in the next three to five years. Here are some of the key steps to start implementing Revenue Operations:

Phase 1: Audit
Audit your customer journey to find areas of disconnect between departments by completing the following 3 steps:

  1. Audit all of your existing content, align it with your buyer's lifecycle stage and create a plan to fill in the gaps
  2. Audit the technology you use in your marketing, sales, and service departments to make sure they're correctly tagging and tracking every movement your potential buyer is making
  3. Audit your website (and other digital footprints) to ensure you have every conversion best-practice in place, so there are no barriers to entry for your potential buyers

Phase 2: Define and Align
Define and align your lifecycle stage definitions for your team by following the next 3 steps:

  1. Evaluate your analytics to ensure you have a full-funnel view of your revenue pipeline and the health of the business
  2. Audit your Tech Stack to identify any redundancies across software and tools
  3. Provide your team with streamlined and proven RevOps processes for content marketing, inbound sales, outbound sales, and customer delight

Phase 3: Build
Build or restructure the following items to foster forward momentum toward capturing more of your revenue potential:

  1. Build a Go-to-Market plan for Customer Acquisition and Client delight.
  2. Build the workflows to move prospects through the system to ensure accurate data within your revenue engine
  3. Build inbound sales follow-up emails and task queues
  4. Build outbound sales outreach emails and task queues
  5. Build a RevOps dashboard that shows your current bottlenecks

Phase 4: Activate & Optimize
Activate and maintain consistency with your revenue operations growth strategy:

  1. Activate a regular RevOps meeting cadence to maintain alignment by solidifying your growth goals with your heads of Marketing, Sales, and Service to ensure they understand their contribution and role in the revenue-producing mission
  2. Create and follow a rolling 12-month execution plan to ensure the continued adoption and optimization of your RevOps growth strategy
  3. Use the RevOps Dashboard to identify which lifecycle stage has the biggest bottleneck each month and activate pre-defined process playbooks available to "unstick" the targeted bottlenecks

Is there a playbook for RevOps?

As with any business function, understanding is one step, but activating and operationalizing can be a challenging step without the right plan.

There is no definitive playbook for RevOps, but there are some practical steps you can take to get started.

See how you can use The Digital Utopia Methodology™ to:

    • Focus on the big picture
    • Align your internal teams around a unified goal of revenue generation
    • Provide clarity on the strategy and tactics needed to achieve your growth goals
    • Create a full-funnel report with actionable insights and accountability
    • Streamline bottleneck identification
    • Transform your siloed departments into one powerhouse growth team

Download the Ultimate Guide to RevOps

Get this RevOps guide so you have a consolidated resource to reference as you continue to explore Revenue Operations. The guide also includes direct access to assets used by the Digitopia team for setting up B2B organizations with RevOps on HubSpot.