RevOps seems to be in vogue at the minute but many of you may find yourself asking, "How is this different to what I am doing currently and what are the actual benefits of adopting a revenue operations approach?" Luckily for you, we're going to cover that very topic in this blog.
Revenue operations isn't some new, paradigm-shifting approach. It's like building a champion relay team using sales, marketing, operations and every other part of your business to align around one shared goal: Repeatable, predictable, revenue growth driven by data.
Data is everywhere. Every single action that we take online, and even in the physical world, leads to a data point. Many times we can get fixated on comparing individual data points trying to find correlation without ever understanding the causation.
We may have a scenario where some of the top level metrics look great, but we're just not seeing the full picture and worse we are unable to figure out what the metric is that leads to revenue growth.
Instead of multiple parties looking at various data sets trying to piece them together, RevOps team approach data in a unified way that gives a holistic view on not only what the data is, but how it is impacting revenue.
Most of us have been in the room when the marketing team is talking about impression scores and on page read times, paid media experts are talking about multi-layer attribution, and the salesperson is talking about closing rates. More often than not, nobody really has awareness of how they all intertwine and then when it comes to the monthly report, marketing blames sales for not dealing with the leads, etc.
This is an example of a team that's not aligned and not focusing on the main goal of making profit, as a team for the team. RevOps breaks through this by mapping and aligning the handoff points between all parties to ensure that there is visibility of what each party is doing and that everyone across teams is held accountable.
Building onto benefit 2, what's worse than having parties not working together is having parties that don't have a shared understanding of what their processes are, or the processes of their counterparts and how their data points align with one another? Siloed information.
Inherently, siloed information leads to reduced outcomes, and no team can function without a clear source of truth and a shared purpose. With revenue operations, the focus is on removing information silos and creating a shared reality in terms of metrics, definitions and purposes to ensure every party is working from a single point of truth.
When you're working in a non-revenue optimised business, you have to pull together siloed information-meaning that your forecasting is subjective. That said, you don't know what works or what doesn't work, and you can't forecast predictable revenue growth based on what direction the wind blows.
Revenue operations allow you to find key data points that influence a set of actions. Being able to predict pipeline growth won't just happen overnight, so you need to ensure all the pieces of the process are being administered correctly to see incremental improvements.
When your team is working together towards one shared goal, you waste less time focusing on fighting and more time focusing on your core goals. RevOps is like building a champion relay team where the handoff is clean and each person sprints for collective glory.
Teams succeed in business more than individuals and when you have a streamlined team all working towards the same goal, you start to see faster deal cycles as you are reducing the friction and improving the process.
As you can see, RevOps has a host of benefits but let's be clear - it isn't easy. It takes the constant evaluation of processes and planning of resources, which can be straining. But ultimately, a business built around RevOps will provide you with a lean and optimised structure built for success.