The Rise of Revenue Operations

Every couple of months we hear a resurgence in people discussing the concept of revenue operations and its importance. And then, before you know it, the idea dissipates again. It is, however, an incredibly powerful concept and if it's done right can fix a lot of problems for sales and marketing. 

What is revenue operations?

Revenue operations is a function or team in a large organisation that’s responsible for driving revenue. Where this revenue comes from is irrelevant, only that total revenue objectives are achieved. This opens up a lot of opportunities for businesses to remove the silos that exist when sales, marketing, and customer success teams have different targets, budgets and resources. The idea is simple: pool all of your resources and find a way to bring in the most revenue for the business in the most effective way possible. 

If you imagine a customer’s experience or journey throughout a buying cycle, they’ll touch on both sales and marketing upfront and then sit with customer success until they’re ready to buy again. Rather than having a team wash their hands of the outcome once “handed over”, why not make them equally as culpable for the success or conversion throughout their lifecycle? In other words, why isn’t there one team responsible for total customer conversion regardless of what stage the customer is at? This is revenue ops. 

What is the alternative to rev ops?

We all know the downfalls of traditional marketing and sales teams, but unfortunately, very little has changed in the mindset of the majority of businesses. How many times have you heard a sales person praise their company’s marketing efforts, heard a marketer congratulate sales for a successful lead conversion, or enquired about a customer success team’s renewal targets? It rarely happens - but why, when they’re all working for the same outcome?

Not all businesses operate in this siloed way, and there will be some leaders out there who focus on bringing the teams together...but it’s hard work.

Positives to having separate teams can relate to freedom and individual strategies. If your ambition is to improve the conversion rate of the website by embedding new UX tools, you can do this without any input from other teams. The same goes for sales operations, if they’re looking to introduce new functionality or features on their sales tech then this won’t necessarily need to be discussed with anyone else.

So how would rev ops work in reality?

As the name suggests, revenue operations is primarily about the operational aspects of a business (where it relates to revenue) and should cover the total sales cycle. That means, ensuring that technology, processes, data, and people are as effective and efficient as possible for everyone involved. All goals and targets should be towards the overarching revenue goals and not individual areas. Here’s an idea of what that looks like split by operational focus:

Technology:

Revenue ops teams would ensure that all sales, marketing and customer success teams have the most effective tools at their disposal. Not only are they available but they’re used efficiently, connected and linked to other relevant technologies, alongside being removed or added as needed.

Processes:

A huge area of focus for rev ops, this is making sure that the processes of getting data and a prospect or customer from one part of the customer journey to the other is as seamless as possible. Moving from a marketing stage to a sales stage takes consideration to understand how a salesperson will identify the lead, triage it, what data is sent across, and what the next stages are. Whilst most of this will be set up already, a rev ops team will look at this holistically and make sure there’s no detriment across the whole journey.

Data:

The team will be responsible for making sure data is accurate, clean, where it needs to be and can provide as much insight as possible. Gone will be the days where marketing can’t understand what happened to a lead once passed to sales, gone will be the days when sales are requesting customer success share renewal dates. In this world, revenue ops is looking after it all and making sure it's usable.

People:

Training, up-skilling and long term resourcing plans will all be managed by the rev ops team. Understanding how to make teams successful, what they need now and in the future is key to bringing everything together and being operational efficient.

We predict that over the next 5 years the move towards revenue operations will become popular for large and enterprise businesses across the UK. It’s already seeing an increase in the US and it won’t be long before these global businesses request a restructure for their UK arms (which in turn will get heads turning for UK-owned businesses).

Looking for operational support or want to discuss this concept more? Get in touch with us and we'd be happy to chat.