What is RevOps?

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the strategy of aligning your marketing, sales and customer success teams into a single revenue generating function.

In the past in B2B companies, customers were passed from one team to the next in a step by step process.

  • Marketing marketed and generated Marketing Qualified Leads that they passed to sales.

  • Sales sold and converted those leads into signed customers

  • Customer Success onboarded and served those customers into the future.

But the way that customers want to buy has changed. They want to interact with every part of your business from day one.

In many B2B companies today, key processes are siloed.

  • Marketing are responsible for creating content

  • Sales are responsible for generating proposal responses

  • Customer Success is responsible for adoption

But this misses the way that customers expect your company to act - as one.

A good example of this in practice is customer referrals.

Everyone knows that customer referrals are one of the best sources of high quality opportunities.

But in most companies there is no strategic customer referral programme.

Often it lies with sales reps to ask their customers if they know of anyone that might also benefit from the same product or service - but as the likelihood of the referral being in the seller’s territory is so low - they don’t ask consistently.

When companies adopt a Revenue Operations strategy they break down these siloes and look at processes from a buyer-centric perspective.

  • Creating content and responses becomes everyone’s responsibility

  • Testimonials are generated systematically by customers through the sales and onboarding process

  • Referrals are strategically requested regularly from every customer

  • and on and on…

Can’t we carry on as we are?

Companies that don’t evolve are seeing growth stall

This chart shows the average number of Quality Conversations per day per SDR. It is declining at 10% each year showing that this outbound channel is becoming less and less effective.

Source: Bridge Group

“55% of millennial buyers would prefer to buy even a complex solution without engaging a sales rep at all.”

-Gartner

Gartner describes leading companies as focusing on buyer enablement.

Helping their customers to complete a set of buying jobs in order to get themselves to a position where they can possibly buy something.

Problem identification - help me understand the challenge my business faces

Solution exploration - help me understand the internal and external routes to solving this challenge

Requirements building - help me define and prioritise what I might need to solve this challenge

Supplier selection - and only now do buyers want to start engaging with vendors

As your customer works through those first three buyer jobs, your revenue team has a significant opportunity to support them and guide their thinking - if they are aligned.

Your buyer will be spending most of their time below the line - in what is termed the dark funnel. Researching on channels that you cannot attribute to.

Leading companies are ensuring that they provide content and buying tools to support their buyers even if they can’t draw a direct link to an opportunity.

They provide ungated

  • Diagnistics and calculators

  • Benchmarks

  • Industry overviews

  • Demos and simulations

  • Free trials

The Revenue Acceleration Flywheel

Content is just one aspect of the RevOps mix.

To drive scalable and sustainable revenue growth companies need to deliver continual iteration on all the external and internal aspects of the flywheel.

Cross-functional teams must own the revenue technology stack, amalgamating and analysing the data and turning that into insights for all teams to use.

Every team from Marketing, Sales and Customer Success must be accountable for their activity - demonstrating how the work they do is delivering incremental revenue.

Iterate continually

RevOps is a strategy, not a project.

Leading companies continue to iterate, consistently improving thier revenue processes, systems and data to drive sustainable and scalable revenue growth.

How do I get started?

Start your journey by taking the RevOps Maturity Assessment. Answer 22 questions and you’ll immediately receive a personalised readout with advice to improve your revenue engine.