RevOps – or revenue operations – has become more prominent recently and a bit of a buzzword. Gartner predicts 75% of highest-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025. And Forrester reports that “centralized RevOps has gone up from 15%-40% between 2019-2021.”
However, “highest growth” implies either big or successful, or both. What if you’re an SMB? Or even a startup? The good news is, companies of all sizes are beginning to think differently about growth and how to scale up.
Growth is not always linear; there are other ways of growing revenue besides employing more sales staff and throwing ad campaigns at the public. RevOps is one.
Even startups are realizing it’s beneficial to introduce even a minimal RevOps system from day one as they start on the journey towards SMB size. After all (they think), it will be far more difficult to introduce later when systems and processes are already neatly and firmly tucked away in silos!
But that’s jumping ahead. Let’s start with a definition.
What Does RevOps Mean?
RevOps is a business function that drives an organization’s revenue through increasing efficiency across marketing, sales, and customer success operations, the end goal being revenue growth.
The model focuses on your people, processes, technology, and data and aligns them around one goal – that of helping every team focus on the activities that improve customer advocacy.
How Does RevOps Relate to Your Business?
RevOps works by bringing together all departments of your business that contribute to a successful customer lifecycle and aligning everything with your organization’s overall goals.
RevOps helps your revenue growth in the following ways:
1 In general
Firstly, you can leverage your overall revenue operations and avoid the problem of one department not knowing what another is doing and therefore acting independently. More importantly, leveraging your overall revenue operations lets you benefit from growth that comes from new business development, existing client expansion, partnerships and alliances, online sales and all other sources, managed effectively.
To achieve this, your RevOps will design strategies, processes, and systems that allow you to more effectively oversee the revenue-generating side of your business. RevOps focuses on aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service operations to the benefit of the customer. One goal and one set of aims to get there.
Secondly, you can improve decision-making by introducing clarity. That’s because one focus of RevOps is to gather and analyze data to provide one set of results for everyone.
Your various teams will no longer spend time trying to coordinate disparate data sets that cause confusion and conflict. They can focus on the overall customer journey instead and move on with its next phase in a coordinated fashion.
2 Specific benefits
Specific benefits include:
Revenue predictability. Your RevOps department helps managers
- see more easily what’s working,
- more accurately predict future growth, and
- set more realistic goals that everyone can achieve.
More efficient processes and the streamlining of the full customer lifecycle. This leads to cleaner handoffs and prevents the customer falling between the cracks the previous silos have created.
Better information-sharing. Every department works together now and understands how their tasks fit into the overall company structure and goals, and with other departments.
Improved customer experience with your company. Every department has the same goal: to ensure the customer completes their journey with you in a way that gives them a good experience! In a competitive market, this is crucial.
How SMBs Can Deploy the Concept of Rev Ops
It’s tempting for SMBs to think they simply cannot deploy the same concepts that big corporations implement. They have fewer resources, time, and staff. It seems out of reach.
However, SMBs should start thinking imaginatively and innovatively, and focus on the three things that affect growth:
- customer experience,
- the speed you can move things forward, and
- the efficiency of your business.
These are the keys to growth in revenue. So these are the reasons for renewing and aligning your background operations.
And even a small amount of RevOps will feed productively into those three things. So it’s worth looking at RevOps with these points in mind. We’ll look at them in turn.
1 Deploy RevOps With CX in Mind
Don’t let the customer experience take a backseat – it’s the most important thing. To properly deploy RevOps, you need to introduce customer journey data alignment. Customers experience friction when (for example) moves between marketing and sales leave them “lost” or “hanging.”
RevOps can be the glue that prevents this.
As Alison Elworthy, EVP of RevOps at Hubspot, has said: “If the customer is not the first thing you’re talking about, then there’s a problem.”
It’s too easy to spend time thinking about functions and growth and forget about the customer! So, even if you deploy only a small system of RevOps, make sure the customer experience is the focus.
2 Set up RevOps to Speed Up Workflow
A RevOps system of any size aims to create a seamless, integrated, and faster workflow across your company. You therefore need to deploy it with a focus on:
- People: Bring teams together to work as a unit, preserve the energy in the firm, and keep communication open around your single company aim. Silos bring complexity but RevOps simplifies things!
- Data: Connect all company data in real time – and ensure all teams use it efficiently to guide their decisions.
- Processes: Centralize your processes to enable faster execution of business functions. Gone are the days of sitting next to someone from another team and swapping ideas. Teams have grown. Silos have emerged. You need to bring in overall organization of your processes to drive the insights, innovation, and automation you need.
3 Let RevOps Enable Scaling Up Via Targeted Use of Current Investment
Your RevOps department can analyze the best use of your current investment. For instance, you might want to move some expenditure from sales to marketing, or from marketing to operations. Having the information you need to hand and centralized will speed up any decision and bring value from your investment more rapidly. Your business scaling-up follows from there.
Implementing RevOps in Your Business
We mentioned up top how much easier it is to introduce RevOps earlier rather than later. It’s much harder to start later on with the process of breaking down silo walls and getting staff to agree on a more unified system of operating!
However, whichever stage your business is at, there’s hope! If you’d welcome guidance on starting RevOps in your SMB, either at a late stage or on a small scale and early on, we’d love to help.
At 360 Consulting, we have years of experience implementing strategies to bring you positive changes. Contact us today for a free consultation!