Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Revenue operations or RevOps is a business strategy or function to align different divisions or departments of a company on a unified objective, fuel their revenue processes, improve the revenue pipeline and achieve their revenue goals. Not to be confused with business operations (BizOps), a decision-making framework for business professionals to use to make an organization run efficiently.

Unlike siloed departments that focus on separate data, processes, and goals, RevOps teams bring everyone on the same page. Revenue operations deal with almost all company divisions related to customers, including sales, customer support, marketing, and finance. 

Why do you need RevOps?

RevOps have never been more critical in today's business setting than they are. Traditionally, sales and marketing departments worked towards their own goals with minimal participation in another department's budgetary and operational planning.

Marketing operations and sales strategies are changing now. A loosely connected communication approach doesn't allow you to compete with comparable companies. Customer behavior is also changing as they use innovative methods to search for their required products and do more research before purchasing anything.

That's where a need for RevOps arises. It is a B2B and B2C business function that helps companies to unify their targets and revenue goals. RevOps gives a more manageable approach to revenue management, understanding customer behavior, and evaluating how effectively firms can expand.

A recent study found that companies investing in RevOps increased sales production by about 10 to 20%. Investing in RevOps ensured that their sales and marketing departments worked together and focused on the customer's history, including customer acquisition and other necessary metrics. In the next section, we will explore the benefits of using RevOps.

Benefits of using revenue operations

RevOps strategy mainly focuses on the points mentioned above and, if followed, is excellent for the company's fostering revenue. Investing in RevOps can highly affect the way your company functions. Here are some of the benefits:

Increase the functionality of your organization as a unit

A successful company needs efficient operations and employees working as a unit. Investing in RevOps will clarify the tasks an individual team member needs to perform.

Brainstorming new marketing strategies or campaigns is the task of a marketing team or a sales leader, while salespeople must sell the products. You can assign operational duties to the related team or department with efficient management.

Align multiple teams with common goals and efforts

A company with aligned goals is generally successful. However, establishing these goals across all the departments is a challenging task. That's where a RevOps team can help. It allows companies to avoid disjointed sales ops, increases communication, and reduces siloed departments.

With proper implementation of RevOps, it can gather multiple teams from different locations to focus on the same goal.

Happier clients/customers

Meeting your customer's demands efficiently allows you to turn customers into regular clients. An informed and autonomous employee gets happy and satisfied customers. With RevOps, you can efficiently analyze your customer's requirements and fulfill their expectations.

Satisfied customers are a source of good future revenue and a process of trust building on your products. If you are getting good outcomes from your customers, they are interested in your product which will result in revenue.

Provide accurate forecasting revenue

A unified system combined with data from all departments improves the company's revenue forecasting accuracy. A sales operations team will not only focus on decisions that help meet their department's goals.

Instead, a unified system created by the RevOps team will ensure that the departments make decisions that benefit the entire company.

Save costs and eliminate confusion.

SaaS companies are working with various software and digital tools. These modern tools help organizations to simplify processes and analyze critical data. But what if your employees don't know how to use them efficiently? Working with too many tools is heavy on the company's budget. In addition, it can directly impact a team's performance, especially if they are not trained to use them.

RevOps enables companies to determine specified tools that are needed for operations. The company can cut costs with fewer tools, and employees can focus on helpful tools. In addition, RevOps teams also allow businesses to use a holistic approach to the tools that are beneficial for multiple departments.

What problems does RevOps solve?

RevOps allows companies to solve their pre-existing issues. Here is a list of problems that any company can solve by investing in RevOps:

• Departments have poor communication and not interacting efficiently to share customer data. This results in operational inefficiencies, and customer experience suffers as a result.
• There is no unified process design for sales forecasts to see the big picture.
• The employees manage the tasks manually, slowing down the company's revenue operations. In addition, the manual processes are also increasing your expenses.
• The company's key performance indicators and finance processes are not aligned. Every team brings different results to the departmental meeting resulting in the misalignment of goals.
• There are an excess number of tools and software platforms across many departments. This increases the costs and leads to process gaps.

These are the challenges most companies face, particularly when they grow and try to keep up with market changes. With the revenue operation team, you can analyze your company's performance and make informed decisions to drive revenue.

How to successfully implement RevOps in your organization?

Implementing the RevOps function in an organization doesn't have an ultimate or fixed method. Every business or organization can implement RevOps according to its company's structure and team adjustments.

There are four ways to optimize your company with RevOps:

1. Gather all teams at one point

The first method is to collect the company's data and get answers to some essential questions. Which customers are high churn rates, and which have high MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)? What is the customer's LTV (Lifetime Value)? Are there positive or negative outcomes from customer support?

Although sales organizations have multiple metrics, you must align data other customer-facing teams can access. By working as a unified unit, you can establish CS operations that will result in sustainable growth.

2. Align clear incentives

A company or business works with multiple teams, including sales, marketing, revenue operations, and customer success teams. RevOps helps you align clear incentives on different teams for successful growth and performance. You cannot solely rely on the sales team to brainstorm marketing campaigns. Instead, you align the incentives of the marketing operations and sales ops team so they make a decision that helps the revenue growth.

3. Agreement on the tech stack

With RevOps, different teams work efficiently with the same tech stack. Gathering everyone on the same tech stack for successful growth and revenue generation. If your company has additional digital tools, you need to cut them to save costs. Or, if you need more platforms or software, you must bring additional tools or platforms.

4. Supervision of CRO

The points mentioned earlier are necessary for CROs to understand as they are responsible for the teams' work and processes. CRO holds an important place in a company. They must gather the team and supervise their work. Furthermore, Chief Revenue Officer must ensure that everybody has the same goal.

How is RevOps success measured?

For evaluating and tracking the RevOps success, metrics are valuable. As the revenue operations team uses different strategies to align marketing, sales, and customer retention and the company's revenue generation, key metrics are necessary to keep in focus.

ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)

The annual revenue that you get through a recurring contract or transaction.

Revenue growth

Measuring the revenue process with yearly statistics can increase the company's revenue.

Cost of customer acquisition

These metrics hold all your expenses to get new customers, including advertisements, promotional projects, and other things.

Renewal rate

Many customers are likely to renew their services, but maybe you don't know their numbers. So renewal rate brings you an accurate situation of customer data.

Churn rate

Churn will identify the customer rate that will no longer be a part of you in the future. It will indicate the money and profit you will lose after losing the customers.

Revenue backlog

Revenue backlog is a metric that indicates your interests and which contracted revenues are left to be collected.

Forecast accuracy

These metrics are beneficial to know your forecasting revenue abilities. You can measure your future sales and profits with short-term and long-term predictions.