By Growing revenue is essential for businesses of all types and sizes. If you’re not actively increasing revenue, competition, and other external factors will eventually shrink what comes in.
Plus, the fact that your operational cost will naturally increase due to factors like inflation and increased wages makes increasing revenue an important, perennial action point for all companies.
Moreover, if you have a revenue problem, you’ll eventually have a cash flow problem. Even when you have a lot of runway in terms of investment, not growing revenue will eventually catch up with the business.
So, what can businesses do to institutionalize revenue growth as a continuous action point? The answer is revenue operations or RevOps.
RevOps isn’t just another buzzword gaining traction amongst business leaders; it’s a strategic framework that combines sales, marketing, and customer success functions to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
Per a 2021 Gartner report, “75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model by 2025.”
In this guide, we’ll be providing key strategies for building a revenue-generating machine with RevOps.
Whether you’re a startup looking to scale rapidly, an established enterprise aiming to stay ahead of the competition, or anywhere in between, this guide is designed to help you key into this budding trend and transform your organization into a revenue-generating powerhouse.
Step 1: Assess current operations
RevOps seeks to dismantle siloed functions that limit your business’s potential.
However, to move forward, we believe it’s imperative to understand the current state of operations and identify areas of improvement. This helps you define your strategic priorities and potential quick wins.
Here’s how:
1. Process evaluation
Conduct a thorough evaluation of your existing sales, marketing, and customer success processes. How do you generate and qualify leads? What does the customer acquisition process look like? These are some of the essential questions to ask.
In this phase, map out the steps involved in lead generation, lead qualification, pipeline management, customer acquisition, and retention.
2. Identify existing bottlenecks and inefficiencies
What factors are hindering revenue generation in your current system? These may include areas where leads get stuck in the pipeline, delayed handoffs between departments, or repetitive manual tasks occupying your staff’s productive hours.
3. Benchmark performance
Benchmark key performance metrics, such as conversion rates, sales cycle length, and customer retention rates, against industry standards and internal goals and objectives. This provides data-based insights into areas where performance is lagging and opportunities for improvement exist.
4. Data quality assessment
Data is an integral part of RevOps. You need high-quality data to gain valuable insights that power strategic decisions and choices. As such, evaluating the quality, completeness, and accuracy of existing data across customer success, sales, and marketing teams and systems is vital.
5. Conduct technology audit
Compile a comprehensive inventory of the tools and systems you use for sales, marketing, and customer success operations, including customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, analytics, and customer support tools.
More importantly, you want to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of existing tools. Do they meet your needs? Are they easy to use? Are they the best in class for their category? The goal is identifying opportunities to optimize or replace underperforming software or tools.
Next, assess if tools integrate seamlessly with each other. Determine whether data can flow seamlessly between different systems and departments. Are there barriers to integration that need to be addressed, like upgrading to a more expensive tier?
According to Salesforce, 90% of organizations have challenges caused by data silos. In the same survey, 88% of respondents acknowledge integration challenges as a bane to digital transformation initiatives.
6. Evaluate employee skills and expertise
Your employees are the most integral part of implementing RevOps. To achieve your goals, team members must have the requisite skills, expertise, and capabilities across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Assessing the current skills gap can help you identify areas for additional training, where hiring new staff is necessary, or where you should outsource some of your RevOps functions.
Pebble provides a skilled, dedicated RevOps team for the price of one employee, helping you fill the skills gap and get started on your RevOps journey speedily and affordably.
Step 2: Start laying the foundation
Now that you know what the current structure looks like, you can begin to lay the foundations for your long-term revenue operations strategy.
Get company-wide buy-in
RevOps requires contributions and collaboration across departments; hence, obtain top-to-bottom buy-in before moving to the implementation phase.
To do this, you must:
- Communicate the vision and benefits to your employees. Articulate benefits such as increased revenue, improved efficiency, and better customer experiences. It may also be helpful to tailor your messaging according to different stakeholders. For example, increased revenue sounds better to executives, while operational efficiency and less workload with automation will resonate better with the sales team.
- Ensure you engage stakeholders early and carry them along at every phase of introducing RevOps.
- Empathetically address concerns and objections. Preempt each stakeholder’s potential questions and concerns, like perceived threats to their job, and answer them thoroughly. To minimize repeating yourself, create a RevOps strategy document with frequently asked questions.
- Develop a clear roadmap and action plan outlining the steps, realistic timelines, and milestones for implementing RevOps.
Develop data foundation
First, it’s important to standardize data across the three departments for easier and more accurate analysis. This will ensure uniformity in how the different departments store similar metrics, data, and KPIs.
This process will involve deduplication, normalization, and validation of data to eliminate errors and discrepancies. Additionally, put in place data governance mechanisms and policies to ensure you don’t violate regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Lastly, integrate data from various sources, such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and customer support software, into a centralized repository. This ensures a single source of truth for all revenue-related data.
Lay technology foundation
Depending on your current tech stack and the gaps identified earlier, you may need to select new tools. Researching and choosing new tools and platforms that align with your goals, objectives, RevOps strategy, and budget is essential. Ensure you consider factors such as scalability, ease of integration, ease of use, and compatibility with existing systems.
After identifying potential new tools to add, craft a phased implementation plan to minimize disruptions and ensure a smooth transition.
Develop team structure and roles
Depending on your resources and company size, you may choose to build a totally new RevOps department or select a few people from sales, marketing, and customer success who can share the RevOps tasks. Whichever side you lean on, ensure that you highlight the importance of collaboration, alignment, and shared accountability.
The next step is clearly defining and assigning roles and responsibilities within the RevOps team. This way, each KPI, metric, and process has clear owners.
Where necessary, provide training and development opportunities to equip RevOps team members with the skills and knowledge required to succeed in their roles.
At Peddle, we provide world-class sales enablement training to equip your sales team with the skills and knowledge needed to close more deals.
Begin shaping culture and mindset
One of the challenges you may get while implementing your RevOps strategy is resistance to change, especially if employees in the various targeted departments feel they readily meet their targets and KPIs. They may be wondering, “Why do things have to change.”
As such, it is imperative to communicate your plans and goals with the team while listening to their fears, questions, and feedback. More importantly, instill a customer-centric mindset not just in the team, but across the whole organization.
Emphasize why delivering value to customers at every touchpoint and stage of the customer journey is crucial to generating more revenue. Lastly, you want to build a culture of continuous improvement.
In an article on “Why Good Companies Go Bad,” Donald Sull argued that good companies go out of business due to “active inertia.” He described this scenario as one in which companies are stuck in the same processes, thinking, and principles that brought success in the past. Simply put, they never evolve beyond their past.
That’s why you should aggressively promote a culture of continuous improvement and innovation within the RevOps teams. Encourage feedback, experimentation, and learning from both successes and failures.
Step 3: Start building your RevOps machine
In building your RevOps machine or strategy, three things are essential:
- The RevOps machine and process must support the entire customer life cycle from beginning to end.
- There should be workflows and processes linking every layer of the RevOps machine.
- It must provide visibility “into execution and outcomes across the revenue process.”
These three attributes form the foundation of the RevOps machine. The RevOps machine involves creating revenue-generating processes and leveraging technology for automation and optimization.
Revenue creation processes
Revenue creation encompasses all the activities and strategies involved in converting prospects into leads, then into paying customers and maximizing their lifetime value.
This phase comprises lead generation, lead management, opportunity management, and entire customer lifecycle management.
Lead generation
Lead generation involves identifying and attracting potential customers more likely to show interest in your products or services.
The first part of lead generation is figuring out your target audience's demographics, preferences, pain points, and buying behavior through market research, surveys, and analyzing your own data.
With these insights you can develop buying personas representing different segments of your target audience. You can then tailor your lead generation efforts to address the needs and interests of each buying persona. Makes your marketing more laser-focused and helps maximize your marketing budget.
After identifying your ideal prospects or lead, the next step is attracting them via any of the following methods or channels:
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Paid advertising
- Capturing leads with lead magnets, landing pages, forms, and opt-in boxes.
- Attending or sponsoring industry events.
Lead management
Now that you have a pool of leads and prospects, what do you do with them?
The first thing to do is create a lead qualification or scoring criteria for qualifying leads. Possible criteria include budget, geographic location, company size, industry, lead’s perceived buying authority, and much more. Defining these criteria ensures that sales teams focus on leads and prospects likely to make a purchase. Asking questions like “Can this lead afford our products and services?” and “Does this lead have the decision-making power in their company?” for each customer can also help.
The next step is lead routing and assignment to ensure prospects are funneled to the right sales representatives based on your established rules. With the right tools, you can automate this process, allowing you to respond to leads quickly. Many reports have shown that the longer the lead response time, the lower the chances of conversion.
The last step in the lead management process is lead nurturing. Most of your leads will not buy from you immediately, and the chances of them buying will depend on the quality of the relationship you build with them.
As such, you’ll need to develop workflows to engage and educate leads at various stages of their buying journey. This includes things like personalized email campaigns, targeted content marketing, and automated follow-up sequences.
Opportunities management
When a lead’s interest transitions to intent to buy, it becomes a business opportunity. Opportunities are basically leads with higher sales potential.
Identifying leads that qualify as opportunities requires understanding all the stages in your sales pipeline. Therefore, define clear stages in the sales pipeline, from initial contact to closed-won or closed-lost.
Outline specific criteria and activities for each stage to guide sales reps through identifying opportunities. For example, a customer asking questions about the product via chat is likely more interested than someone who submitted their details to download a report.
Next, develop sales cadences and playbooks that outline the sequence of activities and communication channels (email, SMS, and social media) to be used at each stage of the sales process, especially for identified opportunities. Of course, you’ll leave room for your sales team to adapt creatively to each prospect’s needs, like offering additional perks.
Lastly, implement systems that give you and your team real-time visibility into sales performance and pipeline. This system allows you to identify prospects and opportunities slipping away and helps you forecast future revenues.
Post-purchase support and management
Beyond closing a sale, retaining customers and maximizing their lifetime value is equally imperative. This starts with an impeccable onboarding process, which provides new customers with an exceptional experience from the moment they sign up. The onboarding process includes welcome emails detailing the next steps, technical assistance during implementation, and more.
After a successful onboarding process, it’s important to establish regular touchpoints and channels to gather feedback, address concerns promptly, and keep customers engaged. More importantly, invest in delivering value and exceptional experiences.
Lastly, develop strategies to maximize customer lifetime value. This phase focuses on implementing retention strategies like creating loyalty programs, offering referral incentives, and proactively identifying opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
Automation and optimization
Automate repetitive tasks and processes using workflow automation tools, such as lead scoring, email sequences, and task assignments. This frees up time for sales, marketing, and customer success teams to focus on other high-value activities.
You can also implement artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to optimize some of your processes. For example, predictive lead scoring models can prioritize leads based on their conversion probability, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of lead management processes.
Peddle specializes in HubSpot Onboarding and Implementation, helping you integrate marketing automation with your existing systems.
Step 4: Implement the strategy
We recommend taking an iterative implementation approach at this stage. Your team is entering a totally new “climate,” and it’s imperative to ease them in.
More importantly, you must evaluate your new strategy and stress-test the new integrated systems before deploying to a larger audience. A phased approach makes this possible.
For example, you can introduce the new RevOps strategy to only a few prospects, perhaps those coming through a particular lead magnet. Then, assess the strategy based on your ability to generate revenue from those select customers.
Gather feedback from prospects and employees on the efficiency and efficacy of the strategy. Use this feedback to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement and then iterate based on the lessons learned.
As you improve the revenue operations function, gradually scale to include all customers.
Step 5: Establish and define performance metrics and KPIs
To track performance, pinpoint critical metrics and KPIs that align with the objectives of your RevOps strategy. These KPIs don’t have to be only related to revenue generation. You can also track metrics related to customer acquisition, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and retention.
After identifying essential KPIs, establish achievable targets for each metric to provide a baseline for performance measurement and goal setting. Where available, you can lean on industry benchmarks when setting targets.
Use data analytics and reporting tools to generate insights and identify trends. We’ve already mentioned the importance of standardizing data across revenue teams, but it’s worth reiterating. Without consistent data, you cannot generate accurate insights.
Lastly, regularly review performance metrics and KPIs for those ripe for a cleaning up and to assess progress towards the established targets and benchmarks.
Step 6: Establish continuous improvement processes
Continuous improvement is fundamental to a successful RevOps strategy. Emplace feedback mechanisms to gather input from stakeholders, including sales reps, marketers, customer success teams, and customers themselves. This can be through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and regular check-ins.
Look for common and recurring pain points, challenges, and suggestions for enhancement and use them to improve your RevOps processes, workflows, and strategies.
Be prepared to adjust RevOps strategies and tactics based on performance data and feedback. If specific initiatives are not yielding the desired results, pivot and try alternative approaches. Remain flexible and agile in response to changing market conditions and customer needs.
Furthermore, schedule and conduct regular performance reviews for cross-functional teams to review performance metrics, share insights, and discuss challenges and opportunities. Use both positive and negative outcomes as learning opportunities to refine strategies and tactics moving forward.
The last tip we’ll leave you with is to always invest in growing your RevOps capabilities. This may involve investing in additional technology, hiring additional staff, or providing additional training and support to existing teams.
Takeaway: Unlocking revenue growth with RevOps
Adopting and implementing RevOps isn’t just a trend—it’s a strategic move for long-term success.
Start by assessing your current operations, identifying bottlenecks, and benchmarking performance. Then, lay the foundation by getting company-wide buy-in, standardizing data, selecting the right technology, and defining team structures.
As you build your RevOps machine, focus on revenue creation processes, automation, and optimization. Implement your strategy slowly and iteratively, gather feedback, and track performance metrics for ongoing improvement.
Do you need help defining and implementing a RevOps strategy bespoke to your business needs? At Peddle, our experts provide RevOps Consulting, helping you align sales, marketing, and customer success efforts for maximum efficiency and impact. Let’s talk!