What exactly is RevOps and how can it help your company improve its performance?

In an era of digitization and new technologies where dynamic innovative developments streamline business processes, turning them into data and automation machines, the way organizations purchase products and services has changed completely. 

These changes cause everyone from businesses, to organizations and end-customers to demand better products and services. From product marketing, through to sales and customer service, both during and after the initial sale, everything must be synchronized and based on data. Customers today require much more than just transparency, more than taking responsibility for the customer journey; it must be a smooth and flawless process. 

All this led to the development of a new field, created for the purpose of optimizing the marketing, sales and customer success processes. Say hello to RevOps: Revenue Operations.  

 

Organizations are creating strategic work programs, beginning with suggestions of unified goals for all teams, continuous synchronization between the teams, alongside collaborative work and unified messaging.   

This important process came about through a deep seated change in the way of thinking and how companies perceived the process of generating revenue. Today, companies realize that the outdated practices they have worked with until now, actually lead to wasted organizational resources. It begins with inaccurate marketing leading to irrelevant leads, in the loss in sales of not a small number of leads that sales do not deal with despite the amount of money marketing spent to bring them in, and missed deals which do not close due to a lack of synchronization. The result is less profit - precisely at a time where the high-tech industry is more focused on profitability than ever.

This method of marketing, sales and customer management departments work by themselves in a completely separate and independent manner, where there is no continuous and consistent connection between them or a unified plan of action, is slowly disappearing. 

A RevOps strategy takes all departments that impact an organization’s bottom line: the marketing, sales and customer service processes, as being grouped together as one customer journey, in a "funnel", which connects to the other. As part of this process, organizations are creating work plans and strategies that begin by setting unified goals for all departments, continuous synchronization between these departments, as well as collaborative work and unified messages. They appoint managers to be responsible for the planning, implementation and operation of all these processes together.

 

What are the advantages of RevOps? 

 

• Improving The Customer Experience 

Previously there was a disconnect between the marketing department, which creates sales opportunities, and the sales department, which connected active customers using the product, who are dealt with by customer service. Mistakes occur when each of these departments work in their own silos; including a lack of continuity in the customer experience and operational efficiency. RevOps coordinates between all departments, trying to create a continuous customer experience.

 

• Customer Retention 

When each of the three work together, it is easier to identify issues during the customer onboarding process making it easier to prevent them. If customer retention is necessary, then synchronizing everything that brought the customer to the purchasing process, as well as their complete customer journey are all fully documented. Think of it this way, the continuous process makes it possible to prevent customer loss, before it actually happens. This does not mean that no customer will leave, but when it is possible to prevent, it will be easier.

 

• Faster Completion Of The Sales Cycle 

when marketing is connected to sales, there is constant feedback on the accuracy of potential customers who arrive as leads. Marketing channels which create the leads become more accurate, thanks to a continuous dialogue with the sales people. On the other side of the equation, campaigns that produce many conversions but few sales are stopped. Instead of a quantitative analysis of leads, as is customary in many organizations, the emphasis is instead placed solely on the sales bottom line.

 

Traditionally, organizations have worked in fragmented and decentralized departments with separate tasks, disconnected customer experiences and analytics. This at a time when the customer experience required more connectivity and more customization to scale. 

 

• Data analysis is centralized and handled jointly -

Marketing, sales and customer service all working together to see the big picture, in organized team meetings. This way, shared issues are brought up, rather than separate ones. 

 

• Bottlenecks and missed opportunities for generating revenue in the company are addressed 

For example, reselling to customers or generating new leads from satisfied customers.

 

What is needed in order to implement RevOps in your organization?

Step 1: Where existing departments in the organization each work in a silo, it is necessary to change work procedures and create new work methods. This is more challenging to implement, but is possible especially when there is a significant stakeholder in the organization and the decision is made and supported by senior management. When management is involved in the change and its implementation, the execution is easier and faster.

 

Step 2:When you build the organization from the ground up - for example a startup in the process of scaling up;. after the first round of recruitment, where you are starting to broaden your marketing and sales activities, where you already have paying customers and they are building up their marketing, sales and customer success departments, then it is much easier to create correct work processes. From the beginning, each of the departments is centralized by the CRO or RevOps Director.     

 

Step 3: Apart from the organizational side, the RevOps process also requires technical implementation: a tool to follow-up, monitor and automate the work processes agreed upon. This means selecting supporting technological systems or a single system, as well as integration between the existing or selected technological systems.

 

At the end of the technical implementation, it is necessary to train the employees and the teams themselves and follow up on their ongoing processes, until the new work methods have been completely adopted. It is at this stage that many companies fail, as management chooses the tools and implements the systems, but there is no enforcement for the teams that will actually use them, with no ongoing monitoring to get feedback from the teams in order to optimize the work processes and adaptation in the field.

 

Which technical tools are needed to implement this approach?

Organizations need a corporate CRM software that brings all channels together, such as Hubspot and the like. When teams work together on the platform, monitoring work processes and coordination by definition takes place, as it is embedded into the current work processes. If there is a specific requirement that does not yet exist in the work processes to facilitate coordination, in the process of creating the coordination something will be damaged and it will not work consistently and smoothly.

The bottom line is - organizations, specifically those that are meant for professional audiences, spend large sums on generating new sales opportunities for the organization. By implementing RevOps processes it is possible to generate much more revenue and sales from potential clients and contacts that already exist in the system, rather than spending more budget to bring in more and more leads. In a year like 2023 when you want to have QUICK WINS, this is the place to invest.