A Revenue Operations Consultant

Sage Advice from a Revenue Operations Consultant

A Revenue Operations consultant can spend his or her career implementing strategies, best practices and technologies that create sustained company growth.

But what exactly do they do? Or what should they do to drive the maximum impact in the least time?

To answer these questions, we gathered lessons and insights from experts in the Johnny Grow RevOps Agency.

They provided clear evidence that the biggest results are created from a short list of actions.

So, before you consider hiring your next RevOps consultant, consider the below recommended actions from a team of seasoned experts.

A RevOps System

The professionals were clear that you must develop a systemized approach to revenue generation. Only then can you achieve automation and scale.

Without an end-to-end system you are likely to pursue piecemeal efforts that achieve temporary results.

It's not a simple effort. But it can be simplified with a methodology. We'll share an example.

We have been building these systems for more than two decades. From that experience, we've developed and matured an implementation methodology called COMPASS.

It's a 7-step approach.

The professionals advise that most clients do some steps well, need to refine some steps, and need to add or reinvent some steps.

Below is a summary for each of the steps.

Map the Revenue Cycle

The first step is to map the company's revenue cycle.

The best way to do this is to map the customer purchase journey and then align it with your sales process.

The professionals share that many clients can step up their revenue cycle by extending it from a traditional customer acquisition funnel to a bow-tie funnel. The bow-tie funnel adds post-acquisition steps to systematically increase customer expansion and retention.

Once you have a revenue cycle you can apply sales enablement assets at each step. These assets include things like prescriptive engagement, content or artifacts, and best practices.

You can then add technology automation. This includes things like sales plays, guided selling, push-based content suggestions, and next-best-action recommendations.

The combination of sales enablement assets and technology significantly improve conversions and accelerate pace. Even better, it brings repeatability, predictability and scalability to revenue generation.

A word of caution. There was clear consensus among the revenue operations consulting professionals that getting this first step wrong will negatively impact all downstream steps. It will also delay program results by months or quarters.

Create the Team Structure

The next step is to design a Rev Ops team structure and org chart.

The team should be organized to unify go-to-market motions, manage company-wide revenue execution, measure results in real-time, and implement swift course corrections when needed.

The experts say that a simple structure, like the below example, works for most companies.

Define the Target Operating Model

Rev Ops is an all-of-company effort.

So, it's essential that each customer facing team or department understands their responsibilities and how their contribution rolls up to achieve the company's goal.

A Target Operating Model is the best tool for the job. It puts revenue, process and technology responsibilities where they make the most sense.

Below is an example.

Apply Best Practices

The company must satisfy and systematically advance buyers through their purchase process. Evidence-based best practices can help.

Best practices are often applied at each step of the revenue cycle. They provide a combination of repeatable processes and automation to accelerate each step and scale efficient customer growth.

Adopting a single best practice will deliver an incremental improvement to customer conversions.

Adopting a group of best practices can drive exponential growth.

Automate Business Processes

Business process harmonization across departments is important.

But before you apply technology, the experts advise that you need to simplify, streamline and then automate cross-departmental processes. The order here is important. There's no sense in automating inefficient processes.

For most companies, the CRM application is the customer system of record and the single source of truth. So, sequence the revenue cycle steps in your CRM system.

This will also enable you to stage content, artifacts, best practices and plays from a Sales Playbook at each step. You can then use CRM workflow or AI tools to push recommended content or actions for each step in the journey. It's part of Guided Selling automation and the recommendations can be contextually delivered based on customer and sales cycle behaviors.

But CRM is just one application. Additional automation and information tools should be defined by your RevOps Tech Stack.

The experts are quick to acknowledge that it's not practical to purchase every helpful technology at once. In fact, that's likely to much change too quickly. So, design the tech stack as a multiple-year roadmap whereby the most helpful technologies are acquired first. Their payback is then be used to fund the journey.

Measure with Performance Analytics

There's a near limitless number of performance measures. So, the RevOps consultants recommend organizing them into the four categories of Volume, Conversions, Time and Value.

They also share that many clients make the mistake of measuring low value metrics or measuring too many. Prioritizing the most important RevOps metrics is needed to keep staff focused on the most important outcomes.

Capturing metrics is step one. Making them easily accessible is step two.

A Rev Ops dashboard is the best tool to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

Displaying the right measures will bring real-time visibility to valuable trends, areas for improvement and growth opportunities.

More advanced companies may step up their information reporting to include predictive analytics. That's because data becomes much more actionable when it advances from historical to predictive.

One of the tools used for Johnny Grow clients is the Predictive Pyramid.

It's an interactive dashboard that shows how lower-level execution rolls up to satisfy the company's top priorities.

It's helpful because business development processes, programs or best practices do not live in isolation. Each has cascading effects that impact other areas. Those impacts must be considered when making tradeoffs. This visualization is useful in determining where to invest your limited time to achieve the biggest uplift.

Drive Continuous Improvement

Rev Ops is a journey. And it's best pursued with a roadmap built on progressive phases.

Every company's path is unique. But the path can be aided by advancing along progressive building blocks. The measures of that continuum should align with the previously mentioned metrics categories. Below is an example.

It's important that the journey is staged so that each phase builds on the prior and contributes to the next. Otherwise, investments and improvements tend to be a series of one-off, disconnected fixes that are short lived and fail to create momentum.