RevOps Best Practices
7 Standout Revenue Operations Best Practices
Seven RevOps best practices stand above all others in terms of sustained performance gains. So, before you consider your next business development investment, consider how these Revenue Operations best practices may improve your strategic planning, revenue execution and company growth.
Start with the Customer Journey
Customers want more personalized and tailored experiences. They expect companies to understand their unique needs, preferences, and pain points.
The is achieved by aligning the customer purchase process with the company's sales process. This step is a prerequisite to streamlining, automating and measuring your success.
The goal is to satisfy and systematically advance buyers through their purchase process.
Delivering relevant and personalized customer experiences at each step will decrease friction, increase conversions and accelerate sales cycles.
Build the Right Commercial Model
A Rev Ops commercial model shows how resources are orchestrated along the company's revenue cycle.
It's a holistic growth model that aligns sales, marketing, customer service and any other customer facing department that generates revenue.
This alignment must include a shared purpose, business processes, technology and performance measures.
The goal here is to shift revenue generation from a series of disconnected efforts to a single, cohesive process.
Creating sustained company growth is an interdisciplinary effort. Each functional area must align toward a common goal. That goal is often profitable, scalable revenue growth.
And to get there the inter-departmental alignment must be much more than a casual relationship. It must be designed, automated, measured, and in a state of continuous improvement.
Automate with a Revenue Operating System
Many companies fail to support their commercial model with end-to-end automation.
Most have closed loop systems for procurement, manufacturing, distribution, accounting and HR. But not for enterprise-wide revenue generation. Sure, they have a sales organization. But that's a single departmental program. There's no enterprise system that standardizes and automates holistic revenue generation across the company.
This misstep results in delays, poor conversions and performance shortfalls.
When we assist clients with revenue operations projects, we create a Revenue Operating System (ROS). That's because a systemized approach to revenue generation is required to achieve automation and scale.
The ROS streamlines, integrates and automates end-to-end revenue cycle business processes.
And there are several cross functional business processes to consider, as shown in the diagram below.
Each of the processes in the above diagram drills into the workflow automation. For example, lead scoring is a common process within the lead management step. The below illustration shows how that process can be completely automated.
The ROS prescribes and automates the optimal company interaction for every step in the customer purchase journey. And that's the key. It's not designed within departmental boundaries. It seamlessly crosses functional processes to accommodate and accelerate the customer journey and increase the company's conversions.
Even better, a ROS drives three strategic growth levers of revenue expansion, cost reduction and improved customer experiences. Historically, companies would pursue these levers one at a time. Succeeding with any one would be regarded as highly valuable. With a ROS, all three can be accomplished in parallel for transformational uplift.
Make Customer Engagement Prescriptive
McKinsey reports that sales reps waste 10 hours per week searching for content. They then spend more time recreating content because they couldn't find what they were looking for.
The problem is a double whammy as Forrester reports that Marketing staff go to great effort and expense to create content, but 60% to 70% of it goes unused because it's not found.
From over two decades of revenue operations consulting experience, we can share the unfortunate reality that you cannot expect staff to manually go find content. Instead, it must be automated with real-time, push-based contextual delivery.
The goal is to define prescriptive engagement at each customer touchpoint. This requires mapping the company's best content and insights so they can be delivered at each step of the customer journey.
Most CRM systems can deliver the right content or insights to the right person at the right time.
They can be configured to proactively suggest scripts, collaterals, artifacts, insights, offers or other assets based on a combination of customer type, persona, pain point, sales step, and other factors.
This push-based technology facilitates guided selling, eliminates search time, and better leverages your company's content.
According to Gartner, by next year, employees will reduce the time spent looking for information by 50% as information finds them in the context of their work activity.
Use Artificial Intelligence as a Force Multiplier
AI delivers a transformative impact to Revenue Operations.
But recognize that different types of AI serve different objectives. The three primary types are shown below.
- Predictive AI calculates lead scores, delivers next-best-action recommendations and creates sales forecasts. It can accurately predict which leads are qualified, which buyers will buy, which sale opportunities will close, and which customers will churn.
It can even show which selling actions advance an opportunity and how salespeople can better allocate their scarce time to produce better results.
- Generative AI applies company data with large language models to create content and answer questions. It can extract and upload contacts and key points from email exchanges and call conversations into your CRM system. Eliminating CRM data entry is a big win for staff.
- Autonomous AI is self-operating. It performs tasks, converses with people, and makes decisions without human intervention. It uses AI agents for things like outbound sales prospecting, inbound lead qualification, self-service customer support, and real-time sales coaching. We recently helped a client implement an agent that writes RFP responses. That automation alone saves about 30 hours a week.
Apply Commercial Insights
Customers are not homogenous, and they don't want to be treated that way.
Data-driven customer insights solve this challenge. They identify customer preferences, behaviors, pain and priorities. This ensures conversations, offers and proposals are relevant, personalized, specific and well received.
Different types of insights are used for different objectives.
For example, buyer insights enable sellers to craft engagement and sales strategies to maximize conversions. For many B2B companies, the top five buyer insights include the following:
- Change event. What compels the buyer to make a change from the status quo?
- Purchase process. What is the buyer’s purchase process?
- Purchase obstacles. What will prevent the buyer from completing a purchase?
- Decision criteria. What are the buyer’s top decision-making criteria?
- Top benefits. What benefits does the buyer expect from the new product or solution?
Some additional types of commercial insights are shown below.
Insights should include things like what customers have purchased (purchase history), what they chose not to purchase (lost sale opportunities), what they have purchased from competitors (third party enriched data) and what they haven't purchased but need (white space).
Using these insights will improve things like marketing campaign conversions, lead qualifications and sales win rates. They will also help achieve the elusive goal of delivering differentiated customer experiences.
Customer insights should be managed in the CRM system. The data can then be easily parsed into personas, customer segments and a 360-degree customer view.
Without an automation system such as the CRM application, customer intelligence is haphazard and process automation is lost. All downstream execution programs such as lead scoring, sales win plan development, and strategic account management are performed manually and inconsistently, if done at all.
Don't Forget Change Management
No list of RevOps best practices would be complete without change management.
Charles Darwin first discovered that, "It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change." The same can be said for your revenue operations. Aligning goals, processes, systems and measures of success across functional areas will only succeed if you can manage change.
A change in the business model will cause anxiety for many staff. While it is endorsed by the few imposing the change it is not always so well accepted or is even contested by the majority receiving the change.
To facilitate that difference, apply a change management program to systemically shift individuals, teams, and departments from a current state to a defined future state. The program will mitigate productivity loss during the transition, create an environment for sustained change, and realize the benefits of change more quickly.
When we assist clients with revenue operations implementations, we apply a change management program called TEAMS. An illustration is shown below.
Recognize that you will likely incur resistance to change from employees and managers accustomed to traditional departmental structures. This resistance may stem from job insecurity, loss of domain influence, or skepticism about the value of the new model.
Change management is your best tool to ensure that resistance to change does not delay or derail your objectives.
The More You Know the Faster You Grow
Business recommendations without supporting data are just opinions.
Johnny Grow RevOps best practices are prescriptive methods backed by industry specific benchmark data. They show what the highest performers do differently than their peers, and how they do it.
Each of these Revenue Operations best practices are validated by field research, implemented with a prescriptive framework, measured with purpose-built analytics, and fully leverage technology automation.
They reduce risk, increase focus, save time, and show the most direct route to predictable results.
And because these RevOps best practices are data driven, they can be modeled to show investment, cash flow impact, time to value and payback.
Executives that embrace RevOps best practices will achieve significant competitive advantage over those who do not.