Highlights
- Revenue Operations is a centralized business development operational team that orchestrates traditionally siloed departmental teams and unifies go-to-market motions and revenue execution.
- The intent is to manage a more cohesive and effective pursuit of the company's revenue goal. Or maybe better put, its intent is to grow more revenue.
- Adoption is skyrocketing because when correctly done, it works. The analysts at SiriusDecisions did a revenue operations study and reported that when successfully implemented, "organizations that deployed revenue ops in some form grew revenue nearly three times faster than those that didn't. Public companies with revenue ops also had 71% higher stock performance." These types of high impact results should not be ignored.
You ever pick up a shopping cart with only 2 or 3 good wheels? You can still get your shopping done but it's a bit awkward, results in a few stumbles and takes longer than using a cart with four good wheels.
It's similar for revenue generation. You can focus on strategy to find the optimal path, marketing to acquire more leads, sales to close more deals or customer service to grow customer share and lower churn.
And anyone will deliver some benefit. But focusing on all four in parallel creates synergies that shift from incremental to linear results and make for a much smoother run.
That holistic approach is the foundation for Revenue Operations.
RevOps Defined
RevOps is an enterprise-wide approach to revenue generation.
More specifically, it's a specialized operational team that converges revenue strategy and execution among marketing, sales, customer service and any other revenue generating function.
It shifts revenue orchestration and oversight from individual departments to a unified team.
It promotes a culture of collaboration and unites revenue contributors from across the enterprise with a singular purpose, focus and go-to-market plan.
And it spans the customer life cycle, including customer acquisition, growth, and retention.
All of this is important because a centralized team is much more agile and effective than a collection of individual departments. Maximum growth is created when everybody aligns and works toward the same goals.
And getting everybody to rally around the same company growth goal, irrespective of their place in the company, is the first step to maximizing revenue growth.
A Better Way
You need to see your company as customers see it. As a whole. Even though their journey will traverse different departments they see the company as a single entity that supports an end-to-end journey.
Customers not only don't care about individual departments, but they also become frustrated when having to deal with gaps or inconsistencies between departments.
The company's brand and sales generation capabilities are maximized when the company architects integrated revenue generating process that span customer journeys and company departments.
Think about it. If your goal is to acquire more customers or increase customer share, the processes should span sales, marketing and customer service.
Assigning this goal to one department doesn't work well. Or worse, breaking it up into piecemeal goals to be distributed among departments with different incentives and systems, creates an incomplete and disjointed process. There are many points of failure and fewer chances for success.
A better approach is to architect a holistic strategy with each of the customer facing and revenue generating functions. You can then pursue coordinated go-to-market motions and apply integrated processes and shared technologies.
That's what Rev Ops is all about. It focuses on revenue growth strategies and processes across the company hierarchy, not within it.
It may seem like an obvious aid to revenue growth but no business development program is sustainable unless it can deliver a return on investment.
The RevOps ROI
Rev Ops requires additional staffing which is an additional cost. Fortunately, operating efficiencies will generate much greater savings.
For example, replacing sprawling departmental software apps with far fewer enterprise-wide platform technologies will permit much easier enterprise-wide automation and information reporting. It will also simplify IT management and lower IT labor costs for system integration, software maintenance and support.
More so, the RevOps payback will be derived from increased revenue and ROI. There is a wide body of knowledge demonstrating clear and compelling RevOps ROI.
- A Forrester research survey captured feedback from 927 respondents and ranked them into high, medium, and low maturity Revenue Ops levels. The published report, titled The Rise of Revenue Operations, advised that the more mature revenue ops teams delivered two times higher internal productivity and increased sales win rates.
- The Forrester report also revealed that companies adopting revenue ops earned more revenue growth than expected. The research found that "Pre Rev-Ops firms reported anticipating a 2% uplift in revenue growth, while Rev-Ops adopters experienced a 3% uplift in growth." It also advised that "Establishing a revenue ops function builds a more aligned and agile business, which can result in even higher sales growth than anticipated."
- The marketing experts at SiriusDecisions also did a revenue operations study and reported that public companies with formal Rev Ops groups saw 71% higher stock performance. And as shared at the SiriusDecisions Summit in Austin, the improved alignment realized 19% faster growth and 15% more profits.
Finally, some additional RevOps performance improvements were reported by Boston Consulting Group, including the following:
- 10% to 20% increases in sales productivity
- 10% increases in sales lead conversions
- 15% to 20% increase in internal customer satisfaction
- 100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI
- 30% reductions in go-to-market expenses
The Point is This
Companies operating siloed departments with different incentives, piecemeal systems, clumsy departmental handoffs, fragmented customer experiences, and disjointed analytics cannot support sustained company growth.
In fact, without a holistic and coordinated approach to revenue generation, your efforts are reduced to playing departmental whack-a-mole.
To do better, companies are adopting Revenue Operations to realign internal process and put an increased focus on revenue strategies, go-to-market motions and measured execution.
This delivers increased revenue growth because it synchronizes cross functional processes and systems, increases business agility, improves focus and drives accountability.
If you're ready to move ahead, check out the RevOps Implementation Framework.